In designing my rule document, I had a number of limitations due to my location and access to technology, including my normal design tools. I therefore decided to keep the rules document simple, using black and white tones only and maintaining the hand drawn DIY look of the cards I divided the document into sections […]
In my last series of playtest drawing close to the deadline, I was very happy with my game, as I believe that its series of simple mechanics give rise to an engaging 10 minute gameplay experience with repeatability. This is due to a few simple mechanics that are given emergence by the bluffing and misdirecting […]
My next series of playtests were in person with a deck printed on low quality card. These playtests had the goal of determining the physical elements of the game and more personal play. We also played many rounds Coup, using a standard playing card deck, which helped me to understand some elements of bluffing games […]
I started playtesting by creating a version of the game on playingcards.io and inviting two close friends to play a few rounds with me, we played the new simplified version of the game, and tried some minor rule variations to test what format would be the most fun and would create the game feel I […]
After simplifying the game, I wanted to begin playtesting and iterating as soon as possible, so I started by designing and creating my card prototypes. Originally I wanted the game to rely on it’s art to carry the theme, and I intended to do this by creating appealing visual designs for each of the cards, […]
From the moment I read the brief, I was reminded of a simple bluffing game called Skulls that I had seen played by Polygon and knew that I wanted to create a similarly simple game that can create tense and fun moments without a complex learning curve. Given hindsight however, my initial design slightly missed […]
Writing The Rules Before starting writing the PDF for the rules we went over and redrafted our goals for the pdf: Clarity: The document should clearly explain the rules of play, as well as express the feeling of the game to players through the tone and structure. Theme: The feeling and tone of the game […]
Iterative Design We began by choosing one concept from our two potential idea, and went with the Storytelling concept. First we used the feedback to identify the potential flaws in the design and went about fixing them. Our first point of contention was the large option space allowed by the wording of the rules regarding […]
Playtesting our initial concept helped us to realise that we had core issues with the format that we could resolve, while keeping the identity of the game. As such, we created two new concepts that we planned to move forward with, and decided to playtest them both to ascertain which to continue with and which […]
With a core idea selected, we began to plan our first playtest to identify issues with the core concept, and make changes to the rules by identifying the strengths of the format and focusing on amplifying them. My group conducted a test with our course mates in the morning and I conducted an independent test […]