Board Game Assignment Play Testing Notes

This game is a game similar in style to the risk games, but is played on a grid based map. I will upload the design document later when it is to a more complete standard. Basically, the players would move around the map, create settlements on grid spaces, collect money and troops from settlements to be able to built up an army or use money to build up more settlements, to produce more money and troops.

Play testing indicated that this would work better as a video game. The reason being that it requires a lot of calculations to calculate the strength of the player armies. Admittedly  the rule of training a squadron (a player chosen number of troops) multiplies it's attack by 1.9 is difficult to calculate without a calculator. The problem worsens when the player has multiple squadrons of different sizes, and even if they squadrons are joined to form a whole army.

Players also commenting on the fact that being able to move a maximum of 6 grid squares per turn is too slow. In future  increasing it to say, using 2 dice for a maximum number of grid squares that can be traveled to 12, doubling game play speed.

It was also questioned why the number of troops in a battle determined the outcome of the battle. It also meant that the player with more troops would will the battle every time. I thought the loosing player would retreat to safety and build up a larger army, but evidence seemed to show that the weaker players seem to lunge themselves at the player. It could be possible to use the dice as a multiplier which determines the attacks strength of both sides in a battle (one roll for each player) which could increase the player with fewer troops a chance to win. For example, player 1 has 300 attack whereas player 2 has 240. If player 1 rolls a 1, they get a bonus of 1.1 to make attack of 330. Player 2 could roll at least a 4 to beat player 1. This shows player 2 beating the odds and winning in battle, even with fewer troops.

Puzzle Play testing Notes 2: Headlines Puzzle

For this task, we were told to create a puzzle based on the subject matter we chose based on a newspaper headline. The headline my group chose was one about monster energy drink causing the deaths of 5 people. Without reading the actual story (the puzzle is based of the headline alone, not the context of the story), we based the puzzle on a detailed drawn image of the monster energy drink factory, with hidden dangers the player must find within two minutes  This is because the player takes the role of a safety inspector who must find health risks to close the factory down. The safety inspector must not be there for over two minutes as after that he will be found and thrown off the premises.

Lack of detail in the image was the problem with the puzzle. Mainly due to the fact that not much time was given to create a highly detailed image meant that dangers were easy to spot. Possibly if the image ha been designed on Photoshop (with multiple layers) it would have been mush easier to hide the dangers, for example, adding a barrel to cover most of one of the dangers, as currently, most dangers were out in the open. The reason for this was that we drew the dangers in first then found out that we didn't have enough time to go over with detail to hide a lot of the dangers.

The player would take about 30 seconds to find all of the dangers. This was due to lack of detail, but other than that all of the dangers were recognizable as dangers, so there is a success in that respect.

Puzzle Play testing Notes 1: Hostages Puzzle

The theme was hostages for this task to create a puzzle. The chosen puzzle type was a simple hangman style puzzle. The player(s) needed to guess the names of the hostages so that they would be freed. If they fail to name a hostage, they would be killed. The players had 10 maximum tries per name (all of the names were above 10 letters). The overall task was to try and successfully guess the names of 5 or more hostages out of a possible 10.

Here is an example of what the game looked like:

The player(s) would have to choose letters from the alphabet. Then my co-developer or I would check against the corresponding name to see if they has guessed a correct letter. If they did, the letter would be filled in  on the bottom row of lines in the correct place of the name. If not, the letter would be put in one of the top ten boxes, meaning they would have one less try at guessing new letters. The names were written down in two lists which corresponded exactly with a list of grids to use (like the one shown above) for each name. So for example, if the player(s) wanted to try

What the player(s) seemed to enjoy about the game was that the names were all recognizable. Some were of celebrities, others where of people in the same class that they knew one was even the lecturer Stephen. This meant that the player(s) would feel a sense of accomplishment if they feel like they had saved someone they know (even in a made up situation). A slight problem the player(s) had was that seeing 10 full names (forename and surname) that needed to be guessed being too difficult. However, this problem faded as the names were largely recognizable by the player(s). This was show by the fact that the majority of the names were guesses correctly.







Note: Player(s) is used as both only one player or multiple players could try the puzzle.