Blog Post 4 - Unit 2 Postmortem

         My group number was 2, and my partner was Pablo Flores. Our game was called Surplus. In the game, the main focus was on building up a deck of cards to either attack your opponent or upgrade three cards of the same suit into a Surplus card. These Surplus cards had special abilities of their own and were designed so that the game could cater to a certain type of playstyle that the player was free to choose.

        Our target audience was the more strategic type of player who wanted to plan out their moves one or two rounds ahead of time. It was a Player vs. Player interaction pattern due to the game being limited to two players. We tried to appeal to our target audience by cutting down any of the aspects of the game that included luck, with the exception of drawing from the deck of cards. From our understanding, we thought that if we removed elements of luck, the game would naturally be more reliant on skilled play from the players.

        We encountered a multitude of problems within our Iterative Design process. In our first iteration of the game, we limited ourselves to using a board because we had not even considered that the game did not have to require a board. 

        The issue was that we had zero knowledge of designing boards for a game, and I knew from just trying to draw a “simple” one that it would end up consuming a lot of our time and resources. Another issue with this board was that we wanted to decrease elements of luck, so the player would move by playing a card, and moving their game piece the number of times that was on the card they played. This type of play did not favor trying to accrue cards over time, which was the overall goal that we wanted to represent in the game.

        Another issue that was apparent was that the board was, for a lack of better words, useless. The board did not foster any interaction between the players. At this point in the development process, there was no system to attack the player. The only kind of player interaction that existed was trading. 

        There were even more problems with the board that we noticed when we playtested for the first time. On each tile, there was supposed to be a “Modifier” tile that essentially allowed the player to get cards stolen from them, or receive more cards. The issue was that as the players had a free choice over when and where to move, there was no conceivable way in which the players would be forced to take a penalty. They would actually be encouraged to play low value cards and move around at a net profit, because they were still simultaneously drawing cards from the deck and receiving bonuses from the board.

        Fortunately, we realized after about a week and a half that the map-type board would simply not play well with our game, and threw it out. Instead, we opted for a player board style game, with a player board that showed what bonuses they had, how much health they had, and explained what the Surplus cards did.

We were able to complete all of our tasks in a timely manner. Unfortunately, our work distribution was fairly lacking, but it did not take away from the fact that we completed our work on time and were able to keep up with the pace of playtesting and making adjustments to our rule sheet.

Going forward, for our development process, the main thing I would change is making sure that the work was better distributed. Though we encountered problems when it came to our iteration, it is important to note that we were able to figure out that issue somewhat early and rectify it. On the other hand, our work distribution remained unbalanced throughout the entire process, even to the end.