Before starting this project, I had never designed a systems game and honestly had not given much thought to the variety of game types that existed. Systems games, in particular, were something I had only encountered passively as a player. Designing one from scratch, especially as part of a team, very quickly revealed to me how many interconnected components are required to make a game both functional and genuinely fun. Working on our P3, Battle of the Bands, was a much more challenging and involved journey than I expected.
So this game is predominantly designed for players who enjoy strategic decision-making and multiple paths to victory. The fun it offers comes from weighing trade-offs, optimizing resources, and experimenting with different strategies, with each phase designed as testing grounds for players to experiment their different strategies/see which strategy is most optimal. These elements emerged through multiple rounds of playtesting, which helped us refine the mechanics and ensure that they worked together as a cohesive system. And as time went on, we were able to take game balance into consideration so that players could pursue different approaches without any single path being overwhelmingly strong. In this sense, the game’s ecosystem—its band members, the city preferences, resources, upgrades through shopping legendary member cards, and scoring loops—was modeled in a way where each component had a direct influence on the others.
Personally, one of the most transformative parts of this project for me was the playtesting process. I used to shy away from playtesting because it felt intimidating. More specifically, I was very worried about being confronted by my playtesters with questions I didn’t have answers to, especially while the game was still evolving and developing. But this class has really helped shift my mindset towards this iterative process, and helping me see playtesting not as a stressful hurdle but as an essential and potentially even enjoyable part of game development. Watching others interact with our game allowed me to see unintended behaviors, unclear rules, and surprising strategies, all of which ultimately helped strengthen the design.
Another unexpected area of growth came from doing graphic design for the first time using Figma. I had no prior visual design experience, so I was pushed out of my comfort zone, but in a good way. Interestingly, I found parallels between graphic design principles and systems design. Both rely on creating balance, emphasis, and clarity through interconnected elements, and designing cards and boards required the same kind of structured thinking we used for developing the game’s mechanics, so that was an interesting discovery I had.
After completing this project, I now have a much deeper appreciation for how systems games function and how the necessity and importance of the iterative design process. I can definitely see myself applying these skills in the future, whether it’s in designing future games or in tackling other projects that require systematic thinking, visual communication, and collaborative iteration.
