For this assignment, I wanted to ask these three questions:
Should we include penalties for when users say the forbidden words on their respective cards? (Implementation) – > Because frequently using forbidden terms would cause the game to end abruptly and significantly reduce the enjoyment for all participants, we really hope that users will refrain from doing so.
I think we should implement penalties because breaking rules make the game less enjoyable
Should we allow multiple players to win? (Look and Feel) -> Because players won’t be as likely to play the game if they find the multiple winners boring and the incentive to win to be weak. When victory is shared by several teams, as it is in our game, we are unsure how this will effect the players’ perception of the game in terms of the value of their time. Winning is often an exclusive right owned by either an individual or a team of some kind. If everyone can win, who wants to win?
My guess is that there should only be one winner because the game might lose incentives for others when one already won.
What should be the minimum and maximum number of players? (Look and Feel) -> because our prototype needs to evaluate whether a minimum playing group of 6 players is too small and makes the game’s challenge too easy; if players discover their matches too soon, we will need to increase the minimum playing group. We know we need to reduce the maximum group size if the game dynamics fail at the 15 people mark, such as when players fail to locate any partners at all. We could perhaps boost the maximum player count to more than 18, but lowering the minimum player count below 6 seems unlikely to be enjoyable.
My guess is that the optimal number of people will be 3-4 because too many people might make it hard to follow arguments.
Moreover, we wanted to continue asking some more questions.
During the first prototype, our goals were to test several mechanics that we made based off of assumptions we had and also playing off the models of time-based challenge games like Pictionary and Charades. This was a Role prototype. We wanted to test the implications of choices our game was having on the role of the game. Some sub-questions we wanted to answer for this are:
- How in-depth do our cases need to be? What parts of the cases did players like the most and like the least?
- Was 1 minute an adequate duration for players to discuss and present their arguments to judges?
- Would evidence cards disrupt the teams’ plans and push them to be creative in crafting a narrative around this newly introduced information?
- How can we ensure that this is truly a social, party game where everyone participates?
For our second one, we used our Look and Feel prototype. We wanted to see how our users interacted with the graphical decisions we made. Some sub-questions for this are:
- How are the new cases perceived by the play testers? Are they more whimsical and light hearted?
- Do the new cases evoke more creativity, especially when we introduced evidence cards?
- Did all members of both teams speak and how did they interact with each other?
- How disruptive were the updated evidence cards?
- How did updated timing reflect in the user experience? Did it make the game more challenging, evoke more fellowship or hurt the experience?
