P3 Reflection

For my P3 game, I made Startup City with four other people.

I remember going into the game, I had a lot of fear. I was especially fearful that startups, or any business kind of game would have a lot of elements at play, and I was worried that my group wouldn’t be able to make a simple, enjoyable game to model the system.

In our very first concept of the game, my fears came true. My group came up with a concept that had too many objects in the system, and too many complex relationships. Even one of the TAs looked at our game concept and said that we were trying to tackle too much. Eventually, we learned from our mistakes, and with later iterations we made the game a lot simpler.

However, near the end, one of our later playtests revealed that the game became too simple, and we had to add more elements to it to make it exciting. This was pretty interesting since it was the complete opposite of my initial fear.

Looking back at the game design process, I was pretty happy with how much we iterated on and progressed with our game. However, one thing I’d definitely do differently next time is do internal playtesting early on in the process. My group didn’t do any until 3 days before the game was due, and at that point, we realized the game didn’t play like we wanted it to, despite our major efforts to keep iterating on it beforehand.

If we didn’t rely on other playtesters and instead played it ourselves, I’m pretty sure we would’ve have much smarter iterations, since we would’ve experienced firsthand the experience of our game, instead of iterating based off of our perceptions from other playtesters.

Overall, however, I’m still proud of my team, and it was a great learning experience.