Design and Analysis of my first Game Prototype

I am a new comer towards this fascinating and interesting gaming industry. Game designing is combination of aesthetics, mechanics and dynamics. To learn those a designer has to implement those by developing prototypes. Therefore, it was a very enthusiastic moment for me when the professor has mentioned that group of two students have to design a paper prototype for the game by using a simple concept of finish to start game. We have to do three sessions for our designed game prototype to analyze and improvise it.

Session 1: In the first session, we begin with a simple design of our game by drawing some sketches on the paper. Then we starts writing the rules by using a mechanics of dice rolling. According to board game geek website, "Dice rolling is a game by itself see Yahtzee or Craps but as a game mechanic dice rolling in a game can be used for many things, randomness being the most obvious. Dice can also be used as counters; start at 6 (for a normal die: singular for dice) and turn it to 5 at the end of a round, single player's turn etc." The main target of our game was to cross the border and captures the other person; by reaching opponent's begin point. We were not able to play the game in the first session because of the time constraints.

Session 2: In this session, I started integrating rules for the game and come up with the name of the game. I named it "Who Capture B?", B denotes

the begin point of opponents team. I also added all the points in the game. After this improved I played the game with the another team mate from the class. Though in the image the yellow sticky are rules that we designed fro the game. We uses the mechanic of "Point to Point Movement", where when a player roll a dice the token move from one point to another which depend on the number of roll in the dice. We played couple of times and then we were changing the rule list if we were stuck at one loop again and again.

Session 3: This was the last session that I have played with my family members. During the game there are many questions arose by them regarding the rules. These questions have helped me to

improve the rules. For example, in my design there is palace called Volcano and when the player come there he/she has to wait for the magic number 6 to move forward. But it was trial error thing. Therefore, from their suggestions I have updated that rule to if someone get ">=3" for more then twice in two chances then  they get a treat to move two steps ahead in the game. This mechanic is known as "Press your Luck", where one can repeat an action on certain constraints that has been designed by the game developer.

In conclusion, these three sessions are the best way of design the game and they help me to come up with new ideas toward the game designing. Also, the inputs from other user has enhanced my approach of designing the rules in this particular game.


Resource:

BoardGameGeek | Gaming Unplugged Since 2000. (n.d.). Retrieved September 29, 2014, from http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamemechanic/