I came into this project with more than a little baggage from making my previous two games in 247G. Creating those games was one of the most rewarding experiences I’ve had, but under the tight timeline of this project and busy schedules of my team, I knew I surely couldn’t spent the amount of time I had previously. However, I also love teaching and I love games, so I knew I had to do this project justice.
So, for the first time in my history of making games, my team started by scoping. Despite interest in making a complex systems game, we chose the medium of a social game that emphasized fellowship. The hope was to make a game that would be easy to pick up, quick to playtest, quick to iterate on, and hopefully teach people something.
At first, I was a little disappointed and a little nervous. I wasn’t fully content with having a less ambitious project and my initial ideas had all revolved around statement games, which the game we settled on, certainly was not.
I was especially unsure of how the first playtest would go, which I had somehow convinced five of my friends to spend their Sunday night helping out with. The last time I had playtested with these friends, I had presented them with the final form of a complex social deduction game — their favorite genre — and now, I was presenting them with a very untested, very prototype-y, and very silly collaboration game.
However, as soon as they started playing, I knew this game was something special. Within ten minutes, I was dying laughing over my friends dramatically debating the meaning of “pazo” (or was it “PAzo?”). By the end of that playtest I realized, for the first time, we had actually come up with a concept that was, from the start, fun!
That difference actually made iterating on this game a very different experience. While with previous games, iterations felt like a race to have our game just achieve our aesthetics, with CAVE TALK, each iteration we were able to specifically refine our game. I found myself thinking about smaller problems, such as how to guide new players to the most fun actions or how to smoothly introduce concepts to aid our learning goals. However, that smaller progress did take time to get used to. Iterations didn’t always see drastic improvements, but I grew to understand that we had simply started from a higher floor.
Yet, what really stuck with me came from hosting playtests. Asking my friends to playtest made me realize how lucky I am to have people in my life who will come support me on a Sunday evening, Tuesday night, or Saturday afternoon to test out something I put my whole heart into. There’s truly nothing more rewarding then seeing hard work pay off with their laughs and smiles.
That’s a lot of words to say what can be encapsulated by one: “wuwu!”
