Group projects are always a difficult process to navigate. Sometimes you get a great group that works together well and creates good work. Most of the time you get a group with 1 or more members that are just difficult to work with and sometimes downright impossible!
DEADLINES is a game Alicia, Amy, Dayle, Lizzie, and I created out of this inspiration.
Creating this game was a new experience from start to finish. Designing a game is a wild experience as you’re not just playing with mechanics to make pieces move or drawing cards, but you’re creating a catalyst for experience and as well as conveying philosophies and ideas.
We started this complex process from the angle of theme. I encouraged this discussion as theme and setting would provide options for a variety of directions. In my experience, group projects work best when thriving off a group’s similar interests. With this in mind, I facilitated and encouraged a discussion to start this process. This started an effective and helpful discussion, which led to playing a game together.
Flashpoint is a collaborative game with tension and excitement. Players work together to rescue people from a burning building. However, every turn there is a chance that the building may fall!
Starting is often the slowest part of any project. I took a lead role in facilitating our early discussion by encouraging questions after playing Flashpoint. As a group we decided that we like the common goal aspect and the high tension. We struggled with the complexity and keeping track of every part of a players turn.
We finally settled on a theme: Group Projects.
Ideation
We started by discussing material aspects we appreciated from other games and settled on a card game. We were inspired by munchkin’s door challenges. I particularly like Die Rich’s system for different stages of the game’s narrative. Finally, Dayle mentioned 5m Dungeon, a game we hadn’t yet played but were curious to try. Here are some of our notes from the first brainstorm…
Following this we played around with mechanics based off our games theme. We considered all the different avenues of group projects but settled on a student setting. I encouraged this particular conversation as I saw a lot of potential for the marketability of other settings and licenses in the future.
We sketched out some ideas and played with mechanics around cooperation and competition. We were initially conflicted between the two. After some discussion, I suggested a way we might incorporate group work with the option for sabotage. My idea was to use challenges (similar to munchkin) that require all members to attempt, however one player would have a “mole” card that gives them an incentive to sabotage the others. This was tossed back and forth to ideate the concept. Eventually we decided for players to have a character card that would allow for one character to be a saboteur.
Next, we started sketching out the challenges. Sticking with our student setting, we created challenges and tokens necessary to defeat them.
Feedback from our tutors lead us towards individual scoring methods as well as other potential group challenges such as a group stress level.
After these initial concepts we started making some mock-ups to play test. We worked together to create and iterate these. In particular, I made challenges and action cards, coming up with creative and relevant items to our theme.
From paper copies we moved to digital ones. Amy and Alicia did an incredible job together creating character cards for each player. We iterated a few ideas from some playtesting and decided players should keep track of individual points. Our reasoning for this was a challenge I posed early in our brainstorming. I wanted to push our group to create a cooperative game with competitive elements. We also were keen to include sabotage.
This resulted in a “loose together or take it all”. Players work together to finish the group project, however only the player with the most contribution wins. If they don’t complete the project; they all lose together. A unique mechanic, that none of us had seen before.
This created the need for individual point tracking. We tried a progress board with tokens, however, in play testing this proved too much. We decided on dial inspired by a game called Kings of Tokyo.
After playtesting and iterating from our experience we worked on our presentation. Presenting this project was lots of fun as we were all quite invested. At this point I wrote portions of the script along with a full user manual. Although others did the majority of the graphics, I helped build our slideshow and edit along the way. I recorded the first section and the conclusion for our presentation, however, in editing my files were corrupted and the team had to improvise last minute. This was quite frustrating.
I would describe my contributions to this project as a catalyst. I initiated conversation and kept the group moving forward. When ideas were suggested, I pushed the group to test them before casting them aside. I encouraged the team to attempt what appeared to be contradictory mechanics that proved vital to our theme and game’s core. I wrote equal portions of our script along with a full manual for our game. I helped with prototyping and playtesting as well as reflective iteration.
Thanks to the team, we are proud of our finished product. We can see this game being a Kickstarter success with potential to become a mass market game. To learn more, check out our teammates blogs too!
Boswell's Brain 