Week2 Play Journal

This week I am focusing on playtesting and iterating my project 1, a synchronized game base on zoom. When I think about the gameplay or game-feel of the game on zoom, the most similar thing is the board game that involves few physical interactions. This idea becomes the basis of my game design.

The next step I made was to find a board game that fits the condition and try to modify it and integrate it into zoom. The first board game I found is Werewords (designed by Ted Alspach and published by Bézier Games in 2017). It combines a word guessing mechanism into the classic Werewolf game.

I pick the word guessing element and lying mechanism from the Werewords and finally made my first version of project 1. It requires four players. One of the players needs to find out a word that other players picked. The Guessing player needs to ask other players’ subjective opinions toward this word(Do you like it? Do you think it is pretty?) and try his/her best to find out the word based on these responses.

The purpose of this game is to make it an ice-breaking game on zoom because no matter what happened during the game, players always find themselves get to know each other base on others’ responses. However, after I did a few rounds of testing, I found a critical problem in this game.

• There are only a few questions players can ask if players can only ask subjective questions, and if players want to guess the word correctly, he/she has to ask objective questions to narrow the range. So the game rule makes it impossible to play.
• During the meeting with Professor LeMieux, he points out that if you want to make a game on zoom, there must be something unique to the platform(zoom). This iteration of Project 1 is a game that you can play almost anywhere, even in a non-video phone call, so I need to think about making the gameplay experience unique on Zoom.

Zoom’s core is video chat, so I want to mess around with the video chat, and there is a functionality that catches my eyes – Customizing Video Order. As a result, I keep moving on to the next iteration. I want to keep the purpose of letting players know each other in this iteration. To utilize the video functionality, I change the guessing words mechanism into guessing pictures. I want to create more uncontrollable moments in this game, so I let the players draw different parts together. I want to let players express their own feelings towards a single item, so I try to let the player draw something that does not have a static shape (Clown, Cake, Computer, Devil).

There are so many changes and iteration I made for this project. The most important takeaway I have for this project is that if you want to design a game on a specific platform for a particular purpose, you have to study the platform first. You can only design a game specifically on a platform when you have a clear idea of the platform’s ability and limitations. Further, it is also essential to find the functionality of a platform that interests you the most and design around that functionality.