Week 05 - Reflection

The design process of making your own sports game and making it into a board game was challenging to say the least. My team and I found ourselves scratching our heads and throwing ideas at a wall hoping it would stick. In the end, however, I think we came up with a pretty unique concept. In sum, our concept was a combination between basketball and korfball in which players had to focus more on formation than building up a single player. We imagined our game to be strategic in nature, although in playtesting it might have confused some players.

At the core of our game, we took basketball’s scoring mechanic and korfball’s team formation to make our board game. Specifically, we wanted players to think before scoring a ball and engage in a battle to block the shots. This was all done in part to make sure the board game emulated elements of a face-paced ball game. However, it took us a while to really get the rules down on paper. The rules for our game constantly changed and went through a design process that relied heavily on playtesting the game. For example, when one rule didn’t work, we questioned why it didn’t work and whether it was fun. With the game being a team ball-centric game, we had to really nail the rules down for this to work. I believe it was through our fifth or sixth rendition of the rules that we really started to nail them down.

Conversely, once we considered our rules final, we ended up changing them again based on some feedback. Taking from chapter 5 from the book, it felt like our game went through an adaptive process. The game went through cycles of testing, prototyping, and revisions that it become natural for us to edit the game process. We weren’t emotionally attached to ideas and constantly evaluated the game at each step. Even after playtesting our game with other students, the last forced us to reevaluate the game again. I think a big reason why our game needed so many revisions was that we all wanted the game to be the best it could be.

I think the best part of the adaptive process was going back to the drawing board. We made up a couple of sketches for the game and then build the prototype. It was awesome to see the sketch come to life, albeit, through construction paper with little cutouts. As a proof of concept or prototype, I thought it did a great job at conveying what the idea of our game was going for. Overall, I think our game did just fine going through the design process. If I had to summarize where the design process challenged us was the rules and first concept of the game. Although, after several playtest, I believe our game mitigated some of those issues.

Thanks for reading!