Post Mortem

Our thought process started off standing in the coffee line, looking at people who were concealing their insecurities in laughably obvious ways. We considered how guessing what they are concealing would make for an interesting mechanic. That is essentially how our second game was born, the one where both players are given 2 insecurities and an excess of accessories to conceal those insecurities and distract from them. Producing that game was very economical on time, since we just had to write up cards for insecurities and a separate set of cards for the accessories that can be used to conceal said insecurities. Some of these “accessories” were ridiculous household objects like buckets and toilet paper so that players would have to get creative and improvise. This was also meant to encourage emergent gameplay.

 Unfortunately, we didn’t consider that some players would be so bad at drawing that their interpretations of how these accessories could be used weren’t clear to their opponents. We had considered that it might be too tedious to have to draw each accessory, so we though of making drawn cut-outs of the accessories with human body templates, such that players can place those accessories on any body part that is supposed to be an “insecurity, and even parts that aren’t (as diversions). However, that would eliminate room for improvisation, so we decided against it. If we were to develop the game digitally however, with 2d assets that take different forms to wrap around the body parts that they are hovered over, it would certainly eliminate the problem of not being able to draw clearly and the alternative of not being able to improvise.

Our first game was the one where two players play the roles of a pair of siblings heading to prom and having encounters that give them insecurities as well as other encounters that reward them with assets to cover up those insecurities. The aim of the game is to beat the other player to prom, and since each player has only 20 rolls, the one to get through all their rolls first wins. Players miss a turn if they have an NPC encounter with one or more of their insecurities exposed. The idea for this game originated as an extrapolation of the initial concept of concealing insecurities. We found gross and unrealistic caricatures of common accidents hilarious, and thought that if we make the insecurities like that, it would enhance the humor factor in our game. We relied very heavily on pop culture reference for the same, most of which are very seasonal, so our game won't be as funny in even a year or two, but we went with it nevertheless because we found it amusing for the present. The mechanic for our insecurities to be caught on by way of chance or dice roll was discussed and experimented with, but since we had to produce the cards ourselves (which there weren't too many of), we thought that having blank rolls that didn't force the player to pick up cards would make our game too uneventful. Since binary rolls are essentially the same as coin tosses, for the sake of efficiency, we decided to use a coin instead of a die. We even discussed making the siblings' "journey" over a game board with token movement, but found it to be meaningless since our intention was to force the player to pick a card one way or the other in every turn to keep the game exciting. Consequently, for the same reasons as stated previously, we chucked the game board idea, since it made no mechanical difference to the game and only added aesthetic work to our schedule. So, we decided that we'll make the roll consequence binary (either pick up an insecurity or an NPC that will either provide a resource or make you skip a turn). 

The idea for NPC cards to have multiple effects, often completely opposite ones (such as either help you conceal an insecurity or make you skip a turn) added an element of chance to what is essentially a forced card draw. The fact that in certain cases players get to choose to earn "Karma" to immunize themselves from one future insecurity or snatch the character's accessory was meant to add some element of strategy. Unfortunately, we didn't playtest it long enough in class to see this mechanic in action. The one thing we definitely learnt from is scope. Even though we liked our game, it was too long and complicated for the class, and thinking about factors such as presentation time and audience would be a better place to start off for us henceforth. Another thing we'd change if we could would be the distribution of NPC types. We didn't refer to or record any statistics to help us determine the best ratio of helpful to deterrent cards, which affected one of our pre-class playtests adversely. Players could go on to pick unhelpful cards consecutively a large number of times, and that was in spite of us shuffling the cards. As a future precaution, it will be important for us to Use dummy cards or stand-ins just for some plain statistical analysis that we could build our final assets on. Another thing that we found sort of,but not completely to be a problem is the game's audience appeal. It was too specific to adolescents of September 2016, and if we could find a way to make the cards funnier to a wider audience in as ironic and satirical a way, we would, evenif it complicates the mechanics a little more.