For our game, a each player’s “identity” starts off unknown to everyone else. Do our mechanics create dynamics which make finding out this identity a valuable incentive but with a high cost? The reason this is an important question, is that, each player’s objectives and playstyles differ based on what role they are given. They have access to slightly different mechanics through their roles, and have varied win conditions. This means that finding out another player’s identity will give you a lot of knowledge in terms of understanding what that player is trying to do and how they might go about doing that, but since this is the main “deception” of the game, we hope to create a system that incentivizes players to aim to uncover each other’s identities as a way to progress their own win state or increase their odds of winning instead of always avoiding that in favor of pursuing one’s own win condition directly. The best way we could prototype this would be to simplify our idea for the games economy (the exchange of resources) and exaggerate clashing objectives for players to test how they approach that challenge: do they brute force without engaging with the enemy or do they try and figure out who the enemy is?
Does the tug-of-war aspect of our game lead to stalemates or lop-sided balance? Since various roles in our game have different objectives, it will be hard to balance them. For example, we have a banker role and a robber role, and both their end goals are to accumulate a certain amount of money but through different means. In the event that the robber knows who the banker is, the robber continuing to steal from the banker might not be balanced or might lead to a net-zero for both players, not progressing game-state at all for them. I think focuses on this question might be a good way to test our game’s balance and resource economy. A prototype for this would be to have players play a version where they start by already knowing who all the other players’ roles are and just focusing on the mechanics with that pre-existing knowledge and see if any imbalances crop up. We would do the same again but without players having that pre-existing knowledge. We would see if, in either game-state, stalemates or one-sided victories occur.
How does the theming of our game impact enjoyment and overall aesthetics for the player? One dimension to our game that I’m interested in seeing how players interact with, is engaging with the roleplay or narrative of the game. Every player get’s a interesting character to play as and their mechanics and objectives should push the player to a playstyle that emulates the real-world counterpart to that role. The setting is a Wild West one that (I think) helps capture a no man’s land where, regardless of your alliances, everyone is ultimately out for themself. I want to see how players engage with these elements. The way we would prototype this would be to test our game, with and without some extra props, and see how players’ enjoyment varies depending on theming.
