Prototype 4 -TTRPG

Overview

Research & Design

Process

Playtesting

Overview

Focus: 15-20 min Tabletop RPG

Group members: Frazer, Siyuan and I

Prompt: Game Dev Studio Simulation

Summary: The player has been hired as the new manager of a moderately well-known indie studio, after the last was incinerated by the owner: a huge and terrible dragon. The studio has a game in development that was supposed to have been released already, but due to mishaps among staff, production has been severely delayed. The player has 20 minutes to solve the various problems and get the game ready for release before the dragon loses patience and fires them. Literally.

Task allocation for this Prototype. It was a bit mixed, as we did most of our brainstorming collectively and didn't consider designating specific tasks at the beginning. In future, I'll make sure we establish some type of roles or task lists.

Prototype 4

This is the page we will give to players. We also have supporting documentation that is only available to the handler. If this prototype is chosen for showcase, we'll need to make the page look prettier and less like walls of text, to better engage the player/s.

Research & Design

Howitt, n.d.

1. One of the key sources of our inspiration was Grant Howitt's single-page, handmade RPGs. According to his Patreon page (https://www.patreon.com/gshowitt), every month he creates a new RPG that fits onto a single A4 page.

2. I found a good website that explains some of the legal considerations that game developers must take into account in Australia (Arts+Law, n.d.). I summarised the main topics brought up and shared them with my group via Discord. We then used this information to guide our narrative and the role of the player/s.

Prototype 4

3. This is a document that Frazer put together for the purposes of our brainstorming. We worked on this as a group during an online meeting, as a way to record our discussions. We also had a private Discord channel to avoid spoiling the game for others in the class. It also doubles as meeting minutes.

UPDATE: The same document also ended up being used for the final product.

References:

Arts+Law. (n.d.). Computer Game Design and Development. https://www.artslaw.com.au/information-sheet/game-design-and-development/

Howitt, G. (n.d.). This One Time At Bard Camp [Physical game]. Itch.io. https://gshowitt.itch.io/this-one-time-at-bard-camp

Process

1. We managed to put together a fairly cohesive game in a very short space of time. These are the key points we identified as problems that the player must overcome. We worked collaboratively in our brainstorming document to formulate scenarios to tick off each point, and I came up with the Music Commissioning issue.

I also suggested (the highlighted part) that the dragon wants to eat the people who misused the studio's assets, and the player's task in that situation is to convince him to take the legal route.

GDS212 Prototype 4 NPCs

2. It was my task to come up with some NPCs that the player must interact with. I wanted to give them distinctive and interesting personalities, to add some excitement to what might otherwise become a boring management simulation. I asked ChatGPT for some character name suggestions, and then used a few as inspiration.

I really liked the idea of having first and last names with the same initial, as I feel it makes the game a little more light-hearted and less serious.

GDS212 Prototype 4 Extra Documentation

3. This is the supporting document for our game page. It contains some extra information that doesn't need to be available to the players.

Playtesting

This is our feedback form. I quickly put it together and shared it with the group on Discord.

We only had one person fill out the feedback form, so it's a bit difficult to analyze how our Prototype was received. From the response we did get, the rules were easy to understand and learn. However, it was recommended that we implement some kind of stats system in future.

This is something we discussed during development, but ultimately we decided against it as we'd left it a bit late and didn't have time. Additionally, our feedback also indicated that we'd managed to convey a lesson about the reality of game development in a meaningful way.

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