Continuing Game Design (11/4-11/10)
This week I planned to develop my game even further. I wanted to focus on the actions players will make and how they can work together to achieve the same goal. I need to consider other factors on how to make the gameplay more fun and delightful, while still engaging with my topic of navigating through grief.
Game Design
I continued to develop cards for my Garden of Grief concept. I tried to separate it out into action cards, event cards, and item cards. This structure made it easier to figure out what players can actually do in the game.
After brainstorming and thinking through my game concept, I realized the Garden of Grief wasn’t exactly achieving my goal to “facilitate conversations about grief.” A peer and I came to a new concept of an adventure style board game. Players need to venture different environments and biomes of positive and negative emotions to reach acceptance. Players will come across creatures and monsters of emotions and may gain or lose items. This concept has a much stronger direction than the previous one.
Although I’ve developed a few cards for the Garden of Grief but I was struggling a lot. Considering the new concept, cards will be much easier to develop.
Reflection
I shifted my idea but I’m excited to see where it goes next. I wish I had thought of this direction earlier on in the ideation process, but I’m glad I came to it eventually. It’s always helpful to talk about ideas with someone else because we can often get stuck in our head. I’m glad I found out a way to integrate conversations and storytelling into this concept.
Next steps
Hopefully next week I’ll have a functioning game prototype that I can start testing with people. It’s ambitious but I think it’s possible due to the stronger concept that is developing.