Devlog #11

I’ve said it before, but creating games is hard. My group and I created Trick or Treat this past week and honestly, I feel like I learned a lot through it. Throughout the week, I volunteered to go to the other groups and playtest their games so that I could come back to my group and hopefully provide them some insight into how other groups tackled issues we also had. Because of this, I didn’t get to see how people interpreted the game until in front of the class playthrough, and when my other teammates discussed it with me.

One of the first things I realized was how by having a theme based on something a lot of people do, the understanding of the game can be easier to grasp. This is the ‘why are we here’ James Ernest spoke about in the article. He talked about how having a preamble to your game can help the players get a quick grasp of the game and it honestly did just that. Our game was about trick or treating. What is trick or treating? The essence is ‘give and take’ so in the form of our card game, the players can assume that they will be taking and giving presumably candy (cards) and with prior card playing experience, they can also imagine there will be other special cards that block and steal or something. I believe that this was something the players grasped right away. The trouble came when we introduced what the actual special cards did. For example, we had a card that could force every other player to give you one of their candy cards BUT the player who has to give the candy may have a block card that negates that card for them.  It makes sense but it was a bit hard to explain.

The second trouble came when we also told players that to use certain special cards, they had to spend tokens. This is always where we could see people start developing strategies. Did they want to play more aggressively and just steal candy from everyone, so they don’t have any or did they want to play quietly and never steal any candy and just focus on getting a lot of candies themselves?

Ernest talked a lot about clarity when writing our rules and everything, but I think that was one of the hardest parts. When he said that people can misinterpret what we meant I didn’t really understand until I saw people play our first version of the game. It was rough and we didn’t really know how to word our thoughts, but after some fine-tuning, I think it turned out pretty ok.