Dev Log 11: Post-Production

Introduction

Boy-oh-boy it has been quite a year. Our board game, Game Hacks, is complete! There's still a lot we wanted to do with it before the deadline was here, but that's more work for another time. Game Hacks itself is in a great state from a production perspective. The only thing that remains is a wrap-up period of writing our post-mortem and showing the product off to our classmates. I wish I had the physical version now in order to grab a picture to put in this dev log, but the digital assets will just have to suffice.

Achievements

We've accomplished quite a bit in what feels like a small amount of time. With a roughly 5 hour work period each week, over 20~ weeks, we managed to encapsulate fun in a simple educational board game. But that doesn't include the extra work my teammates and I did to really make this nifty little game shine. Since it's my dev log, I'm going to take a moment to emphasize my achievements in the undertaking of this project. This isn't a means of saying my team did nothing; they did a lot. Every week I felt like I was slacking because of how much effort each of them put in. I'm going to attach their dev logs at the bottom just to give them their own place to shine too. So, to highlight a few of my accomplishments:

• Colouring and shading of box art
  • It may not have been the best work out there, but I'm very happy with how it turned out. It wasn't my role to be the artist but I pitched in and got us a complete graphic to use for our physical production.
• Implementation and production of the digital builds
  • Playtesting Game Hacks was a necessary part of our design process. Due to the pandemic, we required a medium in which to test easily and rapidly. That's where I came in.
  • I used an online tabletop simulator called Roll20 to recreate and implement placeholder assets which were then replaced with final assets once they were made.
• Rules and Testing
  • The first iteration of the rules and playtests were done by myself. I acted as our first playtest moderator and helped form the structure for all playtests to come.
  • The current rules are still based on my rules from the first iteration. The changes from that point on were handled by all of us, but final proofing was handled by myself and Riley.
• Beatmapping and system balancing
  • As seen in my earlier dev logs, the construction of our beatmapping tool was handled by myself.
  • This beatmap tool was used to plot out the progression of players given any roll on any space, allowing us to finely tune the arrangement of tiles across the board.
• Resources and card balancing
  • The distribution of tiles went hand-in-hand with the amount of stats increased or decreased by playing cards. Cards were composed and balanced by me.
  • The resources needed to be kept in check and rigorous tweaking was conducted to find the optimal flow with and without player-to-player interactions.
• Documentation and editing
  • Our designs would've gone nowhere without sufficient efficient documents used to track our changes, goals, thoughts, and process.
  • I was our document designer and editor for the first half of production before shifting into an assisting role during the latter half.
• Implementation of research material and narrative
  • The flavour text on the cards and box all come from the research the lead designer and myself conducted.
  • The narrative of the game and events that take place throughout gameplay were written by myself to help fit the setting we were going with.
• Coordination and project management
  • There was a shift in management partway through development so I started to handle the organization of meetings and the assignment of tasks as we moved into production.
  • For the most part, we all were able to coordinate ourselves, but I assisted with redirecting us and giving everyone a lens to focus on our objectives with.

Metrics of Success

Fun and Learning tend to define success for edutainment. Given that Game Hacks is a educational board game, the metric for our success is how effective it is for teaching people about cybersecurity, as well as how fun it is. These are both relatively difficult to judge, but playtests have been very helpful across development for tailoring the experience to match our intended goal. The team and I all agree that the game succeeds at providing a fun and educational experience, but that doesn't mean it couldn't be better. In light of the latest tests that were done before halting development, we still have some areas and pain points that we could improve upon. Personally I'd give this game a solid 7/10, but it definitely needs and deserves improvements. I hope to revisit it with the team again after this semester is over.

What's next?

Really, not much is left or us this semester. But further in the future, I want to get my team together again to go over our whole design process once more, run some more playtests, and make a brand new fully-fleshed out rendition of Game Hacks. Until then, we're just going to go through a post-mortem then showcase the game to our peers.

Conclusion

tl;dr it was a wonderful learning experience and a real pleasure to work with my team. I hope to work with them again in the future and as far as the development of Game Hacks is concerned, it is concluded. Thank you everyone who has been keeping up with me through these dev logs and an especially huge thank you to my team for being awesome. We had so many road bumps but we stuck it out and made something great. Furthermore, thank you to our Professors, Dinath and Kawczynski, for being great mentors and providing the guidance we needed to remain on track and come out with something fun.

My team member's posts:

https://33ap33.itch.io/fake-project-for-dev-logs/devlog/365567/dev-log11

https://rj-design.itch.io/y3-game-devlogs/devlog/365614/semester-2-devlog-5