Games Studies - Projects

April 20, 2020

Games Studies - Projects

14.4.20 - 2.8.20 (Week 1 - Week 16)
Abigail Bea Chong Ka Yee (0333966)
Games Studies
Projects

INSTRUCTIONS

PROJECTS

Tabletop Game Brief | Week 1 | 14.4.20

Mr Charles brief us about it the phases of the project we would be having in the coming weeks. The main objective was to create a tabletop game but since we're under MCO right now; we'll be working on Tabletop Simulator using the platform Steam.

Selecting our teammates | Week 2 | 21.4.20

On Friday, we tried the game tabletop simulator on Steam and played around with the objects, background, and could even flip the table if we wanted too. After fooling around we chose to flip cards to see who will be each other's teammate for creating a tabletop game. I was teamed up with Ryan. Both of us discussed and used map mindmaps to try to come out with ideas.

Fig 1.1 Discussing how to incorporate our ideas together

Fig 1.2 Ryan's Mindmap

Working on tabletop| Week 3 | 28.4.20

This week the other group presented their first gameplay to Mr Charles. I found it really interesting but confusing as I wasn't so sure about the objective of their game. On Friday Ryan and I was testing the draft we drew in fig 1.2. A screenshot of us discussing our game in tabletop simulator.

Fig 3.4 Testing the game

First Gameplay Test | Week 4 | 5.5.20

We had our first game test today with Mr Charles and our classmates.

Fig 4.1 Testing our first draft in tabletop simulator

I wrote Mr Charles feedback to our game and also came up with the second idea as I felt like the previous game didn't really work out:

Fig 4.2 Feedback written down using GoodNotes5

I then made a second mindmap on what I had in mind. I wanted to make it more story-driven with puzzles, cards, and a spiral board.

Fig 4.3 Game Idea #2

I told Ryan about my idea and he liked the concept about it but felt like he could do more with his game with Mr Charles feedback. So we wanted to have two games to see which one would be better when we have the next game testing. I further developed the second idea using google docs shown in PDF version below:

I then uploaded the board, cards, and HP packs into Tabletop Simulator.

Testing out my game together with Ryan's game | Week 5 | 12.5.20

This week we had to test both of our games and gathered feedback from Mr Charles and our classmates.

I had a hard time uploading the images as I wasn't used to how the simulator worked but eventually got them all to appear. I was nervous about being the gamemaster so I forgot to take screenshots for the blog but thank you Mr Charles for recording the session.

Fig 5.1 Testing my game #1

Fig 5.2 Testing my game #2

Fig 5.3 Testing Ryan's game part 2

I then rewatched the recorded session to see if I missed any of the important feedback and added what I missed to the week 5 feedback. Here's the feedback in a PDF version so it would be clearer:

After evaluating both of our games, Ryan and I decided to follow up with the feedback for my game and developed further from there.

Week 6 | 19.5.20

We played Joe's and Kenny's game on tabletop simulator. I like it much better then the first draft as the objective was clearer and the map was also pretty detailed.

Public Holiday | Week 7 | 26.5.20

This week we tried using the plot pyramid to come out with ideas for several stories.

Stories:

Scenario #1

The first crime is based in Paris. A boy was walking in the streets of Paris when a group stopped him. They kidnapped him and only left a note. On the note, there was just a phone number and a location. The group members asked $1mil in exchange for the boy.

The father of the boy was furious and decided not to corporate but instead use military forces. The forces investigated and tracked every phone call that would lead to the boy. At last, they managed to track the boy but once they entered the place; the boy was dead.

Scenario #2

The second crime is at a McDonald’s drive-through in Japan. A woman who’s late to her best friend’s funeral parks her car outside in a hurry to use the washroom. However, she does not come out as it seems like she has vanished. Inside the washroom, her purse was found. Inside the purse, there were 3 lipsticks, a letter, a wig, and an anchor. One of the staff that worked in Mcdonalds went to check the car that was parked outside and had an awful smell in the trunk, turns out she was dead all along.

Scenario #3

A man is walking back home from work when he is stopped by a policeman. The police asked him for his wallet but the man found it a bit weird. He questioned the officer whether he did something wrong but the officer remained silent and shove a plastic bag on his head. The man woke up in a room where there were only him and the officer.

He has been brutally abused with different tools while being streamed online. In the end, he was left on the chair to bleed. Weeks later police found his body.

The man was in fact a daily browser of the dark web. He was buying and selling stolen items until one day he was caught by one of the guys he stole from.

