We are working on a game that’s something between Spyfall, Pictionary, Just One, and Taboo. In our game two people are selected as guessers each round, one is the good guesser who the drawers will collaborate with and the bad guesser who the drawers are trying to throw off. The good guesser will have a card with four words, one of which is the word drawers are drawing. The goal of the drawers is to make drawings which help the good guesser guess which of the four words is being drawn, while not drawing anything specific enough to allow the bad guesser to guess the word. The bad guesser doesn’t have a word bank, but the four words on each card are somewhat related, though, so differentiating between them without giving away the word might be tricky (thats the hope, at least).
There is plenty left to figure out through prototyping though. Here are some questions we will want to answer with prototypes.
- Should the drawers know the four word options the good guesser has?
- This is a question core to the balance of the game. Maybe getting the good guesser to guess from a list of four is really easy, and having access to the options lets drawers leverage them to make drawings that are even more obvious for the good guesser, taking advantage of the bad guesser‘s lack of information? Or maybe getting past the bad guesser while still giving enough information for the good guesser to guess is incredibly difficult, and the shared knowledge between drawers and the good guesser is necessary to have a chance?
- This prototype will require making a few word option cards to use with play testers. We will need to get ~5 people to play for a few rounds with options shared, and some with options obscured. We will watch and take notes on the balance of the game, and interview play testers after to hear their experience.
- I think that the drawers wont need to see the word options for the game to be fair. I think that with 2, 3, or more drawings that are vaguely circling the same word, and a card with options that include the word it will be possible to guess better than random.
- Should drawers be allowed to communicate/strategize?
- This is another question key to the balance of the game. If drawers aren’t allowed to communicate, in some rounds they might all draw the same thing, or try to hint at the word with different approaches. If the drawers can communicate, then they can strategize a set of images that work together to help the good guesser. Its unclear which side of the scale we should put our thumb on to keep the game fun. Perhaps a compromise would be to have drawers draw in series rather than parallel. You can’t coordinate, but you can see what the previous drawers have drawn before you make your drawing. Maybe the good guesser can terminate the drawing round early (not all drawers draw), if they feel confident and don’t want to give the bad guesser more information?
- This prototype would require crafting some word cards in order to play rounds of our game. We would need enough to play several rounds without spoiling all the word cards. We need several rounds with no communication, full communication, and serial drawing.
- I think that drawing in series will work best. I think it adds drama to the game, “can they get it from this drawing, or will they go ask for one more” and it gives the good guesser some agency over how much information the bad guesser gets.
- How do we assign points?
- This will be a key question to answer. So far, I think our game sounds fun, but it will need a good point-scoring system to feel fun and balanced. Drawers need incentive to help the good guesser, so they should score points when the good guesser guesses correctly. If we do serial drawing, we could randomize the drawer order with dice, and if the good guesser terminates the drawing early, only the drawers who have gone score. If the bad guesser guesses the word, it should nullify points scored from the other players. How many points for each outcome (drawing success, good guess success, bad guess success)?
- This prototype can largely done on pen and paper I believe. For when and where to assign points, I think that mapping out how each point source incentivizes each player role, and making sure we’ve designed the incentives we want can help solve that portion of the design. We can map out After that, we can play test similarly to the other questions, and try out different point scales on the point sources we’ve chosen. Play testing may inform us to add/remove a point source we designed on paper, which is totally fine too.
- This question isn’t really answerable with a simple prediction, as its quite broad. Overall I think we need to keep incentives in mind when choosing when and where to assign points, then we will need to playtest to find a point scale that accounts for the relative difficulty of each player role.
