Week 5

Over the past week, a lot of what we looked at in the paper prototype of our sport could be related to what was talked about in the readings. One thing that I could see a lot of were the four steps talked about in chapter five. We started the project doing exactly what was talked about first: Conceptualize. We started doing this by just throwing out sports that we thought would be cool to take elements from. We went threw several ideas while having to think about how practical and entertaining it would be to use and/or combine their components. After finding two sports, we then had to think about how this new sport would be played. This was probably the hardest part of conceptualizing the sport. When we moved on to prototyping the sport, we also had some issues on how exactly to paper prototype the game. We struggled with figuring out how to represent certain aspects of the game properly. After coming up with a paper prototype, other class members play tested the prototype. This proved to show a lot of flaws. 

“Playtesting is often the hardest and most revealing part of the iterative game design process. Often, what seems like a great idea that makes sense in a prototype falls apart when players get ahold of it.” (Macklin and Sharp, Ch 5)

What Macklin and Sharp say here is very true. As others play tested the prototype, we realized that we left out even simple details, such as how to move a piece across the paper and even how players passed the ball. We had mainly been focused on how players score. Even after having some players play our prototype, we even found more details to rework. I think this was us evaluating the feedback. We did this a couple of times.

“There are many paths the process can take, and they may loop through the iterative steps several times in different ways for different reasons” (Macklin and Sharp, Ch 5)

One thing that I think would have helped us in our initial thoughts for the prototype would have been to assign roles at the start. This concept is talked about in chapter 8.

“While this aspect of the process is perhaps outside the game design and development scope of this book, it is nevertheless important as you identify team roles and responsibilities and will prove invaluable as you all embark on the process of making your game.” (Macklin and Sharp, Ch 8)

The reason I believe that doing this would have helped is because there were times in which nothing was happening. Two members of our group might have been trying to get things done while the third did almost nothing outside of class. I believe that if we had set responsibilities on everyone from the start, it would have helped us clear up who was expected to do what and it would have gotten every member involved. However, I do believe we did well in that we created a way of communicating at the beginning. 

“Sometimes a decision requires a meeting, and sometimes it requires just a short chat between a couple of team members.” (Macklin and Sharp, Ch 8)

Some of our decisions that made it into the final prototype were just quick decisions made over a group text that everyone agreed on.