Devlog #13

This week, we got assigned a new project to make a board game based off of game cartridges. Our group decided to do Runaways, the cartridge that looks as though there's a car driving away from police with money flying out the window. We mostly expanded on our idea and make it from an idea without any basis to an actual concept. Tuesday was mainly looking over the ideas our group came up with. We all eventually decided to do Runaways, as the idea seemed more developed than any of the other ideas. I myself wasn't too keen on the idea, since it seemed more common and an easier route, but majority rules.

In between Tuesday and Thursday, I decided to look at different board games to help get inspiration for the type of game we could do for Runaways. I looked at The Game Of Life, Monopoly, and Seven Wonders. I found Seven Wonders on the Watch It Played channel, the channel we were told to look at videos for this devlog. I mainly chose Seven Wonders because of the artwork and the name. The other two I looked at as they are two very popular games for people in the high school to college age demographic. We really started to draw inspiration from The Game of Life and Monopoly on Thursday, taking in the factors of a spinner rather than dice, as well as the use of chance cards, like in Monopoly. We also thought of cards that purely help, like the community chest in Monopoly, as well as cards that only hurt the player, like "go to jail" cards. "You and the other players will be choosing cards to add to your growing civilizations and each will provide you with various benefits" (Watch It Played, 2:25). I didn't get a chance to talk to my group members about this idea, but the idea of having cards that provide benefits to you, like in Seven Wonders and in Big Thunder Mountain, could also make our game a little more interesting. For example, maybe a player has a card that allows them an extra move to rob a place. Or maybe the player has a benefit card that allows them an extra number on the spinner to help their success.

Another thing I realized, after watching the video with Jason Schklar, that if we were to have chance cards and the like, we would have to make some sort of obvious symbol or write physically on the card what something does, so that new players who don't look at the instructions could understand what something means. "where people got stuck was on the skull, for instance, So, if you see the skull on the board, they thought if they landed there, maybe they would die. And then if you look at the gun and the knife cards, they thought 'well this game must involve combat because why would we have knife and gun cards if we couldn't attack other pirates?' ... None of that exists in the game" (GDC, 10:40). After hearing this, that really made me realize the potential problem of random symbols and not being able to read the instructions. If my group played Big Thunder Mountain without reading the instructions, how would we know the pan meant looking for gold in water? How would we know that picking for gold was impossible in water unless we had an upgrade card? How would we know what the red marble was for? Many of the cards didn't have any words on them explaining what they do. The only way to know is to look at the instructions for a guide.

"They actually had help text on the board and in these player cards... but they were vaguely worded and they're more for reminding as opposed to learning" (GDC, 16:25). This made me realize even further that we would need to provide help text with each of our cards, with text more on the teaching side rather than the reminding side. Most players do read the instructions before playing a game they never played before, so the help text may be useless to them. However, people who don't read the instructions and people who easily forget what things mean could really benefit from such, as it will prevent them from looking at the instructions, which interrupts the game, and keep the flow going since they can read what the card does instead of looking it up.