For our game prototype “Glyphs” there are a number of questions that can be answered in this prototyping phase.
Are Drawing challenges engaging enough for multiple rounds of play?
This is important to answer while we are prototyping because if a drawing game isn’t engaging enough then people aren’t going to want to play the game more than once and that’s not what we want. The prototype that we’ll make to address this will have two parts the first will be a physical acting out, the second will be drawing the terms and guessing. I think that it will turn out that the drawing is a strong enough game mechanic to keep people engaged to want to keep playing.
Is it too easy for good guessers and too hard for the bad guessers?
This is an important thing to figure out, because we want it to be challenging for the bad guesser to be able to figure out the word, but not totally impossible or else people won’t want to play. The prototype we’ll use will have multiple rule sets, so we can rotate through different variations of who gets any hints given/does the drawer know the group of words. I think it will turn out that if the drawer doesn’t have the list that the good guesser has, and only has the word, it will still be challenging for the bad guesser, but will have more correct bad guesses than when the bad guesser has no clues and the drawer knows the four words.
Should roles in the game rotate?
It’s important to ask this question, because having a game with rotating “imposter” like roles would make the game different than things already on the market and provide an interesting twist that would add fun and interest hopefully. To test this we would prototype a rotating roles system and compare the results to that of a system where roles don’t rotate the drawer will just change every time. I think it will turn out that a rotating roles system makes the game more fun and gets people invested in the system even though it’s different.
