P3 Reflection: War of Zones

Designing game systems is difficult. Balancing these systems is even more difficult.

For P3, we were tasked with developing a game that modeled a real world system, containing loops and arcs. Having prior game development experience, I was daunted with the task of developing such a game within 2 weeks due to the difficulty of balancing a system centric game — I knew I would have a lot of playtesting ahead.

The Game

War of Zones is a multiplayer building based board game in which players compete against each other to become the richest property developers. In order to do so, they must wisely select zones and purchase properties to build on them as the value of land constantly changes due to chance based event cards. The game was modeled off of infrastructure systems that real city and property developers encounter. We saw that our game afforded sensation (from touching and creating properties), narrative (from the events they drew), and challenge (as the game constantly changed due to the actions of other players and the event cards). Despite being a relatively complex, and arithmetic heavy game, we were very pleased to see and hear lots of “fun sounds” and body language from our players. Of course, this was not fully realized until our final playtest.

Playtesting

Despite knowing we would have a lot of playtesting to do, I quickly learned, as predicted by our teacher Christina, “there is no such thing as enough playtesting.” Boy was that true. Even after 8 playtests, during which we modified the game board, turn-based mechanics, event cards, and goal of the game, we still got more feedback on our “final deliverable” that showed the game could still evolve.

The biggest challenge I found with our group’s playtests were deciding what to modify and test. Often we did not agree on what changes to make, and frequently overhauled the majority of the game between each test, counter to my intuition. One difficulty that lead to this was that we had a very large group, with some members having particular play styles and experiences that pushed the project in different directions. Many of the initial playtests focused on the mechanics of a single action in our game: event cards. Our team decided to focus iteration on this mechanic as opposed to the core rules and objective of the game (the objective of the game was not decided on until Playtest #3). Admittedly, I was quite frustrated with this decision as I wanted to focus on deciding upon the concrete goals of the game before focusing on tweaking a specific feature of the game.

However, our decision to focus on iterating event cards ended up driving a lot of our game’s success — particularly with evoking player emotion. This feature was core in shifting the status quo of the game, changing up the lead player and altering strategies significantly. This sole feature lead to the vast majority of our “fun sounds” when testing.

Still, our playtesters mentioned that confusion and unpolished core game concepts detracted from the fun at time, but every playtester said they saw the potential of the game and could not wait to try out the final version. After polishing the event card feature, we focused on overhauling the remaining aspects of the game (game board design, turn-based rules, design elements).

When we reached our final playtest, our players saw no issue with the core game, but were absolutely amused by the event cards. Despite being afforded only 45 minutes to play, our playtesters continued to yell, laugh, and play for 2 hours! They said time flew by — a wonderful indication of having a good time. Our team was delighted — and still, our playtesters provided more feedback for changes that could be made to improve the game further. Playtesting never ends.

Concluding Thoughts

After working on this project, I realized that during early playtesting, there is not a concrete formula of what to test first. The goal is to playtest well and playtest a lot. By iterating quickly, and documenting thoroughly, our team was able to identify what made the experience enjoyable and tweak the remaining aspects of the game in order to further draw out that “fun factor”. Without focusing on a specific feature to iterate, I don’t know if we would hear all the groans, yelling, and laughing from our playtesters.