Brief 1

In this task, me and my group which consisted of Tabi and Frazer had to choose a board game to study its mechanics and dynamics, as well as pitch and implement some modifications that we believe would make the game better to play. The first thing we did was grab the game from the campus' library and play a game of it together to get an idea of how the game plays. We didn't record any data for this session for this reason. During this time, we thought up of some ideas for modifications to the game that we could pitch, such as double resources for every 2/12 roll.

The next week the group met up, we discussed the mechanics and dynamics of Settlers of Catan, at least from our experience of playing the game, with Frazer writing down these points into the document. Afterwards, we started thinking about some more ideas for game modifications. We settled on a few and wrote them down in the brief document, and we eventually agreed on three modifications written in the 'Pitch' section of the brief document. We spent the remaining time of the day testing these modifications, and only two of these ideas made it through. We also added a 30-minute timer to deal with class time limitations, but we soon realized that this time limit could actually be a viable modification, so we added it to the document and began testing it alongside our other modifications. 

The next few weeks after that were spent testing the game with our new modifications, both in-person and online, and recording data on what rolls we landed on per turn, the time it took to complete each game, and the amount of victory points each player had by the time each game ended. All the data we collected was recorded via a notebook Frazer had with him and was put into a spreadsheet by him. We also switched board games with another group during a later week into the brief and recorded data for their session as well. We spent our last week of the brief working on the final brief document and the rule book that includes our modifications to the game. Frazer mainly worked on the rule book, writing out all the rules of the game and editing it to include our modifications, and Tabi did some fixing-up on it afterwards to make it look presentable. My task on the final brief document was to work with Frazer to write out our analysis of the game on the final brief document, starting from the 'Gameplay' section. We spent a few hours working on that together while Tabi was doing final reviews and edits of the revised rule book, and once that was all done, we locked the documents and finalized the brief.

A pretty big problem we encountered during this brief was good communication. We failed to keep a stable communication between the group, which lead to slow progression of the brief. I also sometimes had a hard time understanding what it was I needed to do because I didn't communicate well with the group until the very last day, which caused me to procrastinate, resulting in a deal of unneeded stress. I did get fed up with my lack of actions on the last day and decide to reach out to the group to work together to get the brief done, which we fortunately were able to do within the day. 

I think there is one thing that I should definitely change in the future—that being the communication issue.

I think—next time I work on a brief with a group—I should be reporting in regularly with my group and also organize or ask to organize, which is one thing I didn't do very often at all in this brief. I believe that would also help the other members of the group maintain stable communication as well which would help us get through the brief much more efficiently. I should also ask for help more if I'm stuck on something in the brief and can't think of anything that could help me progress. I could do this by either asking my group members directly if I could work closely with them, or to ask for feedback on what I've done so far and what should be added.