The Lecture and the Post-Mortem.

So, it’s finally time to reflect on a lecture! Which I promissed to do in my previous post. This will be kind of a Post-Mortem of today’s work. So here we go!

This lecture (2013-10-07) with Adam Mayes wasn’t a regular just “sit, listen and take in” lecture. We were instead surprised with a small workshop! We could choose what ever game we liked, break it down to it’s core and analys the “Core Experience” to find out what makes that game great. Then we would make a “Paper Prototype” of the game we had created. This was also the time to work with our new groups.

Since my previous group (Andreas, Oscar, Ida, Oskar and Simon) did such a good job with our Sissy Fight game, I was kind of sad to not be working with those awesome people anymore. But I also looked forward to meet my new team! You can never have too many friends, and I know that I will probably learn something useful from each one of them! 

We chose to analyze Orcs Must Die 2. We thought the strategy game would be a interesting and new type of board game. Soon after the decision regarding the game and the working roles were set, we all started to begin our assigned duties, without really looking at the mechanics which made the game great. Which soon proved to be a bad decision (Suprise, suprise). Because of the bad planning and the shortage of time, we forgot to really sit down and analyze the core mechanics and dynamics; and focused more on trying to get the art and small pieces for the playing board ready. As we were finishing up in stress, we started to realize what abomination we had created, and we immediately started to think of changes we could have made. But it was to late to save her, she was already gone.

I then had to sit down and basically torture another group and explain it to them. (Sorry Oskar!) As expected, they didn’t understand the game. They knew what mechanics we were going for, but not how we were trying to create it.  

We all saw this work as a “failure” of sorts. But most of us saw a glimpse of good in it aswell! Sure, we did a really bad game. But we also learned what our new group needs to do to prepare for a similar task. We need to sit down and really focus on the project in hand and not just go off and leave everyone else to do their own job, We need help each other and also focus on our strengths, which should have been presented when we were supposed to be planning..

All and all, I think that we had a rocky start, but we will learn to use each other’s strengths during our 5 week project. We kinda have to, or else…