Brief 2

This brief was a truly interesting brief. Me, Ronan and James came together with the task of making an original board game, and we didn't just have to make any old board game with our own completely original ideas—we had to base it off of an action movie, more specifically, The Matrix (Lana and Lilly Wachowski, 1999). 

This is actually the second ever time I had to make a board game in my life. The first time I had to make a board game for an assignment was back in year 3 when I worked with my old friend to create our own board game that I forgot the name and MDA of, but considering the education level difference, I obviously didn't need to do as much work on that board game as I did with this.

After settling on The Matrix as our chosen action movie theme, my group went to brainstorming on some ideas for gameplay styles. We created the brief document to record all of our ideas, and we came up with a few ideas, but we couldn't really decide on a good idea, so we asked Mark for some feedback. Looking at our ideas and how they would play, he said that—in the least meanest way he thought was possible—our ideas, frankly, looked boring. He then brought forward the idea of having a gameplay style similar to that of Castle Panic (Justin De Witt, 2009), and we decided it was worth a shot to try and make this work—after all, this was pretty much the best idea we had.

We spent the next weeks trying to make this game concept work, which contrary to what people might think with The Matrix being a popular and well-received film, was actually more difficult to try and get to work than we anticipated, or at least I anticipated. In the end, however, we did get a concept up and running that actually seemed solid enough for a passable board game, albeit not a board game that is as solid and engaging as a massively known board game like Monopoly; still, we were happy enough with it.

I think the best part of the experience was working with the group to come up with and solidify ideas. There was true satisfaction from coming up with an idea, testing it and finding out that it could actually work.

There are a couple of things I took from this brief that I would like to touch upon.

Firstly, working with this new group—working with Ronan and James compared to my group for brief 1 (that being with Frazer Dearlove and Kailis Bellanger/Tabi Wyvernfire) was an overall better experience in my opinion. While Frazer was very good to work with, Tabi tended to put the experience down considering the complaints I made in the previous brief's reflection—he wasn't terrible to work with, but while helping us with the task, he also at times hindered us. Ronan and James, on the other hand, were both reasonably responsive and did not hinder the production of the brief. They did really well with their parts in the brief's production and were generally just better to work with.

Lastly, about how I feel I went with the brief—I think I did alright in this brief, honestly. Because contact with the group was reasonably good, I was able to keep track of what needed doing most of the time. Unlike with brief 3 for my GIM110 class, I actually knew what was going on most of the time. We also did well at splitting up sections of the brief production evenly so everyone benefits. I feel that I contributed a fair amount to the brief, which I am pretty happy about compared to other briefs, where I feel I didn't contribute enough. There is of course the odd thought of "I didn't do enough" even in this brief, but I should remember to be realistic about things, considering that not only do my other teammates need to do some of the work as well, but I also have two other classes that need my time and attention.

Oh, how I wish I had the Time-Turner from the Harry Potter series.

From this point forward, the objective is to make sure this game works and is fun to play.

In our next brief, we will be making this board game a reality. We will need to create final designs for all parts of the game such as the board, cards and tokens, as if they were to be printed off and used for a selling copy of the game. We will also need to create a rulebook for the game which has the instructions and rules for how to play the game. I will need to continue to work closely with my group to get this done.

Now that we've gotten the hard part of actually coming up with a solid idea out of the way, things shouldn't be too hard from here considering we know what we're doing from here. The playtesting sessions for the game will take the longest as we have to play and record a lot of sessions to get accurate enough data with and without changes we make, but that's not to say it's hard.

I am looking forward to working with this group again, and I hope we can finish up this board game and make it something we're proud to call "ours".