Playtesting- Round 1

I'll refrain from describing my group's game design as Weiwei has very nicely done that here. Well, we held our first playtesting session yesterday morning at the Starbucks next to California Fitness Orchard and boy did we learn a lot from it! For one thing. we realised that our design was really unbalanced. We've got one unit- the NUS student (:P)- who's supposed to be the grunt or pawn-type unit, but is really overly-powerful in gameplay! The unit's health will have to be cut down by a bit, that's for sure. Another thing that... oh goodness I just realised that Weiwei's put up a very comprehensive report on our playtesting session on his blog.

Eh, I don't wanna repeat what he's put down there so I'll just make a few observations that go into things he didn't talk about. Firstly- the purpose of the game. Not the aim of the game for players, but the actual question of "why was this game made?" Basically, we want people in our class to play the game and enjoy themselves. But that doesn't say much. To be more specific, we've set the game in a parody-version of NUS because we want people to laugh while playing it. So in it's essence, this is meant to be a humorous game. That aspect of the game didn't show up very well in this iteration of the design. Partly because we hadn't implemented the card-based events that were meant to add some spice to the game and partly because the game itself (mostly due to the overly large size of the board) was just too slow and kinda boring.

So in our next iteration of the game, we're going to make a few alterations to the gameplay- the addition of events (which I think should be chosen from a stack of cards based on an "academic calendar"), a smaller map and tweaks to the units to make gameplay speedier. Along with that, we'll add some wacky backstory to the game too. I hope these changes will make the game somewhat more interesting!