Role: Game Designer
Medium: Boardgame and Mobile pitch
Team Size: 5
Duration: 1 Month
This project is a little bit of a weird one. For the first 3 weeks of development we were tasked with creating a board game by each selecting one mechanic idea from a different list and then elaborating on the mechanics as a team. In the final week we then had to convert the tabletop game into a video game format by updating the mechanics while leaving the dynamics and aesthetics of the game as little changed as possible.
Reflection
One aspects of digital vs analog design that has always been interesting to me is how both mediums are significantly more complex than one another in their own unique ways. Digital rests on a set of rules that are much more complex on the designer side of things, but generally obscures that complexity as much as possible for the players… meaning the game processes input from the players on its own. Meanwhile, analog games feel more complex simply because they’re dependent on the player understanding how play progresses. Because of this, digital games can more comfortably set a fast pace while a huge subsection of analog games (especially tabletop games) couldn’t function in real-time without throwing the rules out and becoming a free-for-all.
Each of our mechanics required some tweaks to their expression. We completely ditched our version of the write/draw mechanic because it couldn’t work the same in a digital medium. We renovated it to assist in the collect, upgrade, and eminent domain mechanics instead by forcing players to draw symbols in order to activate those mechanics. We also had to change the player’s view of the game somewhat with the change in medium. Now, players never see the board, only the tile they’re on and have to navigate by tapping arrows on the edges of the screen, hoping their memory is good enough to guide them.
We didn’t hit any insurmountable obstacles. Our biggest issue was communicating our ideas among ourselves and getting onto the same page. We were fortunate that for each change that needed made, someone had a solid idea of how to go about doing it and our ideas worked really well together, accommodating one another’s changes as we went. But we often only had one or two proposed solutions to problems. Despite the relative smoothness of our conversion to digital, I think the Analog game works better as a game concept.
Nicholas Fife 