Week 9

This past week we created a rendition of Bar Tok with a few twists to it. Starting the 14th, we had discussed the theme for our game. We had initially tried to find a common denominator that we could agree on which ended up being Call of Duty Warzone. The only issue was that we could only come up with the theme for it and could not successfully tie in rules that made sense with the theme. This is of course expected in the design process as Garfield says that, “there were three months of false starts in the project” in reference to Magic. We decided to pick up where we left off Sunday and this is where I lost a bit of footing in the design process. The process that we took as a team was not the best as I was not able to attend the zoom meeting that was put together to discuss the details of the game. This was due to me being at work and not having discord notifications on, but there were definitely ways around miscommunication like that. Going into Tuesday we had a theme for our rendition of Bar Tok which we affectionately named RAWR XD after a brief discussion. However, we did not have much of anything past that. There were not many rules that made our game different from just regular Bar Tok. We counted our losses for Tuesday and accepted the fact that we had the lamest game out there. After going around and playing the other games I was able to grasp the end goal a little better and this allowed me to create a basis for a few rules that were later implemented into the game. This was similar to Garfield and how Magic the gathering came about as he says, “there are about a dozen games that have directly influenced Magic in one way or another,”. For us it was three or four games, but the essence is still there. This allowed us to take note of what worked well, what did not work at all, and what made people actually enjoy playing the game. It was interesting to see how just one simple change of the rules opened up a different way of playing against your opponent. This is something that I was hoping to implement into our game, but I feel that we missed the mark by a bit. Given we had some time to adjust the wording of the rules and a few other small things I believe that the game we created would have been quite fun to play.  All in all, I had fun with the game we ended with, but it does not hold a candle to Star cards or whatever the Star Wars theme game was. It was wonderfully complex without being too overbearing and confusing. It allowed really unique gameplay that led to really good interactions between the players on all teams. Seeing their game helped tremendously as it really broke down the walls of what was possible with the assignment. Looking back on RAWR XD I would have hoped we pushed the limits a bit more and created something as ridiculous as the name suggests.