Project 2 Dev Diary - Questionnaire
When i first heard that we were going to me making an expansion for a pre-existing board game as our project for project 2 I was extremely excited. I personally have played a large variety of board games and had even been brainstorming a board game of my own. From the prior brainstorming I knew that one of the absolute core concepts when conceptualising a board game is taking a gargantuan amount of feedback and making small tweaks and changes all the time. I will get to the constant iteration in my next dev blog, in this one i'm going to explain the benefit of the feedback we were given throughout the project and why it was so beneficial to our final product.
Everybody can have ideas, and every once and awhile it might be a good one. There's an incredibly slim chance that the first idea you come up with will be your best, that's why when we progressed with our expansion pack Rafferty’s Reaping we aimed to constantly have it in a playable state and get it in front of as many play testers as possible. This ranged from other teams working on their projects, students from other disciplines, our lecturers and even my family.
Even though not every bit of feedback made a major impact in our overall concept, some of the feedback we got from players was astronomically helpful. For example when we were lucky enough to have our lecturers Steve and Tony play the game i asked Steve if he felt the game was fun, which he responded yes, however after questioning him further it was revealed that he felt the fear mechanic which we had introduced didn’t feel scary or add to the games fun in any way. This lead to multiple variations of the mechanic to be created and tested on multiple different people until we were able to reach a final verdict. Without Steve's feedback the entire premise of our game would have felt meaningless.
One aspect of the feedback which made the project rewarding was making a change after Steve had also given us the feedback that players never needed to give up a necessary item and then between lessons we took that feedback and raised the condition costs on various crisis cards and in the very next play session Victor as the puppy was forced to give up his “Fanny pack of relativity”.
Feedback from playtesters wasn’t only helpful for our team alone, some of the feedback such as there being too many micromanagement based items in all teams common item lists made way for communication and collaboration between teams to reevaluate the common items to make them balanced. Similarly from one of our play testing sessions a character from the base game “The Chef” had his ability changed from being able to take items from other players on an adjacent node to an adjacent room.
The entire process of creating Rafferty’s Reaping was incredibly rewarding and most of that feeling stemmed from the constant stream of feedback from peers and in the end made it possible to create a far more polished product at the end. I know personally i have struggled with putting my work on show, which i detail in my Project 1 Post Mortem, and after this experience really showed me the value of getting feedback.