Week 05 - Slap Putt

For this week’s topic, I believe it was something along the lines of the process we learned through designing, paper prototyping and play testing our games.

From the beginning of creating our game of Slap Putt, we ran through multiple options before coming to the conclusion of mixing competitive slapping and putt-putt. We began the process by narrowing down a list a sports that we thing would be interesting to combine. At first we came up with golf and boxing.

With both golf and boxing having an extremely confusing set of rules, taking a long time to complete and overall just not a fun idea of actually playing through an entire game. We changed to competitive slapping, a sport from Russia that is literally just grown men slapping each other as hard as possible. While we realized that golf still takes a long time to finish, we came to the idea that we could do putt-putt with a much simpler rule book.

When we talked to the class about our idea on Thursday, everyone seemed shocked. Over the weekend we worked some to paper prototype it out but there wasn’t a great way to simulate the effects a slap would have on a player. I feel as if our group had to make the most changes to our game overall due to the complexities of having to incur a “penalty” for playing poorly.

Through the paper prototyping we were able to create rules and change previous ones. Previously we had come to the conclusion that every stroke over par on a hole would incur a penalty of one slap. After paper prototyping and realizing that sometimes you have what’s called a “blow up hole” that it could be detrimental to be slapped 5 or 6 times after one hole. Through the process we were able to conclude that you will receive a slap if you lose the hole. If you win the hole, of course you get no slap, and if you make a hole in one then you receive a “slap pass.” A slap pass, we decided, would be a reward for doing something nearly impossible in our game and it could be used at any time down the road.

On Thursday we were able to bring a putter and a ball to class and we used an empty water cup to simulate a hole which would be at a putt-putt course. I would say that our game of Slap Putt is one that requires more research and design through play than one that can be explained by words on a piece of paper. For instance, our game was one that you kind of show people how to play as opposed to telling them how to play.