Questions Relating to Some Hypothetical Prototype:
1. Does the theme of the game come across as relevant? (Is it too excessive, too subtle, or just about right?)
Imagine a physical card game that comes in a themed box. Why have a theme at all if it’s irrelevant to the game? One Night Ultimate Werewolf would just be Mafia if not for the werewolves, the seer, the robber, the villagers — we want to integrate our theme tastefully into the game itself. I would make either a paper role or a look-and-feel prototype to answer this because the key factors are the way the theme comes into function and how the game comes across. I predict that it would come across as about right so long as the theme is part of the prototype beyond just its name.
2. How thoroughly did you have to read the instructions to take your turn?
Say we’re working on a digital turn-based game. While instructions, of course, matter a great deal, we want users to be able to take their turn intuitively (i.e. for a physical game, this would look like taking the die and rolling it to get N, then move forward N places on the board). I would make an implementation prototype for this to see what technical performance aspects need to be improved for the user to easily take their action. For an early prototype, I’m sure there will be ways that we can improve the intuitiveness of a turn for a user, so I predict that users would give different specific comments on what did or did not make sense to them when taking their turn.
Questions Relating to my Team’s Prototype:
3. Should the size of the starting hand (8 cards) be changed? If so, in which direction and why?
This is something we changed quite a bit, and it’s important because it’s the first thing you get as a player of the game. This is definitely a role paper prototype because we want to test what players can do with the given starting hand size, and I predict that players will feel somewhat ambivalent or want a smaller hand because 8 is too much choice.
4. Should we impose a limit on how many cards you can have in your hand?
One potential problem is players hoarding cards if the rules specify that they must play up to one card per turn. Because of this, we considered a hand limit but ultimately decided against it because we assumed that players would want to play cards to increase their point total. However, it’s still a possibility — one we could test using a role paper prototype to see what role hand size plays in player actions. I suspect that users will agree with the current decision of no hand limit since they will want to take part in the social dynamics of the game and try to earn points as they place cards down.
