Week 13- No Pain No Game

We are in the making of our final board game of the semester, Basilisk is my group's chosen board game in which four players try to collect as much treasure as possible while avoiding the giant Basilisk guarding it all. And while we have a lot of ideas on the different directions the game can go we have to focus on how it will affect the overall play of the game. GDC’s video Designing Great UX into Your Game Board and Pieces, explains how we should “Observe Players Without Helping Them.”. This means we give a group of people our board game with no instructions and let them try and figure out how to play the game themselves. After around 5 to 10 minutes you come back to see how the group thinks the game should be played and “how the board, pieces helped & hurt”-Designing Great UX into Your Game Board and Pieces their understanding of how to play. But what does this do? Well essentially it helps improve the game by using pain transference, where you “take the pain from the player and put it on the shoulders of the developer”- Designing Great UX into Your Game Board and Pieces. In other words it helps show the developer how the design of their game can affect the way it's understood and played by the players. My group came across this pain transference when creating the moves of the Basilisk, at first we were going to create a spinner and number each of the rooms of our board game and whatever number the spinner landed on that would be the room the Basilisk would enter. Now from a developer stance this seemed cool and would help keep the players on edge never knowing where the Basilisk is. However from a players perspective this could be frustrating and even heavily infuriating, never knowing where your enemy is takes away the transparency of the game and creates a roll of chance situation. So to fix this we instead decided to make the spinner represent the amount of moves the Basilisk would have to slither, but what direction should it go? The discussion thus far has decided the Basilisk will move towards whatever player has the most treasure or is the closest to it. There is still a lot of playtesting we need to do before our final draft, but I this GDC’s video Designing Great UX into Your Game Board and Pieces has given us some good ideas on how to proceed.