Devlog 6

During this week (September 26 and 28), we further discussed card games and played two such games as examples: Exploding Kittens and The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine. The former is a game in which the goal is to be the last player standing and avoid drawing Exploding Kitten cards, which is facilitated by the use of special cards to perform actions like seeing the top cards of the deck or negating the effect of another player's card. The latter, meanwhile, is a cooperative trick-taking card game in which players aim to complete tasks by winning tricks with specific cards in them. On Thursday in particular, we also began preparing to create card games of our own, which the readings for this week were meant to help with. James Ernest's article "Writing Effective Rules" outlines the sections of a rulebook and what information should be included in each of them as well as including overall hints on clarity and brevity. For example, the rulebook for Exploding Kittens only takes up two sides of a single page; additionally, every card has its effect printed on the card itself, making the game easy to understand and play. The Crew has a lengthier rulebook that can be more difficult to understand, but it also clearly states how the game is played and covers everything players might want to know. Chapters 9 and 10 of Games, Design and Play discuss the steps of conceptualizing and prototyping, respectively; these are the first two steps of the iterative design process. While we did not do much of this in class, it is relevant to our next project of designing a travel-themed card game; while there are some restrictions for this project, we will still need to generate ideas and then use physical prototypes to test and refine the game.