Devlog #3

     My group and I created the game Ninja Tag and it was based on, of course, Ninja and Tag. It was a pretty easy game to explain for the most part and when writing down its six elements and ten tools, we realized it could be a very open-ended game. When I say this, I just mean that some small rules can be changed or added to really fit the game to the people playing and the number of people playing which is why I think its ‘rules’ element is the most relevant to our game. In chapter one of Macklin and Sharp where they discuss the goals of games, it is said that goals are extremely important even more so than rules because a game cannot make sense without a goal. While I do understand that, for our game, I feel like they are both important, but rules are a little more so. I say this because our rules provide a challenge for the players. The rules can be slightly changed if you wish to either make it easier or harder for everyone. For example, we have a rule that states that you must always have one foot on the ground when playing. We added this rule after our first playtest of the game. In that version, players would often jump or leap further away from the tagged player, making it harder on them if they couldn’t jump that far. 

     While this was very fun because of the funny situations it put the payers in, it could be a bit frustrating to the tagged player. This is when we decided to add the one foot on the floor rules. On Thursday, we tried playing the game with this rule, but it was still not enough to fix the problem we had. In chapter 1, the play space for a game was discussed and made me realize that maybe it wasn’t the rule that complicated the game but the play space we were using. Our first time playing Ninja Tag, it was easier and slightly more fun because of the limited space we had so we had to get creative with tagging and dodging people. The second time we played, we had a larger space to play in which made it even harder to play. 

     Writing this out has made me think that the rules and play space may just have the same level of importance in our game. One last topic the book discussed that I thought was very relevant to our game is the challenge aspect. The book states that challenge can make a game exciting to play and without enough of it, the game can end up being boring. One version of our game was slightly boring because it was too difficult to tag others and the other just felt like it was missing something. Once we find the middle ground of these two options I feel like our game will actually be pretty fun to play.