Team: Will, Ren, Riya, Spencer, Giorgio
Week 1
We are still in the very early stages of our game’s development. However, we have ideas for how it will operate. It all started with a simple idea. We want to make a UChicago-themed game and spoof the university.
At first, we had the idea to make it using a board, and we may still return to that. Right now, we are planning on using cards. The primary inspirations are The Game of Life and Careers. We like the idea of simulating college and have decided that the goal for players is to graduate. Now, we are considering some of what we learned playing You’ve Got Crabs and may make the game function using cards with class credits.
Another core idea is to have the players decide what to do with their time and punish them for their choices. We want you to have a risk of failing classes because you were partying, which is where we plan on including the dice mechanic. You will roll dice to decide your class grade, with bonuses and penalties for what you do. You collect cards representing class credits, and the goal is to collect enough to graduate.
As for characters, the current plan is to introduce characters with different majors and abilities. The game is cooperative if your interests align with someone, but ultimately, it is every man for himself. Events like pre-reg will force players to fight over a limited pool of classes, but a challenging class may push players to work together.
Week 2
After playing Tokaido and Heat, we had a lot of ideas. The points system of Tokaido seemed to be ideal, but we decided to use a looping path. You buy cards with various currencies, such as social and study points, but we included an opposing type of currency with stress points. I like that they all start with s.
There is some inspiration from the souvenir shop in Tokaido, given that you draw from decks based on the space you land on. We took ideas from things like Heat for the stress mechanic. We want you to be forced to slow down and think. In the end, everything gets summed with a Final Overall Score.
The final overall score determines how (and if) you graduate, as well as how your career after college goes! You technically win just for graduating, but the highest score is the final winner. I wrote some goofy results and tried to make sure that the results were unexpected.
A lot of our work needed play to calibrate. Thresholds for outcomes, spaces per quarter, and the like could only be decided through testing. The silent playtest should do wonders for polishing our final game.
We did our own playtest too, and needed to change things drastically. One issue was we tried to use the Golf/Tokaido turn order but ran into issues with too much blocking. We also had to change the stress mechanic to work similarly to heat in Heat. When we used a clockwise turn order, there was no reason to not move as slowly as possible. That is why we add 1 stress every turn. We also had to mess with how cards and bidding work because we kept running into issues. Our playtest changed the game a lot.
Week 3
Our game had to be completely revised. Many of the main mechanics remain intact, but the movement system was completely changed. We removed the track and switched to locations where players can simply go to each turn. They can choose which resources to go for rather than the weird randomness we had implemented. We did include a dice roll though so the name pun is not lost.
The rules needed a lot of revision, as they had been confusing in places. Outside of updates to fit the new movement system, it was names that had to be changed. There were three stats with stress in the name (movement stress, card stress, and permanent stress) that ended up being highly confusing.
We also streamlined our currencies and removed unnecessary ones. We had to rethink how cards were given to players since our movement system changed so much, and it took a lot of finagling to get something usable. We have to make different strategies viable while keeping specific goals a little vague.
We made several strategies for victory through the method of end-game bonuses. Attempting to go for everything a little bit will only fail. This forces players to choose, and the limited number of cards forces players who go for the same strategy to fight over resources.
I am curious to see if the rules make more sense, and if these new mechanics are compelling. These new systems are very different, but we incorporated a lot of recommendations from the silent playtest into our design. Hopefully, it will only synergize more with our game.
Week 4: FINAL UPDATE
We learned a lot from the second playtest. Namely, that cards were clunky. Our game was mostly functional and fun, but the resource cards were unnecessary. So, we switched them out for chips. This posed a lot of challenges and changes to the rules, but overall it was not too complicated.
Firstly, we kept the day in the life cards so not all was lost. We also made each location give different amounts of resources with a disproportionally higher stress cost. For example, one location might give 3 of a resource and 3 stress, and one might give 6 of a resource for 9 stress. Sure, you can collect more within your limited time, but if you get unlucky with a stress check it would be catastrophic.
On top of creating risk vs reward scenarios, we also made it easier to keep track of your resources. The chips are more intuitive in this respect, and the stress gets removed at the same time you spend resources. Overall I’d say this week was about polishing our work. The game functioned during the last playtest, but it feels better now.
Going back to the drawing board turned out to be a good idea, as we now have a decent worker placement game. Instead of clunky cards, we have chips, trauma now works to counteract greed, and the whole flow of the game is simply better. I think the final product of this game turned out well.
