Week 11 - Reflection

With this week’s devlog prompt being a reflection, I would like to take some time to discuss and reflect on how important participation, attendance and helping in groups is. We were assigned our projects and groups last Thursday, Oct. 28. From there, my group discussed ideas before heading home and kept talking in our discord group until we finally decided to meet on Sunday. While one of our group members was unavailable and claimed they would join via zoom, they never did. This already began to throw a monkey wrench into our project. We worked together for about five hours on Sunday night and felt that we had a pretty decent basis on what our game was and felt good about playtesting it on Tuesday. It just so happens that I missed class on Tuesday during our playtest day, it is extremely important to NOT miss playtest days as you will miss a lot of important information about your game. While my group members and I discussed some feedback in our chat, I feel as if I was still missing some crucial element to redesign or refining our game by not actually seeing other students play the game. After discussing feedback and ideas on how to improve our game, we made some changes and felt as if we were set.

The issue with group participation is that everyone in the group needs to pull their weight, or at least some weight. I feel as if throughout this semester, we have been able to skirt by on projects without being held accountable essentially, myself included on a project. I think it was very helpful to have to fill out sheets where we actually had to sit and think about what each person did on the project.

Through the design process and playtest process of our game I learned that I am not very creative. However, I also learned that it is extremely difficult to balance a game or balance certain aspects of a game. We had a large issue balancing out “boss” villain and our fighter card. We felt as if we could never get it to a pretty even battle or an equal amount of wins or losses. It seemed no matted what we tried one was always overpowered, even if we added the same level of nerf to one’s powers. Through this process I have learned that I will not complain about balancing issues in video games any longer.