Week 5 - Paper Prototype Reflection

Prototyping our game allowed us to see where people struggled in certain parts. What seemed to make perfect sense to us would take a few minutes of explaining for others to understand. I find it ironic that Macklin and Sharp describe the playtesting phase as, “the one step in the process that we end with answers” (ch. 5). While that is true, those answers often lead to more questions. Playtesting for us took on the from of, “Players didn’t like X, so how can we fix that?” We got answers, but they lead us to more problems. While people were playtesting the game, we were also evaluating their feedback and coming up with ideas to fix the problems. 

But, that is exactly what we expected. We knew that it would be a rough start, but once players began to understand the rules of the game, it went pretty well. There were a few things that needed to be tweaked — mostly things related to RNG and balances — but we could work these out. The core gameplay seemed to be appealing to most people. We even ended up with a few high-emotion moments. 

One thing I regret is that many of the issues with our prototype could have been resolved before others tested the game. I realize now that we never did an “internal playtest” with all the rules (Macklin and Sharp, ch. 5). A lot of the flaws that people pointed out (or experienced) could have been quickly addressed in an internal playtest session. These flaws didn’t make to game unplayable, but they were glaringly obvious during playtesting and could have been solved quickly. For example, we had no formal system of determining minimum rolls before the first playtest. This would have come up immediately in an internal playtest. 

I think that our team could have benefited a lot from dividing up the tasks and assigning roles to each person. Macklin and Sharp say that in small teams the roles and responsibilities tend to mix, but in our team, there was no distinction. I think that we could have worked better with more rigid distinctions. “Even with overlapping roles, it is important to know who is doing what to avoid potential confusion and frustration” (Macklin and Sharp, ch. 8). I think that having these roles would have made our communication outside of class more productive. Instead of everyone needing to approve of changes to the rules, we could have one person in charge of the rules or just a section of rules. I think this leads back to not doing enough internal playtesting. We all had our own idea of how the game would be played, so communication could seem a little disconnected. What we needed was to all play the game and understand what everyone was thinking.

Overall, I think our team functioned well, and the prototype we developed was not bad. Still, we could have communicated better outside of class, and doing more internal playtests would have brought us all on the same page.