In yesterday’s class, our group discussed about making bluffing and social deduction games. While nothing is decided yet, I’ll assume that we’re working on bluffing / social deduction games for P1 for the following questions our prototypes will answer.
1. Is the “significance” for each role distributed fairly good enough, or is it focused on a specific few roles? This is important because if the game mechanics are focused on a certain few roles, the majority of other players playing the non-significant roles feel bored or left out. We could make a role prototype for this question – for example, a simple thought experiment for playing as each of the roles in a single game and writing out the actions I was able to take during the game. We could then compare the significance of each role based on the contents of the thought experiment.
2. Does the game length feel right? If the game is too short, the game will feel unsatisfying – in contrast, if it’s too long, the game will drag out and increase player fatigue. I think the best way to prototype this question is to actually play the game with real players and receive their feedback.
3. How much impact do the information revealing mechanics have on the gameplay? If a single information reveal mechanic exposes all the information then the game will become lame – in contrast, if they reveal too little then players will have little motivation to work towards these info and the game will become stale. One way to prototype this question would be to play through some actual game rounds and compare the uncertainty before and after information reveal – for example, we could actually calculate the number of possible cases in a job guessing game before and after information reveal to assess the impact of the information.
4. How should roles be distributed based on player count? This is important because the number of players dramatically affect the power balance of social deduction games – think of mafia for example. To prototype this question, I would play the game with different number of players such as 4, 6, 8 with the same game mechanics and observe the difference in outcomes for each cases.
