Game Designer
Messy Business
Anolog Project
Build Date: 06/27/21
The goal of the project was to generate a fun, simple, and strategic game and improve and iterate on it. A large constraint is that the rules for the game should fit on a single page. This was to ensure the game would remain simple.
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Game is Available to Play on Roll 20
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My idea was to create a hectic where the players create a mess that hinders progress. I settled on the idea of a restaurant competing for customers.
In this board game, the player rolls a dice to determine how far you move. If you are adjacent to an enemy piece you must roll to see if you will drop the food you are trying to deliver to the customer and have to return to the beginning.
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During playtesting of this game I found certain strategies made the game tedious and not very fun, and the idea of having to just start over was very frustrating for players. I adjusted the board size to allow for more movement changed the way units moved to create more tactics when create, and whenever you dropped a food item you created a mess that players would have to find their way through. Which created a lot more fun interactions with the game
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As the game began to take shape I started to focus more on balancing the entire experience. I used Excel Spreadsheets during playtesting to record how ofter certain events were being performed. I calculated the probability of giving an advantage on dice to determine if the interactions were fair and fun.
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Probability Chart
Play Tracker
Considering where this game started from, and the amount of iteration I had to go through is kinda crazy. My success depended on creating a theme for the game and building from that theme. I wanted the game to be a hectic race wherein players must navigate a mess that they created themselves. Overall I think I achieved that. Different versions leaned a bit too far into the crazy side which resulted in a less fun experience. I realized how hard it is to get valuable feedback from players after the playtest.
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If you would like to see a bit more on the iterations I went through I kept a journal documenting the whole experience.
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