Reflection #2

Being that this game was a physical card game, and it would theoretically need a very large amount of cards to be made in order to play a really involved game, play testing wasn’t very possible. That being said, I was able to run the concept by a few friends and even demonstrate a few possible game setups with them (including giving them the google doc I wrote explaining all the rules and different game mechanics) so they could get a good understanding of how the game works and properly give me some feedback.

The setup of my game, as stated before, was physical. Since the prompt I got was “Duel” and I was currently really into an open world game revolving around elemental-type attacks, I thought it would be really cool to make a card fighting game that revolved around the same kind of themes.

When I presented the game concept, it received a lot of good feedback. A few of my friends have actually played games like Yugioh and the Pokemon card game so they were familiar with the style. While the cards I had were very simplistic and not designed to be pretty at all, it was noted that they were still easy to understand and use on the battle field. I did use index cards though, which were also noted a bit too big for a proper game setup.

Thanks to the big doc I made explaining all of the rules and mechanics, as long as you read it thoroughly you’d have a pretty good grasp of how the game was played. I imagined it’d be like one of those big instruction manuals that come with other board games. Only a small amount of external explanation was required and it was for very small technical stuff like how player turn phases worked; things that could easily be implemented into game instructions.

I would say one of the main issues that stood out with the game was something that was actually discussed a bit in class, balancing issues. Since some of the elemental combinations allowed for game breaking advantages and disadvantages, it was clear that if a game like this were to work, there would have to be more regulations, like making the effects shorter depending on what the effect is, or perhaps revamping some effects all together.

Player feedback was especially helpful during this because every player in a game like this has their own strategy. It was very interesting to hear how some of my friends would have set up their decks after knowing how the game was going to work.