Assignment

In our course Advanced game design we were tasked with making a board game in four weeks time. My group included five people:

Joar Hedvall

Linus Johansson

Magnus Jinneskog

Petter Vernersson

Viva Ivarsson

Concept

When making our concept we started off by brainstorming different themes that we liked. We did this by taking turns of say random words and themes that we wrote down. Once the paper was full we read it out loud and marked the words we liked. One of the themes that we all liked was the idea of a game inside a candy shop. From that theme we came up with the idea for a game focusing on stealth and trickery. The players would take on the rolls as elders who stole candy from the shop for their grandchildren. They would be able to set up traps for each other and have to keep out of sight from the shopkeeper.

When we had our next meeting we decided to come up with a new idea since we felt that the candy shop idea was a bit silly. Instead we tried to come up with a core system to work from. After some brainstorming I proposed that we could make something based on cogwheels. This idea got us brainstorming again and we noticed that we might be able to make an interesting movement system out of cogwheels. The goal of the game would be for the players to move across the board and reach their own goal while they tried to keep the other players away from theirs. This idea felt much more promising and innovative.

Prototype

Once we had a finished concept we started to make prototypes. The most important part for us was to make some cogwheels that gave us a working movement system. Because of this we put a lot of time on trying different cogwheel designs. We tried different amount of cogs, different lengths and thought about if we could use regular tiles instead of wheels. At first we thought that the cogs would push things between them, but after some testing we decided that the player tokens would stand upon the cogwheels instead.

Trying out different cogwheels

We made the cogwheels out of cardboard, which didn’t work to well since they got stuck in each other if a lot of cogwheels were spinning at the same time. They still helped us to get a visual idea of our finished product though and gave us the chance to playtest the game in the beginning of the development.

Feedback

We play tested our game with other groups from our class each Thursday. Since the cogwheels didn’t work so well, we had to spend a lot of time explaining the movement of the players tokens and how the cogwheels worked. Once the players understood the movement they found the game quite interesting, but the long description in the beginning of the game destroyed their experience. This made us realize that we had to make the rules visible for the players. We decided to have arrows on the cogwheels in the final version, which would show the players in which way the cogwheels had to spin for the player to move.

We also had a meeting with Marcus where we discussed our game idea. He told us that it seemed interesting to work with cogwheels, but that we might have to add something more to the game. We had focused so much on making the movement system work that we had forgotten to add more features to our game. After the meeting with Marcus we decided that we should add action cards to the game. This would give the players a chance to interfere with each other in more ways that removing cogwheels.

Finished product

To make the game work properly, we decided to order some cogwheels made out of plastic. We got these new cogwheels the last week of development, so we were able to finish the design in the last days. By this time we had already discussed what kind of action cards we should add and how the coordinates would work, so it was an easy task for me to design these cards once we knew that they would work with the board. We also made rotation descriptions with arrows that we pasted on top of the cogwheels.

We also had a meeting with Adam in one of the last days of development. He really liked our game and we didn’t receive any negative feedback.

On our last play testing session we were able to show our game for the whole class. Thanks to the rotation descriptions, people were able to understand the movement system much easier. The game took some time to play through depending on the players. Since the game focus on transporting your own token while sending the other players token backwards, it requires the players to plan their move carefully. Once every player does this the game gets very intriguing and interesting.

Good and Bad

Our group was able to collaborate trough out the whole development. There wasn’t much individual work since most of our development of the board game focused around testing new designs. Once we had decided for the cogwheels concept, we all sat together and discussed how the cogwheels would look. Petter printed out the different designs that we wanted to try and while we were testing we came up with new ideas.

We had some individual work once we got our plastic cogwheels and only had some few days left before our meeting with Adam. I took the responsibility for the design of the cards.

From the left: rotation description, two action cards and two coordination cards

I made all the cards and descriptions in Photoshop. I wanted to keep their design quite simple and make them in grayscale since the cogwheels had specific colors that I didn’t wanted to interfere with.

Linus made the game board out of a plank and spikes, which worked surprisingly well.

The game board

I don’t feel that we’ve had any bigger problems in the process. Players still forgot to pick up the action cards sometimes when we had our last play testing, so if I would have gotten a little more time I might have change the design of the action card so that a player isn’t able to put down a cogwheel on top of an action card.