Post mortem: Finding the core and steal it’s gold!

Last Monday we got an assignment within our new group to take one game we all like and find out just why we like it and then make a paper prototype of it. At first we thought of adventure games and horror games but getting the feel of adventure and horror is kinda hard to translate into a paper prototype.

After a necessary food break we decided upon Minecraft. And mainly the mining and  crafting perspective but also the community feel of the end game (mainly the fucking with everyone feel)!! Each player had to venture outside of their comfort zone and mine to gain resources to be able to create houses and thus be able to craft better and better items depending of the material the house was built of. For example: a wooden pickaxe enables the mining of stone and a stone house enables the crafting of stone items which then allows mining of iron.

I was part of the mechanic part of the team as well as lead designer. So me and two more guys balanced the damage of the weapons and the crafting progress. One of our team mate was a bit slow to start working but he picked up the pace before everything concluded. In the end everything went really well and I feel confident that our team can come up with an amazing idea for the space shooter game.

Oh! we also had creeper cards randomly put in our resource stacks which if pulled enabled a player to move a creeper icon on the map two steps which could attack a player or just block off and resource. And this is where we got our feedback, well… I noticed that we had to change the placements of the creeper cards. The lowest valued resource was dirt and once everyone had built their dirt houses the dirt resource wasn’t used at all so the chance of a creeper card being pulled from the stack was slim to none. So 75% of the creeper cards needed to be placed in the stone and Iron pile.

And that was the only thing we had to change other than the removing of Iron pickaxe because there was nothing to mine with that one.

This exercise was really really fun and I got on good terms with the group!