iat 410 || advanced game design

On Thursday, Stephanie and I playtested the game for ourselves and found it to be slow and that the character attributes were not complimentary to the Battleship gameplay. We noted that the grid was too big, which was the cause for the slow game. I would return home to make some temporary fixes after discussing them with Darrell. We talked about the rules and how we could make adjustments to speed up the game.

• Reduce size of grid
• Remove character attributes
• Increase number of throws per round
• Reword food cards and their attributes

Those are some of the changes we made. Here are the rules we came up with in document form: foodFight_rules.doc

Before the playtest session on Friday, Darrell and I tested the first revision. We found that the character cards were pretty useless because we got rid of their attributes. We couldn’t figure out a simple way of implementing them.

For the playtest, we grabbed Yohei and his girlfriend, Courteney, as our first subjects. Followed with Cody and Dan. We ran out of time and could only get one full game into the playtest. The results will be covered in our follow-up report.


The next couple weeks will be dedicated to working on the Alpha/Beta for the virtual game’s Nov. 6 playtest. But for the immediate week, I will have to finish up the time schedule and milestones. Darrell and I will also start building the Alpha in Game Maker 7. I am hoping to get most of that done by week 8.