The final steps

Everything appears to be coming together on our final steps of development. The rules have been finalized and design ideas have been, for the most part, brought to the table.


Our prototype proved to be a success. During the playtesting day, I noticed that most groups played their respective games for a set amount of time before they started writing on the comment sheet. The group that played Supernova ended up playing longest out of all the groups. From what I examined, they displayed all the actions and physical reactions my group expected to find within a test-audience. They responded with excitement, laughter, disgust, and amazement. In fact, some of their faces turned bright red from laughing so hard. These reactions are exactly what we as a group hoped for. In the final steps towards polishing our game, we wish to implement the suggestions brought forth to us.

Soon enough, Supernova will be unleashed.

Finalized Cards!

SUPERWRITING!!!!

So far it has been difficult to come up with the needed ideas for all the cards. This is very important because it is, in essence, the "guts" of our game. We have set a pretty ambitious goal of around 200 cards and that's proving to be a substantial amount of writing. It seems to be especially difficult for us in a few more limited categories such as "Physical Feats". How can we come up with 40+ different physical feats? How can we come up with that number while avoiding anything that causes players to kill themselves? How far are we willing to push our players? Where should the lines be drawn while keeping in mind the teen and older demographic and basic culturally acceptable ideals of taste? Stay tuned to find out the answers to the questions and more on Supernova...the blog...

Playtesting

For this week's class, we had to bring in a prototype of SUPERNOVA. This class gave us a chance to have others play test our board game. The group that played our game reported some criticism, but overall we had done a great job. One problem that we encountered was with our random rule cards. Our playtesters didn't like the fact that the duration of the rule cards lasted the whole game. We decided to cut the time to either three turns or throughout one level of the game. We also had some playing pieces that made our game too similar to Trivial Pursuit. We decided to work on coming up with a different star puzzle. Our idea was to get wooden star pieces and use Velcro to stick it together. It's going to be interesting to see how our final product turns out!

Card Design

This is the card design for the game.

One step closer..

Our group has made significant progress in terms of the creation of cards within the game. Since the content of the cards is essential to success, we sought to focus on solidifying our cards categories and content. We each came into class prepared with drafts of each category of cards. We discussed how we will go about creating the cards, the star piece container, and the actual board. A significant portion of the period was spent creating the set of rules. The weakness of our last two games lied within the presentation and rule clarity. We focused on the coherence and effectiveness of the rules. Professor Goeller returned our previous game to give us inspiration. We took many aspects of Sibling Rivalry and incorporated them into our new game. This includes the cards and the general feel of the game. We also managed to complete a new design for the cover of the cards, assign tasks for each person to complete by next period, and discussed ideas for the commercial.

Game Layout [TAKE2]

Here's an updated version of the game layout.