10.6 - playtest and playtest some more

We began our game design process by spitballing ideas at each other until we found some that were viable. I presented 3 ideas for card games: one themed around backpacking, another about license plates, and one themed around the experience of being in an airport. When we got to class, we talked through some of our ideas and did extremely vague playtests. As Macklin and Sharp point out, “early on, we’re seeing if our game will even run.” This very quick phase of internal playtesting eliminated 3 out of our 5 ideas. We then decided to hone in on my airport idea.

The premise of the airport card game (which has yet to be named) is that you are trying to get rid of all your cards the fastest to get to a rhetorical airplane. When the game begins, you choose a player type (single traveling child, family, businessman, traveling with a dog), and each type has different advantages and disadvantages when it comes to different events that can happen during the game. We use a very similar (almost too similar) system to Uno! that involves 4 different suits and numbers 0-9. There are also playable cards that can affect either just one player or all the players. 

One significant thing that we did during class on Thursday was keep track of what we didn’t like as much as what we did like. In Macklin and Sharp’s playtest process, the observation and listening phases are instrumental to being able to discuss and further develop. In this, we realized that it was playing too closely to Uno! We asked Dr. S for advice, and he suggested that we reveal some of our deck to mix things up more. We are considering adding that to the rules that we are working on this weekend, but without being able to playtest, I am not sure about the viability of this. 

Regardless, doing a playtest with another game developer (Dr. S) provides insight from someone “who understands the game design process” and helped us out of the box that was making our game remain an Uno! Adjacent (Chapter 11). I think that moving forward with playtests from classmates/game devs could open more doors for the development of the airport game, as that is what happened to the last game, Beamer.

Macklin, C., & Sharp, J. (n.d.). Chapter 11. Playtesting Your Game. In Games, design and play: A detailed approach to Iterative Game Design. essay, Addison-Wesley.