Devlog Journal 13

For class this week, we were asked to discuss and prototype the two best ideas we had for our board game project. The games we discussed were Cavern and Stargaze. We ultimately decided to focus our creativity and efforts on making Stargaze into a board game. We prototyped our game by discussing how our board is to be made. However, we were asked to make a noun-verb diagram to figure out the mechanics and narrative of the game to have everything we needed to finalize the board for our game. We were then asked to assign roles to everyone in our group.

When we were prototyping, we were asked to prototype using actual pieces to imagine what our board game would look like and how it would play. The thing that stood out to me about this was that it felt like we were playing with toys and making up our own rules. It is very similar to the Board Game Exercise Jason Schklar explains in  Designing Great UX into Your Game Board and Pieces. (4:16)

Jason Schklar also explains that the exercise is done because he believes that game improvement only comes through pain transference. This means that the pain of the player should be put on the shoulders of the developers. (5:42) This helped me understand how we should consider making our board game. We know that not everyone is gonna read the rules/instructions of our game and will only have the pieces of the game to work with. However, making a good instruction manual/rulebook will be important. But we will have to keep in mind that as designers, we should design our game knowing that the players have only the board and pieces to work with.

Jason Schklar explains that one of the reasons why he presented was because it was to help us think differently about our design decisions and think hard about the tradeoffs between the art of the game and the usability of the game. Jason also says to rely less on solving it manually with a Google search. (19:10) When I heard this from Jason, what came to mind was when we were asked to create our noun-verb diagram because I learned that it was meant to help with come up with creative ideas without the relentless use of the internet. The noun-verd diagram also helped us understand how the art and usability of our game would interact with one another.