Here's my work from the
Coursersa Intro to Game Design course, this time
assignment 2. The criteria for this assignment was to make a new game (or revision of the old) incorporating the feedback from the playtesting of
my previous assignment. As I had more time to work on it, this game is a bit (but only a bit) more polished.
I'm still not happy with the rules and I'm chafing under the assignment parameters- limiting it to one A4 sized board and only being a one-player game. But here's what I've got:
1) From the previous assignment, what peer feedback did you find the most
useful, and how did you incorporate it into your new game?
In the first version my game had no walls, more haphazardly placed
teleportation spots and slightly different rules. Also, even though it was
supposed to, the original game had no rules text at the top of the board. I
just ran out of time drawing the grid.
I added the walls because the game was too easy and basically came down to
"Do I want to use the teleporters or simply make a break for it running across
the board?". The walls are supposed to act as impediments to make the game more
challenging.
I changed the location of the teleportation spots because in the original
game they were too valuable. You'd hop on one near the starting row, and then
just keep teleporting until you got to the one near the exit. In this version
the teleporters are clustered around the center of the board, making them less
valuable (but perhaps now useless).
I changed the rules to make teleporting more dangerous; in the first version
they were really toothless.
But I also changed the rules to give you more "lives" and a slightly
different win condition. In the first version you only had one pawn and won the
game by getting it off the board. This version, of course, gives you five but
you only need to get three off. I think I like this setup better.
2) Describe how you articulated the world or gameplay rules in this
game. Specifically, have you used documentation, narration, or in-game
discovery? How has your approach to game rules, instructions, or gameplay
enhanced balance or engagement in your game?
There's really no "world" - it's an abstract strategy game. The
documentation, as I stated above, is now written at the top of the board. Which
is an aesthetic improvement, but I hesitate to attribute balance or engagement
to it because honestly the thing is so rushed and limited by the parameters of
the assignment... I don't want to want it to be judged on those terms.
ETA: In case anyone actually wants to try the game out it would probably help if I linked to the gameboards I made to play the game.
Here's the SVG version of 10-minute space warp (version 2) and I also made a
10-Minute Space Warp (version 2) PDF.