Week of Nov 16,18

After reading Working With System Dynamics I can see how some of the things talked about in these readings are used to make board games and more specifically how I see these things in my group’s board game A Plunge Into Space. One of the things that the reading talks about is systems in games and how a game system is supposed to entertain you. Obviously your not going to waste your time on a game if it is not entertaining you. Another thing the reading mentions is the basic elements of a system. Those elements are properties, behaviors, relationships and objects. Objects for our game are thinks like the tokens used for players, the planet cards, the villain cards, and the token will use to keep track of your money acquired by playing. One of the properties in our game would be our money system. The way it works is that you can find and collect money by exploring planets and fighting bosses. Then you can use the money you have earned to buy upgrades for your ship so you can take on harder bosses and earn even more money. We also gave players individual cards they pick to use as their character that have certain abilities to create a little diversity in gameplay. A character might have more health than another one as opposed to another card that might do more damage but has less health. We are still working on finding the balance of some of the characters because we don’t want some cards to be way better then the others. Finally that leaves us with behaviors. Behaviors are the potential action that an object might do in each state. Examples of this in our game would be how we have our planets randomly set up and with our new movement system that we decided on you have lots of choices on where to go. This means that players have access to a lot of different decisions on every move because you can almost go anywhere on the board with one or two moves. Another example of behaviors would be the upgrade system we have in place. With your money that you have you can decide what to buy upgrades for on your ship which vastly changes how you can play the game. You can build whatever kind of ship that you want. You can make it an extremely tanky ship that can take a lot of punishment or you can upgrade your damage making it to where you can end boss fights much quicker if you’re a lucky roller. One thing that’s really been helpful is the feedback we got in class from other groups. That way we could figure out what’s to complicated and what parts of the game do they like. This system of interaction has been extremely beneficial to us in making the game. After we got that feedback we decided to change a lot of the core elements of the game we originally brought in to be play tested.