Friday, November 13, 2015

Mechanics and the Development of Group Flow

         During our second group meeting, Jon, Matt, and I were able to brainstorm a general consensus of the game's presentation and mechanics. We knew that we wanted it to be theme park related; however, when it came to discussing the actual rules and visuals, we were coming up short. After voicing some thoughts that came to mind, Matt suggested that players start off by eradicating forrest land in order to build the rides to their park. Jon and I agreed that it was a good idea because in order to form property, one must have to buy and clear the land first. This would facilitate in the overall them of the game. I further contributed to his idea by proposing that a player would be able to build on another players' property as long as they pay that player for the land that they are taking. In addition, I suggested that we have a second layer to the actual board in which players could physically remove, which would be the land that they want to build an attraction on. This way, they could differentiate the pieces they have already cleared.

          Jon proposed an idea similar to Ticket-To-Ride for the mechanics of the game. Players would draw three cards and these would be the rides that they would have to build. This seemed a bit unfair, though, because other players could draw better cards and end up with the better attractions. Soon after, we changed it so that players would start off by drawing three cards; however, they would only keep two that they wanted and put the order card back at the bottom of the deck. Then, they would draw two more from the top, then keep one. This would make it more fair for all of the players because they would have a choice in the rides they could make. Jon then suggested that each "ride" card would have a set of pieces/resources that they would have to acquire in order to actually build it. I thought it would be a good idea to use play money to buy the resources, like one would use in real life.

           After deciding on these basic mechanics, we came across some issues that could occur such as a player not having enough money to buy anything. This would cause them to skip their turn, which we want to prevent so that everyone always has a turn to go. Jon first suggested that instead of buying or building something because they cannot, there would be a separate pile in which players could pick up a random resources. I, then, brought up the issue that players could end up having a bunch of resources they do not need and they would have no use for them. This is when Matt and Jon recommended an "auction" action, which would enable a player to sell the resource to another player or to the deck for a sum of money, which would also help them make more money.

        To finish our discussion off, I advocated a great way for players to additionally earn money. Each spot or attraction would have a certain number or cost, and if a dice were rolled, those players with the number in which the dice landed on would acquire some money. This would symbolize people riding their attraction, which would contribute to the theme of our game.

       By the end of class, we assigned each group member a task in which they would have to complete to get the game's formation in play. Matt would create a simple design of the board, Jon would make samples of the cards, I would find pictures of the rides and attractions that we could use, and since Jini was unable to be there, we assigned her the duty of reading over the Google document we created which basically summed up our class discussion. We also asked her to come up with more ideas that we could use, and to get Matt's portion of the visual game before the next class since he will not be able to make it.

By: Tiffany Rose Villa

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