Devlog #4

For this week, we needed to make a sport into a board game. It sounded easy enough until having to figure out how to turn an active and moving sport into a sit down and play board game, and not use mainstream sports. I did not know this when watching videos from Mr. Animate's playlist, so I watched the videos about baseball and lacrosse. I chose these two sports since I love baseball, and lacrosse was my high school's main sport. My group tried to think of something with the sports we looked at, but ultimately came up with nothing. We did have an idea with NASCAR, but it was pointed out to us how boring it could be. We eventually chose basketball.

Making the game was a bit difficult (but that's the fun of it), but we eventually came up with an idea to bring to life and test out on Thursday. We managed to create more concrete rules, and made a basketball board game that took inspiration from chess, making it into a fully strategy mini version of basketball. When others tested it, we gained their feedback to improve, but overall they really liked it and had fun. 

In Bennet Foddy's lecture, he talks about the consequences that comes with losing in a sport; public shaming from the crowd and how games tend to not do any sort of consequences for failure (10:55). They can just reload or do better on their next turn. He then goes on to provide an example of a humiliation for losing a game of pool, allowing the public humiliation aspect to come back. He continues even further with more examples on making video games more like sports (12:51). Taking his advice and looking at his examples, I noticed that we accidentally applied it to our game. We provided only two spaces to score, and while only two people can play at a time, it is still entertaining for people watching as one person loses and another wins. The player that is losing can feel a sense of humiliation as people watch them lose.

He continues on later in the lecture, mentioning the importance of the integrity of sports (17:23). Fans object to fixing sports or adding performance enhancing drugs to sports because it violates the ethics of sports. With this in mind, it should be noted that for our board game, we need to keep some semblance of the original sport, to keep the integrity of it. We already had to move free shots, three pointers, half court shots, etc, due to having no way to simulate that. And that can make our game go from board game basketball to a remake of chess. It's something to keep in mind as we develop this game even more and polish it out. We have to keep the integrity of it and try to keep it similar to the game in other ways, and not over complicate it into being unable to understand (as well as making sure it isn't oversimplified to the point of it being boring).