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Art 3160 - Galactic Conquest Postmortem
With our game, Galactic Conquest, we wanted to make a game that could appeal to a more adult or mature set of players. Games like Cranium served as a basis of inspiration. A simple and fun setup with a more complex and quirky under layer. The basic premise was a trivia based game that had multiple ways to win. The main objective is to collect 10 Limericks through various methods. The game incorporated chance as well as sabotage, as elements for victory, so that the person with the most correctly answered questions might not necessarily win. The tools at our disposal were randomly chosen game pieces from 6 different current-market board games. We were given the task to design the game’s core essentials, then moved to digital software like Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, for the finishing composition. During the core development process we had the opportunity to have our game play-tested by our other classmates. We received very good and important feedback, which helped work out the kinks and sculpt the final feel and essence of the game.
Several things went well during the development of the game. Luckily, the three of us in the group shared very similar mindsets towards the project. We all knew exactly what kind of game we wanted. We quickly agreed on the basic core gameplay, eliminating tired and stressful brainstorming sessions. This fortune left us in a very nice and extended refining phase for most of the development process. Due to this, above all other elements, our game is very extensively refined and polished, from a gameplay perspective. We all entered the process, eager for a very professional presentation of our game. Based on our prompt for the project, we assumed the far end of the spectrum, and shot to build a prototype we might pitch to a large game company like Hasbro. With a clear timeline and a firm due date, we were able to create a very streamlined development process. We set the meeting we were able to, outside of class, and had a clear cut vision of what we had to do and by when. This allowed for clear planning and the avoidance of confusion and doubt, for the most part. We had several of the aforementioned play-testing sessions and the definitely helped us refine our game to more appealing state. Many of our original radical ideas were slowly but surely refined to a usable state. Such as our Alien Robot concept. Luckily our desperate want for an element of sabotage made us refine the concept over and over, to get him down to a point where we would efficiently incorporate it into the final product. Due to everything that was going so well, during the development, answers came fairly easily to most hurdles. We had, at most, 10 hours of meeting time, to go over the game’s specifics, so we were very lucky to have the core essentials solid, and a clear goal of what we wanted. Answers to problems became obvious at a certain point. Originally we had a system where there would be 3 questions on each trivia card. One worth 1 limerick, one worth 2, and one worth 3. The player would then e able to choose which one to gamble for. This left us with an implementation nightmare, once we decided to make our own trivia. The answer was very simple for us to answer. Have one question per card, and have them randomly worth 1, 2, or 3 limericks.
However, not every part of development was as smooth. I feel the limited, casual experience we all had had with board games, we were all as clueless when it came to certain roadblocks. A more knowledgeable member would have been a plus. However this wasn’t entirely a bad thing. It led us to think more creatively, and come up with unconventional solutions. If I had to have one complaint about our design process, it would be regarding our ability to actually work on it. We had more than reasonable time within class to work on it, however the problems didn’t arise until we were outside of class. Unfortunately, non of our schedules matched up, forcing us to only be able to afford one successful, which lasted less than 2 hours. Luckily this wasn’t too big of a problem, as we communicated decently enough through e-mail messages. As group projects are difficult enough. They become increasingly difficult when outside meetings are required for a decent development progression. Maybe in the future we could be grouped depending on our schedules, over any other factors, to allow for more time spend working on the project outside of class. Another main issue with our development, turned out to be the trivia questions. If I could go back to the start of the process, i would wildly protest the use of trivia cards. Halfway through the development process, we reached the inevitable point of realization, that the provided geography and history based questions wouldn’t serve us very well for our creative goals with the project. We finally decided to go ahead, and write our own trivial questions, which ended up taking up the bulk of our development process. On top of that, due to the number of trivia cards, combined with our already planned turn cards, we decided that the simplest way to make the physical cards, was to have someone else do them. That is when we requested the assistance of the card-printing website moo.com. In the end, it turned out to be the best choice in creating our cards, but it didn’t come without some very risky circumstances. A delay in the completion of the writing of the questions, (due to our restrictive schedules,) led us to submitting the order for the cards, until the literal last minute. That, combined with the usual, and at this point, predictable behaviors of the United States Postal Service, led to a very frantic presentation day. A frantic chase around the city of Omaha, led me to the downtown distribution center on the due day, to retrieve the ordered cards.
Our final budget was around $120. Not too bad, considering none of the originally provided pieces made it to the final product. With all things considered, the process was actually very fun. Stresses aside, every step was a joy to work and an interesting and very effective learning method. In a school setting, I have rarely been given a real-world example of what a design and development process of a project would be like, but this project definitely demonstrated it very effectively.