Fixing our game | Week 8 | 2.6.20

We had a difficult time executing our ideas since it was story-driven we needed a solid story before making the game work. At first, we wrote 4 mini-stories to combine together but felt like it was too complicated so we stuck to only 1 story and made it evolved from there. After writing the story in google docs we still felt stuck so we went over to Miro a collaborative space to discuss our ideas and mindmap how we were going to play the game and drew the board. We began with a draft of the updated story which included the gameplay, objective, rules, current spiral board:

And since I want to avoid spoilers for the story I won't put the draft for that just yet. Ryan was in charge of designing the board while I made the cards. Here's a sneak peek for the draft of cards:

Fig 8.1 Progression #1

Friday Class | 5.6.20

The spoiler I promised would be hereafter today's session. The sticky notes would be the meaning behind the cards in 7 sequences and the paragraph next to the sticky notes is the story for each character.

I gathered the feedback from Mr Charles, Kenny, and Joe which I wrote in the notes. I didn't include everything but Joe thought we should have a combination of the cards and Kenny suggested we have many different outcomes like the video game Detroit: Become Human. The biggest take away from the feedback would be don't include many gameplay elements just focus on the cards as the main gameplay and that the board can be a secondary element to support the cards. Hence, we have to figure out a way on how the players can actually win the game.

We then went on Miro to brainstorm how to use cards together with the board without putting too many gameplay elements into the game. We also tried watching a few videos from this Youtube channel Polygon. They have a special series called 'overboard' where they play a variety of games, we found this helpful to get inspirations from where to proceed next for the game. We got inspired by the game 'Deception: Murder in Hong Kong' and decided to reference the 'board' for our game. Below is the PDF version of our progress in Miro.

Third Game Draft & Game Test 1 | Week 10 | 19.6.20

For today's class, we tried our third try of the card game without using a playing board but more like topics that were placed on the table. A screenshot of the board below:

I wrote down the feedback and felt like we still have quite a lot to do but I'm glad we're clearer about where to move from here.

Third Game Draft & Game Test 2 with Mr Jian | Week 11 | 26.6.20

We were still trying to make the cards and the game board so we didn't have enough progress to show our special guest Mr Jian but we gathered feedback from the class which was not engaging enough, try to adapt to mastermind structure, maybe we can also use pictograms or stronger visuals for our final game design. With those ideas in mind, we both went to miro again to finalise our game idea completely.

Fourth Game Draft | Week 11 - Week 16 | x.x.20

Below is a simple plan for our fourth and hopefully it'll be our final game.

Since we have 5 categories which are location, cause of death, item, personality, and occupation. We made 55 cards in total including the topic card that isn't playable. It took some time to find similar visuals but we managed to bring together good and simple to understand designs. Here are the screenshots of the cards:

Fig 12.1 Cause of Death cards

Fig 12.2 Item cards

Fig 12.3 Location cards

Fig 12.4 Occupation cards

Fig 12.5 Personality cards

I then went on to tabletop simulator to import our newly created playing cards into the game. It was time-consuming as I couldn't find a way to import it as a deck and only individually (all 55 cards) and twice if I may add since cards have both the back and front of the design.

Fig 12.6 Process of importing the cards into tabletop #1

Fig 12.7 Process of importing the cards into tabletop #2

Fig 12.8 Process of importing the cards into tabletop #3

We then moved onto working on the board of the game. It should an easy board to navigate through because the main focus is the cards. Ryan created a simple draft to locate where 7 days would be and where the players would start from as mentioned in the fourth plan of the game.

Fig 13.1 A simple draft for the board from Ryan

I wanted the board to give off light but mysterious feelings and I started at references from board games to the concept of the game itself.

Fig 13.2 Board Game References #1

Fig 13.3 Board Game References #2

Fig 13.3 Board Game References #3

While looking at these references I got the idea of an interrogation room but with elements of colour and also a hole that can symbolise that the player would be stuck there forever. I worked on the background of the board game first by finding pictures that gave me the feeling that you're in a room that was lock or a never-ending hole.

Fig 14.1 Process of figuring out the correct concept board for the game

From figure 14.1 I went with the whiteboard and begin adding elements of colour and the number of tries a player gets. Below is the image of the final board. The purple locations are the categories of the cards and the other 4 colours are the players.

Fig 14.2 The final board of the fourth game draft

Final Game Test | Week 16 | 30.7.20

Today both groups had one final gameplay with Mr Charles. I had a real good time playing both games because of the way they evolved from all the other versions altogether.

Fig 16.1 Joe and Kenny's game

Fig 16.2 Our game

After the final gameplay, we received the last round of feedback from both Mr Charles and my classmates. I wrote it down as per usual using GoodNotes5 and begin twerking the places that needed changes e.g the back of the cards and the game design document.

I changed the back of the cards in Illustrator and imported them into tabletop simulator.