Post Mortem – Core Mechanics and Team 8

During the first weeks of our studies, we we’re put into several groups of about seven people. These groups/teams were supposed to work together on, as far as I understood, all group assignments and projects over the first year. I was part of Group 6, which according to me really was a dream team. We worked well together, everyone spoke their mind freely and everyone had great ideas that we all pretty much agreed on, ideas that truly worked in practise. The downside of our team was, that amongst the seven of us, only one was a programmer. This was apparently true for the other teams as well, resulting in a slightly frustrating turn of events; we we’re put into new teams. Unfortunately they didn’t just switch out some people and balance the already existing teams, but rather they created entirely new ones. This resulted in me (and I believe all or most of the others from team 6) being put with all new people and none of the ones I already knew I worked really well together with. Granted, in the industry, we don’t always work with the people we want to work with, and maybe that is a good lesson that will pay of eventually. I am however a very ”present” being, and I care a lot about what I do at the moment I do it and why I do it, and being tossed around in the mentioned way did put me quite a bit of balance and dulled my creative reasons and will a great deal.

The first assignment that we we’re told to do in our new groups was, to take a digital game, break down its core mechanics and build a paper prototype with those mechanics. We chose ‘Left 4 Dead 2′. The core mechanics of this game were, as far as we figured, staying together and help as many of the group as possible to survive from point A to point B. This also included wasting/using ammunition to fight of zombies from afar, taking damage in close combat, healing (yourself or others) as well as certain special events caused by special zombies, causing one of the team members to be incapacitated and others forced to either help (with the risk of getting hurt yourself) or leaving that person behind to progress and get closer to point B.

Due to the time limit we ended up having to remove certain key features, such as the special events, to at least have a playable end product. This resulted in it being a very simple experience with way too many chance elements, and didn’t quite capture the feeling of the game. These comments were given by our play testers:

1. Unbalanced, too much ammo.
2. Repetitive, should’ve had special events.
3. Too random.

These things were already in our minds before the ‘release’ and so I feel that we did a good job with analysing the core mechanics, we simply needed more time to implement the necessary features!

We spent about one out of three hours to analyse, and the rest to figure out a game board and the rules. I feel like this worked well, had it not been for us getting stuck on how the game board would be designed optimally.