We design get schooled that aims to convey what is it like to try to set up an education system in the current time. We wanted to discuss how difficult it is to meet the needs of all the students. We initially tried to create a collaborative game focusing on storytelling, but we have trouble having the system “fight back” the players.
we decided to pivot to a competitive game instead
I think this project to me is an exercise in balancing multiple objectives. We started struggling with balancing the learning goal and fun. We sway between wanting the game to mimic the exact school board decision making and wanting the game to inspire creative story telling and empathy. For our format of choice it seems that there are simply too much factor that goes on to influence the education system, and we were not able to both accurately reflect that and make the game simple enough for the players to be freely creative. We had two major pivot and finally re-scoped on a narrower system: curriculum design.
Overall P3 is a big challenge in scoping and refining the game for me and for the group. I sometimes gets too technical and go down the path of just wanting the game to be playable but I can drive the design away from being informative or accurately reflecting the system. My teammates were really helpful when I push too aggressively to prematurely optimize the game rather than finalizing the designs. System games are also incredibly complex and play-testing seems to be the best and quickest way to find out of the issues. In addition to play-test with classmates we also did a few internal play-test, and since we are all different kinds of players, it also helps us to see different problems that our game have. Finally, after we designed most of the mechanics I got to make the balance sheet and it was really satisfying to know that our game can encourage multiple strategies (at least theoretically).
Learning to keep circling between refining and reflection helped us slowly but surly moved on to a game that is both enjoyable and informative, I hope I carry this experience forward when working on any games (or any projects).
