On Wednesday’s lesson the external talent liaisons (ETL) for project 2 worked in the classroom next door to get a lot of the outstanding work done. More specifically the work that the collaborators needed to get their own work done. Being in this environment was different than usual because our teacher, Tony put on his producer hat (figuratively) so that we could work more efficiently. It became apparent at the time that the project was in a more dire state than we realized, and that was due to a lack of project awareness. This lesson was able to clear up many issues and help us get on track with the work we were responsible for.

Personally I am not the ETL for our project but because I have the most knowledge of the game I tag along to help out with the work. The main goal of this lesson was to get the graphic designers work implemented into a current build so that we could test it and to also get the scripts updated for the film students so they could get to filming. The game felt more ‘whole’ by the end of the lesson, merging the final version of the cards with the current build and having the program work without issues definitely gave me a small glimmer of hope towards the project compared to before. I like how the information is laid out on the new design, the way in which the information was communicated to the player was a constant issue previously. Here is a picture showing the comparison of the card designs.

Old card design (left) and new card design (right)

So the question is; how did one person manage to scramble us together and to get our work done? A great metaphor that he used to describe the producer’s role is “herding cat’s” while I haven’t tried this before, it sounds extremely challenging. There were a few techniques that our teacher used to assist us in getting our work done. One of the main things he did was ask for exact ETA’s on when a task would be completed, this pushed us to get the work done ASAP. Another thing was that he would check in regularly to see how progress was going, this further pushed us to keep to the ETA we had promised. It really felt like a studio workplace. I think a good lesson learnt here was that it was very inefficient to have the producer chase up team members to check on progress, or to check if tasks were completed. It is a lot more easier on everyone to report back to the producer when tasks are done.

I did some reading up on the producer role and how they manage a team of developers. I came across this article on gamasutra.com titled What Makes a Good Game Producer? by Bosch (2013) who states “On one hand, a producer is a shepherd” and “The second metaphor I use is that a producer is like a parent.” These are the same metaphors that out teacher used in class and definitely makes it easier to see how the producer role fits into a game studio. From what I’ve learnt, a producer helps keep the team together, helps relay information and makes sure things get done on time. If I could sum up the role in a single sentence; “Producers need to have the awareness to prevent fires, but also the adaptablity to extinguish them when needed”. 

While I can see the major importance of the producer role, it’s not my first preference. I would rather be in a role that has a impact on the games design, such as a creative director or system designer. The producer role is something that I will always be open to though, both leading a team and handling pressure are things that I am confident in and think I can always benefit from for future roles.

References:

Bosch, E. (2013). What Makes a Good Game Producer? Part 1. Gamasutra.com. Retrieved from http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/ErnstTenBosch/20130912/200168/What_Makes_a_Good_Game_Producer_Part_1.php

The process of playtesting project 2 which we decided to name The Yeahnah Conspiracy, was both extremely informative and mildly painful for me. The game never seemed to be up to par with the rest of groups considering the amount of dynamics it had that were meant to make for tactical thinking and player vs player experiences. Due to a lack of team contribution to inside playtesting, the outside playtesting was never as smooth as it could have been. Obviously you have to expect for playtesting to have issues, but their were an abundance of problems that were overlooked by myself because I had never seen the game in action yet.

Playtest 1:

Yeahnah Conspiracy initial playing cards

Our early build of the project had the concept of two players acting as the public relation members who side with the corrupt mayor and the third player being a conspiracy theorist who is trying to expose the mayors evil doings. As you can see to the right each card has a neutral effect, a co-conspirator  effect and a conspiracy theorist effect. Each effect has a single or multiple pluses or minuses beside them, pluses being good for the co-conspirator and the minuses being good for the conspiracy theorists. These pluses and minuses add or subtract from an overall number and if the number ends up being lower than 0 the conspiracy theorist wins, if it is higher than 0 then the co-conspirators win.

The idea is that when no ones role is revealed then the neutral effects are in play and when the roles are revealed then the role related effects go in play for their respective roles.The issue with this is that there is no point for the players to hide their roles, the non neutral roles are beneficial to both the teams and so revealing roles meant getting more points. It made for a useless concept and boring game play.

Playtest 2:

In a later build of the game I opted to restart with the design, after playing other peoples games I realized they were going more in depth with the score system and it was more interesting to go in that direction. I decided to make each card have a type and a point value along with an effect. The idea was that the PR members (previously called co-conspirators) are trying to work with each other to gain a high shared score and buff each others card scores with card effects. The Reporter (previously called conspiracy theorist) is trying to counter the PR members cards and try to stop the pr members from gaining high score and translate their scores to his/her own score.

Yeahnah Conspiracy updated playing cards

The issue we found with this is that the effect was very vague at times, as seen in this image the effect is “guard from all responsibility targeting”. Guard what? What is responsibility targeting? This left the players confused due to lack of information, most of this is covered in the rule book although the rule book is so large that the players would forget sections of the rule book as they become relevant in the game.

Another issue was that the play order and the order that effects activate were not decided and were necessary to play the game. We made an on the spot decision to add a rule that the players play their cards face down, once everyone plays a card the cards would be revealed in the order they were played. This worked with the current build, but I didn’t want to have this in the final build. I wanted the second and third players decisions to be reactive to what the previous player put down not just random cards that felt they had no meaning.

Final Playtest:

Yeahnah Conspiracy final playing cards

In the final build of our game we fixed the issues with putting more stuff on the cards. We implemented effect targets and effect types. Effect target tells the player what card this cards effect can target, as an example the first card on the right can target a single divert card of choice, so if there are any divert cards in play they may choose it. The effect now communicates the effect in a more universal format. As an example we will use the same card, let’s say we targeted one of the enemies divert cards, this card would increase the target cards score by 1 for each card already on the field. Meaning if there were 3 cards on the field before playing this card, the target cards score is increased by 3.

The effect type system is displayed above the score number as Trigger or Persistent. This communicates to the player how the effect works, if it is a trigger, the effect is applied a single time when it is played and then does nothing for the rest of the game. If it is persistent, the effect is active and will change the game state as long as it is on the field.

The issue with this is that first of all, these words are jargon and their meaning in games can only be understood by people who have played similar games. Secondly, keeping track of all the effects that just compound one after the other and then calculating the scores was not intuitive and took up most of the time. Thirdly, the rule book was so long and incoherent that people would skim over the important things and refer back to them later and get even more confused.

In conclusion the changes and iteration process ended up making it more complicated to understand. Having more rules to read meant taking in more information at once, if the rule book is too long then most of the rules would be forgotten before they were relevant in the game. The cards were packed full of information that needed too much processing from the player multiple times when placing a single card, then multiply that by the other card plays and how many times they effect each other, and then multiply that by how many rounds there are in a game. The game should have been scrapped after the second playtest and redesigned AS A TEAM.