Our game is a semi-cooperative and semi-competitive game that centers on the concept of Tragedy of the Commons. Players live in various space colonies and must balance the priorities of their respective communities with those of the larger solar system. A few of the questions we want to explore in the early stages of this project are as follows:
1: In practice, how will players balance cooperation with competition (helping the group vs helping themselves)? Will the game push more players towards one side or the other, resulting in a boring game?
This is an important question to answer because it will be the main driver of the game dynamics. If the game leans too heavily in favor of cooperating it will have a completely different feel than if it leans towards competition. I also have a feeling that either one of those options would result in pretty boring gameplay, and a good balance of both is what we’re aiming for. We should make an implementation prototype to answer this question because the look and feel of the game won’t have a dramatic impact on this question. This question is related to the role of the game, since the different gameplay styles will lead to two different roles the game could play for people. However, the gameplay dynamics are so deeply impacted by the mechanics that I think an implementation prototype would be best here. It would be low fidelity and low resolution so that we can iterate quickly and test new mechanics. My guess is that our first prototypes will lean towards competition since we’re planning to give people role cards. Since these are the first introduction to the game, they will likely play to that role’s advantage/personal interests.
2: What should the game interface look like? Is a board with a solar system on it too large scale or does the visual input help players? How many tokens should be at play at any given time? We want this to be accessible and easy to pick up.
This is important because the look and feel of the game has a huge role to play in how willing players are to pick it up and learn. If there are too many moving parts or if the game simply looks complicated, people will not want to play. Because of this, we will create a look and feel prototype to evaluate which game interfaces feel the most intuitive to players. We will likely make a few different interfaces that are low resolution and determine which ones players gravitate towards. This will guide what we choose for our following prototypes. I have a feeling that players will like a visual map in the center of the players. It would help to ground the game and give players something to refer to if they ever feel overwhelmed or confused.
3: How can we make the game flexible with the number of players? Do we want to only allow for large groups? Do we want to prioritize smaller groups of 4-5? On the technical side of things, how can we make the adjustments to the mechanics for different group sizes clear and intuitive?
Since this is meant to be a party game, we want to make sure that it is flexible enough that new players can join in at the last minute and the game will still function well. The number of players also has a big impact on the feel of the game, so ensuring that we’re planning for flexibility and testing different group sizes early on is essential. The prototype we make to address this will be an implementation prototype. Similar to my answer to question 1, while this question does have large impacts on the role the game will play, the actual implementation and mechanics are what will have an impact. We will likely create modular aspects of the game or adjust rules (playing in pairs, perhaps?) in order to allow for different group sizes. My guess is that it will be difficult to adjust for large groups as the game is focused on social accountability and having a large group will skew more towards competition as players will feel that they can get away with more.
Overall, since the assignment spec for P1 explains the overall role that the game should have, I think we will have fewer prototypes based on role. I think that the mechanics of the game will be the hardest to iron out, so I have a feeling we’ll be spending a lot of time on iterating on implementation prototypes.
