SIPBLOG: Two steps forward, one step back – 7/9/21

Game making continues here at SIP this week. Team Chiffon is now deep into development as we deliver bug fixes and find new ways to teach players about our game. Our team is composed of 7 game developers: Dylan, Courtney, Frank, Fergus, Mac, Cal and, of course, myself (Justin). After some much needed feedback from our playtesters, we decided to go back to the drawing board and devise a plan to better teach the players how to play our game.

From the beginning of the team’s development process, we were faced with the challenge of communicating our game’s rules to our players in a meaningful and effective way. After a long week of playtesting and demoing our app with different people from around the greater Boston area, we came to the conclusion that most players were struggling to understand what exactly was going on in our game. Luckily, this is just one of the simple setbacks that a team might face during any form of healthy game development. We gathered around the drawing board and after some back and forth discussion, we were able to devise a plan for how best to develop a set of steps that our players could follow in order to better understand the game.

Our decision, to better explain the rules of the game, came after a series of sessions in which our playtesters couldn’t tell which characters were their friends or foes. Naturally, this poses a large problem for us from a gameplay standpoint. Without an understanding of which characters belonged to the player, very little is possible which makes the game significantly less interesting. In addition to this, playtesters told us on multiple occasions that they didn’t understand the reason for the grid layout which our game makes use of. To solve this problem we integrated an upgrading mechanism to add an additional layer to gameplay.

Over the span of this next month, our team will be hard at work as we finish the final weeks of SIP. In this time we plan to finish the larger introductory segment of the game and implement many additional enemies and characters. Had it not been for our willingness to take risks and swap out design decisions, we would likely be in a much different stage of development. Thankfully, our team feels confident that we have what it takes to deliver a great game.