Week 5

When the class ended up paper prototyping our games we made I feel like it was really helpful and determining some of the flaws people would have in their games. Our group was no different in this case. When we had to watch other people try to play our game with just a rule sheet to explain to them how to play it became quickly apparent that our paper prototype had some flaws. One of the first things we overlooked was how were are player supposed to move. One of the reasons I feel like we overlooked this is because when we came up with our game we were thinking about how you would play it outside and not on a paper prototype. With this in mind we took for granted that you can just run around in real life but on our prototype we quickly realized that this was something really simple and important that we had overlooked despite coming up with so many other specific details. This led to us just coming up with something on the spot so the other groups could play our game. What we ended up doing was making it to where you roll a dice to move and whatever you role that’s how many spaces your allowed to pass it up to your teammate. This is definitely not how it would work in real life but for a paper prototype it got the job done and still allowed you to understand the concept of the game which is what I believe the ultimate goal of these prototypes are. The paper prototypes not only helped our group out but I believe it helped out the other groups a lot to. An example of this would be my group went to play another groups game which was a mix of slapping and mini golf. We quickly determined that the way they had it set up was a bit brutal to play with the current rules they had established. The rule that they had that made things difficult was for however many shot you lost a hole by that was how many times you would be slapped. We quickly realized that if you lose by 3 or 4 shots that adds up really quickly when your playing an 18 hole round of mini golf. You could easily receive 30 plus slap in this game which is far to many to be a good game. We helped their group come up with a solution of where after each hole the winner of the hole gets to slap the loser only one time. No matter how many more putts it took them to get in the punishment was only one slap. This made the game a lot more fair and it made it to where if you were the worse player you weren’t at such a huge disadvantage. I believe that after having someone try to figure out how to play your game without telling them how to play it leads to you being able to see the flaws in your game very quickly. Which is a good thing that way you can try and improve it to make it as good as possible.