Brief 3

Well this was the final set of steps for what to do with our board game—that is, if we don't end up printing out the final designs of the board game and making it truly real.

The first thing my group did after we completed brief 2 (or at least thought we did, I'll get back to this later) was get onto printing out the temp version of the board game. We already had the simplified design of the board and the general design of the cards before we began on brief 3, but everything else needed to be created from scratch. We did this in the span of two days, one day for printing out the board itself and the other day creating everything else. Once this was all done and ready to go, we had to wait to test the game for another day as the process of creating the pieces took until the end of the class for that day.

Before we began testing the game, Ronan created the spreadsheet that we would use to record the data from our playtests of the game. Using this spreadsheet, we recorded two different playtesting sessions on that day with Ronan recording the info and me and James playing the game. During these sessions, we proposed some of our first changes to this game and decided to record it in the game design document (brief 2). We didn't get to do as many sessions in that one day because a lot of time was spent on not only setting up the spreadsheet in the first place, but also recording data and further tweaking the spreadsheet to be able to record specific parts of the data more efficiently. In the playtesting sessions, around between 80-90% of the time was spent recording or tweaking the spreadsheet.

Oh yeah, speaking of the game design document, we thought for a while that the GDD was a piece for brief 3, but as it turns out, it was for brief 2, meaning we actually had not yet completed brief 2. We were fortunately able to quickly correct everything and continue on with production of brief 3.

In the second day, only me and James could be present for the session as Ronan had his GAD170 class at the exact time we were meeting and then a surprise appointment right after (this might sound a bit fishy but he was able to explain what was up). The spreadsheet fortunately didn't need any chances and I got the hand of how to properly record data pretty quickly, although that didn't stop it from taking eons to record data for each turn. Keep in mind that I was both playing the game and recording the data as there was no third person (Ronan) to record the data. During this day, we managed to record a total of five different sessions and record it onto the spreadsheet before having to quickly pack up and dash for the train before it took off.

Once we got all the data we needed for the playtesting sessions, we... left this brief dormant for a bit too long, but we managed to get together, finish it and send it right on the very last chance we had. This last step was creating the rule book, which was fairly easy. As explained beside the rule book on this page, Ronan created the document and made the starting edits (formatting the document and writing some of the sections). I also got in and helped by writing up some more of the sections and James followed suit. We got the rule book done in around an hour, but halfway through, we realized that we didn't actually have any final designs for the tokens, so Ronan had to quickly make those up with some inspiration from our temporary designs. This took maybe 20 minutes and we were able to quickly incorporate it into the document, we finished up with the rule book, bada bing bada boom, here we are right now.

It felt good to finally set this game concept in stone. I know I've been saying "set in stone" a lot, but it basically explains what we did with this. There are of course a few things I'd like to talk about here.

Firstly, about how we spent our time in this brief—I think we did alright with our time management, but there were of course some hiccups. One thing that was pretty good was the time efficiency was around the same as it was before, in fact I think it might have gotten better compared to the previous brief. There was times when we couldn't get together and work on this when the average group would have been able to, and that's because of the pretty busy schedules Ronan and James had around the end of the work week, and I've also had my other modules that I needed to do. Other than these few hiccups, we were able to stay relatively in touch outside of class which was great, and because of this, I think working with Ronan and James was an overall good experience. They also knew what they were doing and didn't make any changes to the documents on completely unexpected terms, which adds to this.

Lastly, about getting this brief in on time—yeah... about that. We didn't quite get it in on time, but this was because we forgot about the one last step to finishing this brief: the rule book. It wasn't until way later after the submission date that I saw what was required of me to submit, and I saw that we needed a prototype rule book for our game and my first reaction that went through my mind was "oh shoot". Fortunately, as explained before, we managed to quickly fix this and get it sent. That really didn't feel good, but it did feel good to finally get it done. I should have definitely checked the project requirements in the brief document earlier; I did check it before but I mainly focused on the playtesting part, which was a mistake and I should've paid attention to everything.

The completion of this brief concludes my involvement with the group, as the next brief is a solo exercise. It is a bit sad for this to conclude, but it is what it is, and honestly, I'm just glad it's over. There are a few things I learned from this that I would like to bring up.

Firstly, about us forgetting to do the rule book—I think the best thing to do next time is to actually sit down with the group before any work commences and go through everything that needs to be done. It would be beneficial for me to write down everything that needs to be done, whether it be in a checklist or in some work management service such as Trello (which I will try to use starting next trimester). Hopefully by doing this, we won't have another incident where we forget one thing that slows down the whole production of the brief.

Lastly, about the meeting minutes—that is definitely something I will need to remember to do for any future class projects. It's vital that I do this to not only record when exactly the group met up and who attended and who didn't, but also to touch base with what has been done and what needs to be done. This was something that I noticed when I filled out the meeting minutes for our group's second playtesting day. Although, considering that nobody else remembered this either with literally every other brief I have done, this might be another thing I'll have to go through with future groups while going through what needs to be done with the brief.

I hope that the future groups I work with are around the level of competence as what James and Ronan demonstrated, if not better, as it will definitely make my life just a tad bit easier. I also hope that I don't forget to do the last bloody thing on the checklist next time.