Week 4

Since last class, my group and I have pretty much completed our prototype of our game: Shipwreck. In addition to learning functionality, completeness, and balance, Mr. Parks went over fun-ness and accessibility in class. We made it possible as best as we could to try and incorporate all five elements to the prototype thus far.

            
This time, in class, we had our full game board finished with all of our resource islands and ports, however the 3D boats still weren’t finished printing so we used paper boats. We also haven’t fully created our individual game boards, however we used the prototypes.  As we play tested we came up with a few solutions to the problems we had been facing in the past. For example, the problem we solved was what was to happen when a boat runs into land. Do we have it reverse or just have it deemed broken? We decided that if a boat faces an island it could flip around and start from the same spot it ended in, in reverse. We also decided instead of starting off with three boats, we would cut it down to only two since the board map isn’t as big as we thought and the game board wouldn’t be as cluttered.  We also decided to reprint the resource cards and make them bigger, for they were really small and could be lost easily. Also, instead of having ten and twenty resources per small boat and big boat respectively, we decided on cutting those resources in half. Each small boat gets a maximum capacity to hold five resources and each mother ship, ten. After play testing more we wanted to make it easier to rebuild a broken down ship so we decided we could rebuild at any island hexagon. We believe we still have a few more changes to make with game play so we are planning on meeting up at least one more time to finalize everything however for the most part our board game prototype runs smoothly.

Recently over break, we received exciting news that Mihaly has printed the 3D boats. We decided that the regular boats would take up two hexagons, while the mother ships will take up three hexagons. We also decided the boats will stay white but will be distinguished by an acrylic painted stripes. All the boats will have pegs to determine how much health it has during the game play. I’m looking forward to next week, and playing with the new 3D boats and the new changes we made.

-Sunny