- The difference between a game designer and a game developer is that the game designer creates the idea of a the game and comes up with the initial ideas, then the game developer refines these ideas and creates the finished product of the game.
1a. A big thing that commonly occurs during the game development process is play testing. With the knowledge that game developers gains from play testing, they can then go back and refine any mechanics or aspects of the game that might need changing.
2. The main challenges of balancing a game are numbers and components. When numbers are involved in a game, it is vital to balance those numbers so that all aspects of the game seem fun and fair. This can be said for components as well, any aspect or component of a game must be balanced around each other so nothing feels unfair or unfun.
2a. Players should believe that there is balance and strategy within games. Even when things may be stronger or weaker than other aspects of a game, if there is an idea of balance and strategy to go along with those, players will often times find it fair and entertraining.
2b. There are a few ways to avoid stealing a players fun while playing games:
- Don’t have ways for players to be kicked out before the game is even over, let them have a chance to come back
- Avoid ‘Kingmaking.’ This is when a player is in a position to win, but cannot choose themselves.
- Don’t reward the person in first. If you do this that player can ‘snowball’ their lead and make it impossible for the other players to catch up.
- Include inherent deceleration. When a player is close to the end or close to winning, they should have a uphill battle in achieving that victory.
- A players ability to influence other players should be somewhere between ‘none’ or ‘lots.’ If you have no player interaction then it may feel like a singleplayer game, but too much player interaction between one another can lead to frustrating moments. Finding that middle poin is important to allow players to have fun.
- Don’t force a reverse. Forcing a player to lose something or go backwards on a board can be very frustrating and creates an unfun scenario.
3. When writing rules for your game, you should follow these guidelines:
- Use Intermediary Terminology: Call things what they are and use words that anyone could easily understand when describing things.
- Use Real Words: Don’t make up words that players won’t immediately understand, make it simple for a new player learning your game.
- Make no More Work than Necessary: Make things simple for the player, don’t add in more steps or requirements than necessary to play your game.
- Add Flavor (But not too much Flavor): You can add a bit of flavor text that relates to your game, but overall you should keep that to other aspects of your game.
- Make your Text no Smarter than your Reader: You should keep your rules easy to understand so that any player can easily understand how your game works and should be played.
- Discard Rules that can’t be Written: If a rule is too complex or hard to write out, then discard it and either find another way to implement that feature or remove it completely.
- Take a Breath: Keep things short and simple when writing rules, or at least pace things out so players don’t have to take in so much at a single moment.
- Go Easy on the Eyes: When formatting your rules, keep things simple so that players have an easy time reading and going through the rules.
- Get your Final Version Playtested: When your game is finished, play test it as a way to ensure it works as intended and gather any last minute changes that need to be made to the game or the rules.
- Fix it in the FAQ: If you find any errors in your ruleset after already releasing it, you can always fix it and release another version online or answer any questions that players have.
4. Play testing has changed a lot with my game, Captain’s Lost Treasure. After my first play test I realized that the numbers I was using were horribly unbalanced and the game ended in a few rounds when I expected it to be a decently long game. My second play test when a lot more smoothly, but it still showed that I needed to refine how Crew Members worked as I only allowed one Crew Member to attack an enemy per turn at the time. This then lead to me allowing all Crew Members to attack in a turn, but I created Frontline and Backline Crew Members that way tankier Crew Members could take the brunt of the attacks and protect their own Crew’s damage dealers. I also only had a few Ships for people to use at the start, but after seeing that players wanted more from the Ships, I created a lot more and added Tiers to the Ships that allowed players to upgrade to bigger and stronger Ships as the game progressed. Overall, play testing has helped and changed a great deal about my game so far.
5. One I have a polished version of my game, I want to have friends and family play test my game outside of class. Getting the opinions of people that have little knowledge on game design and just play games for fun will be very important as I can see how the average person would react to playing my game.