P3 Reflection 🤔

What did I think before doing a systems game?

Before starting this project I thought that designing a game that modeled a system in the real world was going to be really challenging to actually achieve. It seemed like a very daunting task to take a complex system and model it in a game. However, I think that one thing that really helped out my group was modding our game off of battleship. That initial structure gave us something concrete to base our game off of. I think this helped give us a starting point that we could use to ask the question, “How does this system that we are trying to model relate to the game that we are using?”

What was different about this project?

One thing that I did differently in this project from other projects was playtesting a LOT. It seems like every single project that I work on in this class I playtest more and more. This is probably due to the fact that as we progress in the course I continually learn and internalize how important it is to playtest. For this project, my team and I playtested every single small change that we made. We especially did a lot of playtesting within our group. I think that because this was a system based game, it was important that our team did a lot of internal playtesting to modify, improve, and balance the system quickly.

Overall thoughts on system games

Our game was modeling the opioid crisis in cities. We were trying to demonstrate the constant back and forth between drugs and city resources. We found that this particular model lent itself well to a strategic type of game. It was interesting for players to think about this type of system from a strategic outlook on how to best allocate resources.

The most interesting thing about this project for me was thinking about a real-world system and modeling it in a way that would work within a game. This is something that I think is going to be very important in my career outside of making games as well. I think that this idea of taking something complex and breaking it down into its most core and abstract components is actually one that translates exceptionally well in other applications where you may need to make models of a system. This is a technique that I imagine myself using when I am trying to think about what is going on in the world around me or even what is going on in a product or project that I am working on.