CAGD170 - Postmortem Unit 2

   10/30/2022

PostMortem Unit #2

Martin Vilches:


This project was about developing a game that would fit the constraints and limitations. We came up with a game called Mesozoic Conquest, which would be a game about conquering the territories of Pangea. This game would be for two players, and it consists of developing and improving your dinosaur team in order to defeat your opponent. In order to play the game, you need to download the printable version and print it. We have everything that you need on this page, with the exception of dice. 


Our target audience was adults 40+. This was good because our main topic and genre was Logic with Dinosaurs. Making a territory conquering game in which you had to use strategy in order to win seemed like a good fit for our needs.


Some issues we faced during the game design process were the implementation of all the mechanics that we initially wanted to have in the game, for example, breeding and dino eggs, and migration which are concepts that would have probably enriched the Play of the game. However, the complex isn’t always more entertaining. And we became aware of this a bit late. We realized that simplicity was better for our target audience and would make the game more playable and easier to understand. If we could minimize the time that the player needed to look at the rule sheet to understand the game better.


Something we noticed when we started playtesting the game was that there was not enough specification in the game instructions, so the player would be left developing their own version of the game. We wanted the game to be skilled based but also luck based, which is why we introduced the dice. The bottom half of the dice would mean bad, and the top half would be good. Another thing was adding dinosaurs to your team. We needed it to be controlled but also some kind of reward. It needed to be a strategic decision, and after a bunch of different ways, we settled on making the conquering card have another option that would be able to be traded for a new dino card to add to your team.


 The introduction of the Combat system was very challenging, and we knew that it would need to be heavily regulated for it to be fair. We needed something to be balanced, and the objective was for it to be luck based. With the use of the dice, we were able to make it more randomized on what the outcome might be. The combat system needed to appeal for the opponent to also be performing action that way both players would be interested in the game and engaged in the fight. We achieve this by making both players participate in the territory conquering. The attacking player would choose a dino card from the opponent's deck to fight against, now, depending on the card attacking and defense points, the outcome that the fight will have. 


Overall this project was very fun to develop, and I didn’t have much problem organizing times and ideas with my group partner. This project was challenging, but it didn’t break my interest once. Playtesting other groups in the course gave me new perspectives that could improve our game. And people playtesting our game gave us enough feedback to improve the game enough to make it enjoyable. One of the last feedbacks we received was positive and minor details, so it seems like we have covered, fixed, and improved many things that were the foundation of the game; however, there is always a chance for improvement.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

CAGD 373 - Pirate Game Assets Final

Image
  Game Walkthrough:      The goal of this project was to recreate a location from Sea Of Thieves. My team decided to work on an outpost with a stationary sloop and a tavern. We needed to make the mountains similar and add many assets that would be interesting for the player to look at, like the barrels and the lamposts. Also, we needed some interactivity, like cannon shooting and quests. My role on this project was the programmer in charge of implementing all the systems regarding the gameplay. So I managed to make the player movement, interaction with barrels, shootable cannons, a quest system, the final battle, money systems, a high score leaderboard table, and many other small systems within the scene. I also tackled Unity-related tasks like generating a new water shader and sculpting the terrain. One of the problems I faced was dealing with the inventory system since that took a whole sprint on its own, and I did not have any prior experience designing one. I tac...
Read more

CAGD 470 - Locked in Sprint #1

Image
  In CAGD 470 (Video Game Production), I was recruited into a group that wanted to make a first-person horror game in which a player is in a laboratory and trying to escape. At the same time, some monsters roam around, making the player’s journey difficult. The game will have various rooms and puzzles that will challenge the player. In the game's vision, enemies would roam the laboratory. The player would have to gather various items that will help them on their journey to escape the lab. After getting an idea of the game, many key points and features came to my attention, including the player controller, enemy AI, Inventory System, and Crafting System. All those were going to be heavy tasks for this project. After discussing with the other members in the group, we concluded that the hardest feature to develop would be enemy AI since it needed to include multiple behaviors and enemy types, and we all had previous experience programming enemy AI. I took on the task of learning how t...
Read more

CAGD 495 - Stumble Sprint #3

Image
  Starting Sprint #3 for Stumble, there were various things that I wanted to get done; personally, I wanted to implement the core game loop and get started on the arena for the game. During the sprint kickoff, there were various priorities that the designer and producer wanted me to get done at the beginning of the sprint, which were modifying the player controller further and changing some keys; these changes were based on the playtests conducted at the end of the previous sprint. It was mentioned to me that during this sprint, we were going to have an animator & rigger for the team, so I wanted to get animations in the game. So, the first thing I started working on was the priorities and adjusting the player controller. I started working on a delay for the diving mechanic. The biggest problem during the playtest was that players were unable to cancel the dive and dive midair again; if you were quick enough, you would get boosted forward just by tapping space quickly. I adde...
Read more