Survival Isle Final Report
Elizabeth Fitzgerald, Nick LaRosa, Penny Shi, Jasmine Shih
1. Artist’s Statement
Island survival is an alluring and popular theme that has been portrayed in many different types of media, including TV shows, books, and even party topics such as “What would you take to a deserted island?” Most people, especially those who live a comfortable life in the modern age, like the idea of imagining what it would take to survive on a deserted island along with a group of others. Such scenarios are enticing in that they are full of uncertainty and force you to rely on your primal instincts as well as your social skills to survive. We saw this theme as a great opportunity for a party game, and fused our own imaginations with inspirations from existing games into a fully cooperative board game all about island survival and escape. With this game, we hope to give players a taste of the various challenges an unknown island and its mysterious inhabitants might throw in their way, and we hope that their fellowship gets strengthened as they work together to escape in time.
2. Concept Map
3. Initial Game Concept
Our original idea was simply an “island survival game where you had to make decisions and possibly sacrifice other players to survive.” From there, our initial mechanics were centered around progressing across an island by overcoming “events.” Players would work in teams to progress through a series of wilderness scenarios that tested their group decision making. In conjunction with this, one of our most important values was the idea that players could not be removed from the game entirely. We saw this as a drawback of other party games like Mafia, Werewolf, and Clue. Another guiding value was to not have a game master. Essentially, we wanted to avoid any single player being socially “isolated” from the others.
Before our first playtest, the overall idea morphed into a trivia game called Get to the Boat! In this version, the events became wilderness survival trivia questions, because we wanted to add some educational purpose to the game. When answered correctly, players would be allowed to move forward a certain number of miles towards the boat, which was their way off the island. However, they only had 12 rounds of questions to get there. Answering questions incorrectly would move them backwards the same number of miles. This approach maintained our original values and gave players a way to talk through questions together. However, we also added the option to play as an individual because we wanted to make sure every player could have individual agency.
4. Testing and iteration history
4/18/23 Prototype 1: Get to the Boat!
Sadly, we do not have photos of this prototype in use. However, we gained a lot of insights from this round of playtesting. Specifically, these were our major takeaways:
- Item distribution at the beginning should be random.
- This would make players feel that everyone received resources in a fair fashion
- Players wanted to be able to argue their case for why their (incorrect) answers would work in real survival situations.
- This indicated that players did like the survival theme but would prefer the gameplay to be more fun than purely educational.
- Players wanted to be able to interact more.
- The trivia mechanic makes it hard for the game to be replayable.
- This made us think about how we could design game mechanics that would create and foster more interesting and exciting social dynamics between the players
At this point, we realized that trivia would not encourage the player-to-player interactions we were looking for, and so we decided we needed to pivot in order to create a good party game that the same group of players could potentially play over and over again. At the same time, Christina was kind enough to purchase Hellapagos for us (thanks again)! The following weekend, our team met, playtested Hellapagos and Ramen Fury (which two of our members did competitive analysis on), and heavily modified our own game based on those two.
With Hellapagos, we really enjoyed the action-based game procedures as well as the objectives to maintain resource levels and to make progress towards a build for the final escape. The balance between the two objectives creates very interesting dynamics between the players, and inspired us to design a game with similar procedures and objectives with nontrivial modifications. The biggest modification is that we wanted our game to instead be fully cooperative, which meant that we needed to make it all about game versus players.
[Our team playing Hellapagos and discussing what we liked and didn’t like about the game]
With Ramen Fury, we really liked the design of ingredient cards and the procedure of placing these cards down to create a complete and unique ramen bowl. This element from the game inspired us to come up with the idea of having a central ship consisting of several different parts that players must work together to repair. Similar to Ramen Fury, the players would place down materials according to their corresponding blueprints.
At this point, we had a clear enough idea about our game mechanics that we were able to start designing the visual aspects of our game resources. We created wreckage cards that we felt would make sense on a remote island, with a card background design that puts the players right on a beach where their plane crashed and where they attempt to repair a wrecked ship to escape.
[Our first version of cloth and metal building unit cards that the players can search from the wreckage pile. We tried to come up with humorous or interesting descriptions and make it more fun to draw and read these cards.]
