How do we maintain the narrative of our game?
Our game aims to help people get to know each other with each round being a different quarter here at Stanford (fall, winter, spring) with the goal being that as the quarters go on and you get to know people, the questions and feeling of the game become more intimate leading you to hopefully develop deeper connections with the other players than at the start of the game. This is important because this will allow all three rounds of the game to feel connected. By playtesting the game, we will be able to see if our current prototype creates that narrative (even though we still need to develop visuals and design for our game (which should hopefully strengthen the narrative. I believe that initially it may be difficult for new players to understand this narrative with our current prototype (as it’s a bit bare bones at the moment), but hopefully we’ll get useful feedback about more ways in which they see we can interweave the theme!
How do user submissions work?
In our fall quarter round, we ask players to all submit their answers to a “getting to know you card” that will ask questions such as “Who’s your celebrity crush” to which everyone will write down their answers and place them down to be shuffled and then revealed and read out. Everyone will then have to vote on who matches each answer to which then they’ll put down a token corresponding to that person by their answer. We’re still working on the best way to conduct this voting, but one concern is that if people handwrite their answers (allowing for more honest, personal responses) their handwriting or the length of their response may be a giveaway as to which answer they submitted. We have a prototype made which is using the handwritten inputs, so we’ll identify how it works especially with multiple players. Hopefully the handwriting won’t be as big of an issue, however I suspect that if a few friends are in the group, they’ll be able to tell each other’s handwriting a part
Do we want to have a points system in the game?
This was one of the questions that arose after our first round of playtesting in section yesterday. We want the game to have a competitive energy to it where you’re trying to correctly identify people to prompts while also voting with the majority. It also becomes a difficult to figure out how the different scoring for each round should work (eg. in the third round, we’re currently thinking of having a player draw three cards (each with varying levels of intimacy which are indicated on the card), but I’m starting to wonder if the question how we’d like to assign points (should they go to the person answering?). I believe that a prototype like we’ll have today in class will be useful as we’ll be able to get direct user feedback to identify what scoring works and doesn’t work for the final round.
