Devlog #10

     Creating a card game is hard. I realized this a bit last week when playing and thinking about the card games given to us, but it really hit me when me and my team sat down to make our game last week. In this week’s reading, “The Design Evolution of Magic: The Gathering” on page 540, Richard Garfield wrote about how his experience with games he played before helped him create Magic: The Gathering. My group and I did this a lot while designing our game too! In the beginning, we were influenced by the Burger Truck game we had played in class. We created cards that had certain powers like stealing something from another player or stopping a player from picking up or putting down. It was hard to not just completely copy the game but by adding little things from other games, I think we were able to create something different. On page 543, Garfield discusses another problem our team had a hard time tackling. The deck. Garfield talks about all the different cards he wants to use but also isn’t sure how many to use and how many of each type of card to use. My group ran into this same problem with our common cards and special cards. A playtest of our game ended up showing us that we needed more common cards because elf the way our play testers ended up using those special cards. We also realized that switching out some special cards would also make the game quicker and more fun to play.

     Altice’s chapter was extremely helpful when it came to my understanding of how a game is structured like planar, uniform, ordinal, spatial, or textural. It gave more historical context which helped me understand why certain card games are the way they are and how I could change certain parts for a specific effect in a card game.

     My group and I tried out a lot of ideas before settling with the one we have and the reading from this week only went to show how hard this process is. It is frustrating to think that the game will work out one way and then it just doesn’t. It is just a game of trial and error and hopefully what we’ve come up with at the end is enjoyable for everyone. Of course, once we find out if the game does work out we will think about making it more visually appealing.