4/25/23 Prototype 2: Survival Isle
Note: the link above will take you to the full, uncut video of this playtest. It is roughly 30 minutes long.
In class, we playtested our new approach. This time, the game was fully collaborative. Players had to work together to repair 5 components of a pirate ship in time to depart by the end of Spring. Each season (each took 3 rounds) had seasonal effects that changed the amount of wood or supplies they could find. On top of this, they were allowed to search through the wreckage to look for other special items to be used in construction or other survival tasks (such as the Hammer, which allowed players to place two building components at once). Our major takeaways from this playtest were:
- Players got sick too often, but still felt that a wider variety of other negative effects would be both challenging and fun.
- These other negative effects would be less targeted at players, and would instead impact the supply or in-progress builds.
- Our playtesters’ suggestions for including a variety of negative effect cards spoke to the Challenge type of fun, and them not wanting individual players to be sick so often also spoke to the Fellowship type of fun
- Different builds should give the players different effects. For example, players felt that the shelter should protect from weather effects, and the storage should allow them to store more supplies.
- This was a very interesting suggestion, as having these effects for different builds would help increase players’ motivation to collect more wood and focus on specific blueprints towards the beginning. This way, we get to increase the Challenge type of fun by providing the players opportunities to achieve smaller goals during the game and gaining satisfaction from it.
- Search in the wreckage should sometimes result in finding junk items, as was the case in Hellapagos.
- Players liked the idea of end-of-season disastrous events.
- This would keep the players constantly working to make progress on the ship, rather than just doing enough to survive as they wait for the next window of escape.
- Players wanted to be able to “petition the gods” to change the current seasonal effect.
- This was such an interesting and somewhat surprising idea. It would definitely increase the Narrative type of fun in our game as it would add more story elements, though we didn’t originally set out to include much narrative other than the premise that players were on a remote island hoping to escape.
Ultimately, for our next iteration, we modified our game to incorporate feedback (a) through (d). We did not have time to be able to implement (e), and we felt it was a little out of line with the game versus players dynamic we were trying to create.
[These were the junk cards we created as suggested, to make some of the wreckage cards useless but fun to get.]
4/26/23 Prototype 3: Survival Isle
We completed our final playtest at Game Night. Our major feedback:
- Rounds should have no set turn order, as long as each player takes one action.
- Having a set order limits the social dynamics between the players and there is no obvious reason to mandate a specific turn order
- End-of-season events should be monthly events, and they should be largely negative.
- On average, our game was not high stakes enough. It did not produce enough urgency as it was too easy to collect supplies. We should make the expected value for wood and supply collection at around 0.75.
- The end state of the volcano erupting was mentioned as a good way to create urgency.
- Cards needed type icons.
We really appreciated points (b) to (d) as they relate directly to our goal of creating the Challenge type of fun. Adopting these suggestions would highly increase the sense of urgency felt by the players. These changes were very much needed because our game setup is game versus players which means that the main way for us to achieve a high level of fun is to create events that keep players on the edge of their seats in each round.
[Here are 12 of the 24 end-of-month event cards we created in response to suggestion (b)]
We also agreed that our cards needed type icons since we had many sorts of building units as well as many sorts of card and build effects that could confuse the players. As such, we have designed and added wood, cloth, metal, one-time use, permanent use, weather-related, animal-related, and volcano icons to the appropriate cards in the final version.
We did our best to address each of the comments from the final playtest in our final revisions, as will be seen in the rulebook and materials list below.
5. Link to the Final Prototype Rules & Materials
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ansL25mhxycAC6f3B0xTzzaY5H_0BoLJ/view?usp=share_link
6. Link to the Final Prototype Print-n-Play
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1xKKOibbBD1RDpH1-5VpXjw6RXMQxb8fD?usp=share_link
7. Link to the Final Playtest Video
8. Additional Comments
The box art, the game mat, the card icons, and the card backgrounds are all custom made in Procreate by Elizabeth Fitzgerald. Penny Shi took many of these artistic elements and created cards from them, printed them on cardstock, and cut them out by hand.
Final Game Mat:
