Questions:
- How should information about player dynamics be revealed each round?
- Since we plan on making a social deduction game where players have to figure out the relationships between characters, deciding how players can obtain just enough new information per round to keep the game engaging is very important. To answer this question, we plan on making a paper prototype with a game board and do play multiple playthroughs with different methods of revealing information (examples: action card, interrogation similar to mafia, quick scenes with interactions, etc). To keep dynamics most simplistic, it may be the best to keep information revealed methodically via consequences of action cards.
- Is the game be too easy and fast to play?
- We want to make a replayble game that isn’t too easy like Tic Tac Toe! The difficulty can drastically vary depending on the number of players, so we want to make sure we know the appropriate number of players suitable for the game. Also, we want to make sure the game’s mechanics facilitate the gameplay at a suitable pace. Essentially, this will probably boil down to the complexity of the social network of our game, so we will see test this using our current prototype of the game board, which contains the entire network. I think that the current prototype will be too easy to play for smaller numbers of players (such as 4).
- Should there be a gamemaster?
- Having a gamemaster might be very helpful for organization and facilitating the game, but then they become excluded from the fun :<. If possible, we would like to eliminate the need for a game master. Our current game board design is structured in a way that allows play testing with and without a game master, so we plan on using that to do multiple playthroughs to answer this question. I think that we will be able to eliminate the need for a gamemaster, but this might require more complexity in the game mechanics.
- Is it more enjoyable playing as yourself or with a fictional story + characters?
- This is important because we want to maximize the enjoyment players feel from our game and see which mode people are more drawn to. This can also change the types of aesthetics that’s targeted by our game. We plan on coming up with a storyline that can be used for playtesting with a fictional story. I predict that people will be more inclined to play with fictional characters to avoid impacts on real life relationships with others.
