The game our team produced for P3 was both difficult to make and hard to come up with. Brainstorming together proved difficult due to how hard it was for us to define what a systems game was, what constitutes a system. Since collectively answering the aforementioned questions was already hard, agreeing on what the systems in each of our ideas were and defining them together after concurring on their initial promise was even harder. This fault caused our progress on the project to be somewhat delayed after our first play-test session, after which we decided to abandon our original idea of modeling Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and come up with new concepts.
Looking back, I recognize that systems games are incredibly complex to design, especially when you’re trying to balance both the mechanics and the narrative. While our lack of play testing in the later stages undoubtedly cost us in terms of polish and balance, i would say it was not what held us back in regards to the success of our final product. Instead, our lack of gameplay loop definition caused us the most trouble once we got into the nitty gritty of the code. We spent far too much time trying to make the game work without fully understanding how the player’s actions and choices would define the game itself, which delayed our progress and led to incomplete or imbalanced mechanics.
Artistically, my experience with the game was amazing! I loved getting to draw all the chef’s, giving them some personality through their visuals, thinking about how I could visually incorporate indicators for the different mechanics associated with each chef and how learning to recognize these indicators could be an interesting measure for the skill of a player.
While the final game didn’t fully match our initial vision, I’m proud of what we accomplished and the lessons we learned along the way. Moving forward, I’ll approach future projects with a more grounded understanding of systems, a clearer understanding of how to build narratives around these systems, and a better sense of how to manage scope and expectations.
