P1: Reflection_Shirley

Our game aims to teach players how to do collaborative housekeeping with their roommate. The game is set in a cozy apartment and players have to share chores, respect personal space, and coexist peacefully. They need to work together to keep the apartment clean and avoid conflicts. This game requires them to find the balance between personal space and shared responsibilities, testing their teamwork, patience, and communication.

 

Through the interaction of controls, tools, obstacles, and rules, the game creates both excitement and fun. In terms of controls, players should carefully decide how to spend their three action points each round, providing strategy and urgency. Tool cards offer more efficient cleaning for different appliances. Personality cards and Global Event cards introduce more obstacles that increase the difficulty of “surviving.” The rules guide the players on gameplay, stipulating the need to find the best cleaning strategy with limited resources while maintaining cooperation with roommates to avoid conflict.

 

By using different tool cards, players learn to clean different appliances in the most effective way, stimulating the real-world housekeeping strategy. The game also stimulates real-life roommate interactions, making players discuss cleaning tasks, coordinate cleaning works, and support each other to maintain a harmonious living environment. Through this, players can learn the skills of sharing responsibilities and solving problems in daily life.

 

Before starting to design the game, I thought we would struggle to balance the mechanics. I always believe no game can be perfectly balanced. Even “successful” games, such as League of Legends, Overwatch, Valorant, etc., have their design teams constantly fixing the bugs, updating the versions, and trying to reach the balance. Besides, from my past experiences, luck can affect results a lot in the playtest, so I thought it would be important to conduct as many playtests as possible to minimize the influence of luck.

 

Initially, I was concerned the game might be boring because the mechanics seemed relatively simple and might not effectively teach the players how to collaborate with their roommates on housekeeping. Hence, while designing the game, I stood to make the rules more challenging and added some mechanics aiming to teach cleaning techniques. However, during playtesting, most of our players, including myself, found the game surprisingly fun under the “simple” rules and the game was easier to lose than expected if followed the “harder” rules. Additionally, the tools mechanic does help them learn the cleaning techniques, just as I expected. Watching them encounter obstacles and react with excitement and laughter made me very proud. Their thoughtful feedback made me also feel warm because it showed that they were immersed and invested in playing the game.

 

This experience taught me a lot. It was my first time going through the entire game design process, from writing a rulebook, creating which elements would assist players, evaluating players’ feedback, adjusting mechanics after playtests appropriately, and designing maps, tokens, cards, and packaging. These insights have built a solid foundation for my next individual project. More importantly, I learned how to cooperate, understand, support, and communicate effectively with my team members. This will be a valuable experience and cherished memory as I move forward.

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