Blog Post 2 - Postmortem Document

 The playtesting observation revealed to us a lot of things that we should have incorporated into the game during our brainstorming process and what elements of the game we should have focused on refining. As a group, we went over it lightly in the Postmortem sheet, but there was more depth to it than we had simply put it.

Our rule sheet included a lot of information. The information itself was not necessarily confusing. After all, at its core, it was just a rehash of solitaire which is a well known and well established game. What made our rule sheet confusing was that there was a lack of organization of the information. The order in which gameplay components were presented made for a confusing read. For example, key gameplay elements or central parts of the modification were included towards the bottom of the rule sheet, so they seemed to be less noticed by the player when the actual playtest was conducted.

We also forgot to write down one of the modifications that was an extremely important change to the game. This modification would have both made the game harder and slightly easier for the player as it expanded their options, but if they stacked their cards on the foundation piles too soon it would have closed off many of their options. That experience of forgetting to include a key component of the mod told me that I needed to pay far more attention to whether our most important ideas were being represented within our rule sheet and consequently, our game.

We all agreed that our willingness to collaborate and compromise within our group was one of our strengths. There was never a time when we were brainstorming or modifying the near product that our ideas were shot down when we suggested them. Instead, we either broke them down and figured out where they could be incorporated, or we saved the idea until we found another use for it. We also had very evenly distributed and divided work. The unspoken agreement that we would try to pick up an equal amount of work amongst ourselves made group work fairly frictionless.

I personally felt that the first playtest in which we felt out the game modification and whether it would work or not was productive and a useful experience. When I ran into roadblocks when playtesting the game, we as a group discussed whether it was from the skill of the player (me) or whether it derived from the game modification missing components. When we identified which was which, we were able to essentially make a patch and change what we thought would make the game play better.

It is easy to say in hindsight, but after having finished the final playtest, I wish that we would have thought to bring in an inexperienced player who did not have any part in developing the game. If this had been done, we would have been able to see the more glaring issues, such as the janky organization on parts of the rule sheet, or the omission of some rules altogether.

The final thing that I would’ve liked to have gone differently was our brainstorming process. Although we were accepting of others’ ideas, we did not strive to go outside of our normal lines of thought. We could have played a word association game to get into a mentality unlike what we usually thought. We also could have gone and broken down our ideas to an even further extent. We were lacking in the sense that when we gave our ideas and decided upon them, they were ideas that we had half formulated in our head and not truly gotten to the bottom of why we thought they should be added.