This week we discussed the importance of planning a game before beginning to design it. Finding the happy medium between too much planning and too little planning can be hard, but it seems that everyone agrees that some level of planning is useful and necessary. I can personally say that in my limited experience creating games, this has proved true.
Last year in Sci-Vis, we were assigned to create a game based on STEM careers in small groups. Let me just say, that was probably one of the worst group projects I have ever had, not because of the project itself, but just because of my group's lack of planning. There were three of us in the group designing a game based around the Pokemon card game (even though only one person in the entire group knew how the Pokemon card game works, and said person was determined to make a Pokemon-like game). So obviously we should have nailed down a card template, what general categories of information were going to be on each card, and overall just attempted to create some sort of balanced system of attacks and health. Instead, we assigned each person on third of the work and went our separate ways to work. I was the unfortunate soul who, on the night before it was due, was emailed everyone else's cards and had to attempt to put them together into the game. This is when the lack of planning really hit me. Aside from the aesthetics of each of our card sets looking completely different, statistically we were all over the place. One member hadn't had the energy to even finish as many cards as they were supposed to, creating even more unbalance. I had contemplated attempting to reformat the cards as well as balance the system (which I did some of) but overall, I realized that that would be a lot of extra work, as well as a lot of my group members' work thrown away. If we had set out some sort of ground rules in the beginning, things definitely would have turned out better. This was definitely a learning experience that I'm not going to forget. The lack of sleep from that night spent furiously working to try and create some semblance of a functioning game due to lack of planning is enough to ensure I remember. As much as I would like to walk away and just blame my group members, it was just as much my fault for not planning with them. It was all of our responsibilities, and if we had done the right thing and planned everything out, it may have actually functioned as a game.
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AuthorHi, I'm Abi, a DSA student who likes games, drawing, writing, and acting. Archives
February 2020
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