For this project, I was placed into group 5 in my CAGD class, which consisted of me and another guy named Kevin. We were tasked with making a board game that was a role-playing game, had a farming theme to it, and was targeted to 15-20 year old girls who had an interest in science. Not really the best combo for us...but, we managed to come up with the game Farming Revolution. Farming Revolution involves both well-thought strategy, as well as good focus. Be the first to complete your farming empire before your competitor!
We had a pretty easy time with our task completion. We were able to do everything equally and we were both able to have sufficient amounts of input into what the game could require, what the game could have, and what should be scrapped. Our first original brainstorming sheet for this game was around 3 pages in length, involving things such as places to train your skills, more animals and tools, different ways to rank up, etc. However, for this project, our game could not be longer than 15 minutes, which caused us to have to rethink some ideas or just scrap some all-together. However, we managed to figure out different ways of shortening key aspects of the ideas that felt most important to us, just so we could have a nice flow for gameplay.
Our first playtest was a little bad. The way we had the board set up consisted of different animal zones, as well as a central grid in the middle of the game board. Our rules were quite long and they were worded very weirdly. The playtesters that played our game thought it was very confusing, too long, and not very enjoyable. Once we figured these things out, we went back and shortened the rules, making sure that all of the rules were easy to follow, and that anything that was important was properly highlighted. As for the board, we completely scrapped the central grid, as none of our playtesters used that correctly and it just gave my partner and I more work to deal with.
Things we probably could’ve done to help our design process were:
- To meet up more outside of class to do more proper playtesting before the official playtests
- To communicate more outside of class other than the small chat box that Google Docs have
- To figure out times that we could’ve taken out of our days to specifically work on the game and nothing else
I feel like these things could’ve definitely shaped our game differently, but overall, our game still turned out very well in the long run.
Our second playtest went very well -- we got many more playtesters, our rules were much easier for them to follow, and they were able to get the hang of the game very easily, allowing them to have a lot of fun playing our game. After scrapping the central grid, it allowed our players to get a feel of what's going on, and it didn't make them feel super confused. We implemented a dice roll into our final product as it made the gameplay much smoother and made it easier to get to the end goal.
Overall, I think this game shaped up to be a very good game with tons of potential. I feel if we would’ve taken a little more initiative to do more things to help our design process, I feel the game could’ve come out even better than it did. However, I still feel our game was quite successful, and I hope to possibly be able to expand on it in the future.
