Before we started on our systems game, my main concern was making a complex game with too many rules that was going to be hard to learn and take a million years to playtest. I feel like systems are complicated, and truly representing them can take a long time and might not even end up being fun.
For Not On My Block, our team was really inspired by Mapmaker. We thought the gameplay was simple and intuitive, but it still managed to capture the core concepts of packing and cracking. This changed my view on systems games – the key was actually finding a clever way to capture the core concepts, not representing every single detail accurately. The system we chose to represent was gentrification (I guess we were inspired by the map concept), but we ended up abstracting a lot of it to focus on the core concepts of displacement and inequality.
When we started our game, we tried to have as few rules as possible to avoid complicating the system. I think this was actually a pretty good approach – even though the first few iterations of our game were not fun, starting with fewer rules made it easier to build in the right direction.
I really enjoyed seeing our game evolve with every playtest. We definitely had a low point between version 2 and version 3 (going from “winning hexagons” to pushing apartments off the board) where we felt stuck. However, changing the mechanic of the game from “claiming land’ to “pushing off the board” was a critical step in making a more fun and engaging game. Seeing players get competitive and come up with strategies that we didn’t even plan for was amazing!
The last point that I want to bring up was achieving game balance. This was definitely something we had to work on throughout our playtests – the Developer was always underpowered. However, using the concepts brought up in class where it is better to go really far in one direction and then bring it back to the middle, we intentionally really overpowered the Developer. This turned out to be the right move though – our final few playtests were finally balanced!
Overall, I really enjoyed working on this game and am really proud of the results.
