A Reflection on Inspector, Inspector!

Inspector, Inspector! was the first game I ever designed and it was an extremely impactful learning experience. Designing games, especially analog games where satisfaction can’t be achieved through some hi-def hack ‘n’ slashing is an extremely intensive process, where losing sight of your original plans at any point can be detrimental. Before getting into my reflections on the entire experience, I’ll mention some of our game mechanics and their interactions. Our main mechanic was argumentation. Players in our game had to argue why they deserved more resources than other players, and were guided through their argument by the cards in their hand. The rest of our mechanics were what really put the game into our game, helping us sustain extended argumentation, since sitting through 15 minutes of discussion about topics one is actively learning about doesn’t, on its own, result in ‘fun’.

I’m pretty unsatisfied with the above approach, and consequently feel unsatisfied with Inspector, Inspector! overall. During our second play-test,  our play-testers captured why I feel unsatisfied very succinctly: “this feels like an activity, not a game.” Inspector, Inspector! taught me that if the thing players spend the most time doing in your game isn’t fun or rewarding or playful, you, as the designer, need to take a step back. And we did, two times. We went through two major redesigns, and i mean major. None of our designs felt fulfilling, although they always seemed promising in my head! I learned that even if a design feels fleshed-out up there, you may be setting major components of the idea to the side at the very first sight of promise. I learned that play-testing is how you determine whether or not what you hoped to design is what you actually designed. Watching other designers play my game was extremely rewarding and educative and only further fueled me in improving as a designer. Game design is such a massive field of work, there are so many choices one can take and directions one can go, as a problem it is only becoming more interesting!

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