After taking 247G last year, I had a basic understanding of what making a game would be like, even if not specifically focused on teaching. I’ve created other projects focused on education before as well, but learning about the formal elements of fun and how the mechanics of a game work towards it was a important tool while working on this game. Our game focused on fun as challenge and discovery. To this end, we wanted to add uncertainty to the player’s experience early on that could be overcome through strategy and time.
We knew we wanted to bring the idea of competition into the game as well, as one of our learning goals was for players to understand the conflict that can occur in animal conservation between different species in the same habitat. However, it was very interesting to see the ways players either instinctively moved towards cooperation or into competition with each other, something that was not universal at any point during the various iterations of our game.
Watching our playtesters play our game, especially during the final playtest, was very rewarding. I was very proud of our final prototype’s fidelity, though it still has some issues to work out (the sizing of the board, for example, is a little small for six players, meaning it gets messy and cramped about halfway into the game). I was also pleased to see players able to achieve several of our learning goals by the end of the game, as I wasn’t certain our combination of mechanics and presentation would allow them to do so.
Moving forward, I think I learned that having a clear goal for what players will get out of a game is very helpful in its development, even if the game is not focused on education. For our future games, I plan to outline my goals as rigourously as we did for this game.
