A Game Designer who is ready to make worlds
The Company He Keeps
Overview
Platform: Board Game
Tools used: Google Docs, Google Draw, Google Form, Microsoft PowerPoint,
Cards, Tokens, Paper clips, Post-its
Duration: 1 month
Role: Game designer
Features I worked on
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I designed a 2-4 person board game
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Used Google Docs to write a game design document
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Used Google Draw and Microsoft PowerPoint to make a visualize the rules and setups of the game
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Used cards, tokens, paper clips, and post-its to make a working prototype of the game
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I held play test sessions to gather feedback, analysed the test results, and iterated the game's rules based on my analysis.
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Used Google Forms to gather test results from play testers
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Summary
The Company He Keeps is a tabletop card game that has a theme of “Friendship and Relationship”. It is an All v All style game that has one winner at the end, mainly based on drafting.
Design Process and Intent
a. Game Design Document
I started the design process with writing out a game design document. Following the GRATIS outline (Goals, Rules, Actions, Transitions, Items, Setup), I have explained all the specific rules of the game. This includes the setup of the game and an analysis on how the player’s actions are meaningful in this game.
b. Outline of the Game
This game can be summarised as a “friend making game”.
On the table, there are 12 Friend cards on the table. Each Friend card will have three Personality cards dealt to them, and faced down so that no one can know which Friend has which Personality.
Then every player gets dealt 2 Personality cards and 3 Interaction cards.
Taking turns, each player can use their Interaction cards to “talk to” a Friend card and reveal one of that Friend’s Personality cards.
If the Personality card that one revealed is that Friend’s second personality card to be revealed, that Friend is now that player’s Friend. The player will place his/her indicator token on that Friend card to claim that that Friend is his/hers.
Some personality cards have active/passive effects on them which will enable the players to use them in making more friends. Some of those effects will make the player lose certain friends, which makes the game more complex.
The Personality cards also have points on them. At the end of the game, each player has to add up all the points on the personality cards that their Friend cards have, and the player with the highest points wins the game.
c. Play sessions and iterations
In order to play test this game and see if the rules work well together, I made a prototype of it using paper, colored marbles, post-its, and etc. The play testers were my school friends, online friends, and family.
I encouraged the play testers to think aloud while playing the game, and wrote down their reactions and comments very specifically. After having several play sessions, I noticed that there were some parts that I could change or improve. For example, originally when a player makes a Friend by revealing two or more personalities, that player had to take the friend card and its three personality cards and place them in front of him/her to show that the friend is his/hers. However, this made the game more confusing because it made it difficult to read or keep an eye on the personality cards of other people’s friends. It was also convenient to move around whole sets of cards.
As a solution, I changed it to placing colored pebbles as indicator tokens on the friend cards to show who is which player’s friend. Also, there were balance issues as well. Some of the personality cards that have active/passive effects were too overpowered. Some of them accidentally made one player impossible to win the game, by taking away almost all the possible ways for him/her to earn points. For example, there was a personality card named “depression” which had a passive effect that switched the points of the two personality cards that have the highest points to a negative value. This card’s effect could be removed only when the player possesses the one “Very Happy” card, but this did not happen very often. So I decided to change that card’s effect to “-2 from the total amount of points of this player”.
d. Postmortem: What I've learned
Through this project I learned the two different sides of game design. One was the “making” side, and the other was the “testing” side. During the “making” process, I had so much fun in defining the rules and imagining how the game play would be. But this was kind of a blind process since I could not get data during this stage.
To me, the actual fun was during the “testing” process. Watching how the rules I’ve made are getting played and realizing the mistakes I have made was such a fun experience. Fixing the mistakes after receiving feedback from the play testers and making them play the fixed version of it was even more fun. The game play sometimes changed significantly with only a very minor change, and the players felt like the game changed a whole lot. Watching through all this process until the final version of the game was a great experience that taught me how fun it is to make a system and test it to make it better.