Week 8

Response: Analysis

XXXX

Games this week
What have you been playing?

• Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (2018) by Sora Ltd., BANDAI NAMCO Studios and Nintendo EPD.

  • At the time of writing this, I bought this game two days ago and I have been enjoying it very much. I've wanted to get Super Smash Bros. Ultimate for my Nintendo Switch for a while because I really enjoyed playing matches with my friends at school on my friend's Switch, and I wanted to be able to practice my skills on my own without having to rely on versing my high-skill friend.

  • There are a few aspects of the game that I really like. I really like the overall fighting controls because of how easy to learn they are in comparison to other fighting games such as the Street Fighter series. I'm able to spend less than a minute figuring out the controls compared to spending maybe 5 minutes learning the encyclopedia of combos that Street Fighter has per character. I also really like the random challenger encounter system as it's a way to unlock new characters to play matches as, which is basically a progression system, and I also like the classic mode as it's like a survival route mode, unique for each character, where you battle against opponents as the difficulty gets higher, and eventually fight against a boss at the end of the route.

Scrum
What did you do last week?

• Last week, I finally finished my brief 1 page for GAD171. It took me a while to do because I was getting stuck on the reflections. With the remaining time of the week I had, I moved on to working on other modules.

What are you doing this week?

• This week, I will work on implementing the work me and my group have done into my learning journal, as well as developing our game project further and creating a pitch to present our idea.

Are you having any problems?

• Especially with working on my other modules, I seem to draw mind blanks with what to write or do further, which is why doing my work takes so long. Not only do I want to make sure the information I provide is solid, I also want to make it look good, and I can't seem to not do that without feeling like my work isn't good enough.

Learning Journals!
Open your learning journals, share them with your team, and provide each other feedback!

• This week, I got Jimmy Kunoth to review my responses to in-class slides for week 6. While explaining my 'Games this week' section, he picked up on the points I made while talking about the game of that week, such as why I played the game, why I enjoyed or disliked the game, etc. He showed me his learning journal and explained how he thinks he should put more effort into the in-class responses as well. Jimmy also showed me his page for GAD171 brief 2, and told me that he was able to do what he did on that page with his partner in just 6 hours, which was really good work for that amount of time.

MDA Identification
What are the mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics that we see in this week's video?

• Hades
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zpo2UgLkLxo

• Mechanics: 

  • XXXX

• Dynamics: 

  • XXXX

• Aesthetics:

  • XXXX

Postmortem Reflection

How is your project going, what needs to change, and what do you plan to do in the next 4 weeks?

Ask yourself:

• What went well?

• What went poorly?

• What are you going to continue doing, and what will change?

• What are your goals and how will you achieve them?

Our project has been going slowly, but we have definitely made some progress. We are currently in the process of designing things such as the cards and board, as well as elaborating on the actual main objective of the game in the brief document. I feel that this is the aspect that has been going well, albeit a bit slow.

I think our group needs to spend more time out of classes working on this brief, as not enough work is being done on this task outside of classes, therefore putting us more behind. I believe that can be solved by scheduling times with the group to call over Discord and work on the brief together.

My overall goal is to help the group develop this game idea into an actually playable board game and something we can pitch. I will try to achieve that by working closely with the team to flesh out our idea properly and put it into a pitch document, as well as creating a video of my group presenting our pitch.

Victory Conditions
From board games, what sort of victory conditions can you think of?

Matt's List of Victory Conditions

• Checkmate - Eliminate one special piece

• Checkmate combo - Eliminate a few special pieces

• Elimination - Eliminate all pieces

• Majority - Control the most territory / have the most pieces

• Destination - Move one of your pieces to a specific destination

• Connection - Construct a path or chain between two locations

• Numbered Connection - Construct a path of a specific length between two locations

• Discard - Discard more pieces than your opponent

• Last Move - Make the last legal play

• Grouping - Group up your pieces

• Goal Scoring - Achieve a set target score

• Time Scoring - Achieve the highest score after a time or amount of turns

• Asymmetrical - Players have different victory conditions, usually attack/defend

Matt's List of Non-Victory Conditions

• No Winning - The game rules stipulate no set victory conditions.

• Self-Set - Player set objectives, usually points scored.

• Cooperative Creation - Building something together, with no winner.

• Safely Ignored - Games with written victory conditions that can be ignored without impacting continuous play.

What is Your Victory Condition?
With all of these in mind, what fits your games victory condition most closely? Do you have one or many victory conditions?

XXXX

Brief 2

Continue work on your design documentation for your briefs. Consider how you want the game to play and how it should be balanced. Submit today!

Brief 3

Create and playtest your game. Tweak your design documentation based on your playtesting feedback. Iterate on your game design. Due week 12.