First Meet Up
For the first meet-up, we had decided that each of us would think of a personal idea to propose during the first session. We would then present it to the group and decide on which idea was the most agreeable between all of us. The idea I came up with was a board game of 2 sides which took inspiration from chess. It is a 2 player game comprising of students and teachers. I had the conception that the game had to be designed around a school based theme hence the idea. The game was based off an exam setting where the students were all cheaters and had to sneak a cheated exam script pass the teachers to the end of the board. During the presentation of this idea, my teammates also came up with suggestions which would help improve the game such as move choices. Dr Oon raised a concern that the game had limitations due to the fact that student who were cheaters had no obvious distinctions from students were not cheaters. This made it hard to the player on the teacher side to made well though out decisions on who to attack or block while playing. After hearing this, the group and I tried to think up some solutions such as giving the different students distinguishing move-sets. However this then further complicated the game design process as more problems arose from this change such as what moves were needed and balancing issues. I learnt that sometimes an idea that may seem workable might have core issues that one person might have missed. After discussing with the group we decided to put my idea on hold and moved on to listen to other ideas that my group mates had thought up. After listening to Wesly's idea of an auction game, I personally felt that it was a pretty interesting idea and voted to support it as the group idea. The idea had many interesting bit but it was also very incomplete with many details missing. With so many parts all over the place, I decided to take charge by facilitating the discussion linearly starting from top to bottom. We then as a group discussed on specifics such as ability effects, number of cards in each category, tokens etc. Showing this early prototype to Dr Oon we found a few major flaws with our design. The initial game had to much of an RNG factor based off a die roll which we later removed and by allowing bidders to bid 0 while they originally only had to choice to bid 50. We also took Dr Oon's idea of not implementing unnecessary "00"s at the back of numbers which makes it unnecessarily complicated. After all was discussed I volunteered to create the cards as I had already purchased the materials from the school's popular and we had the template of what the game needed to have during our group discussion all written down. However Wesly insisted in creating the deck since it was his idea and he knew best how to do so. I agreed with him and we decided as a group that we should let Wesly handle it. Second Meet Up This is where my group mate and I discovered the kind of people we were working with. During the second session we found out that Wesly came back with no playable prototype but instead he told us that he had revamped the entire game with new game mechanics and ideas. Reluctantly we decided to listen to these new ideas he had to propose. This was on the second week and we were running out of time. After spending an hour listening to the new mechanics, I questioned a lot of his new ideas as they seemed incomplete to me and we as a group could not understand where he was coming from though he insisted that it was less complicated. Finally we decided to go back to the original idea and refine it with the flaws that Dr Oon had suggested to us about. At the end of the week I suggested that we start creating the prototype in class together, but ran out of time while trying to plan the video creation. Before we left I suggested to split the work such that I went back to create the prototype while the video was split and then compiled as a group. However Wesly once again insisted on creating the deck which Robin and I strongly insisted against due to the previous mishap. After much resistance, we could not dissuade Wesly and he once again was in charge of the prototype creation while Simon volunteered for the video creation. Final Meet Up On the week of the submission Wesly came back to us with the deck created. But he had created a completely different game not to which we as a group had discussed and agreed upon. Without notifying the group if changes were added as I had requested multiple times, we now had a completely new game at our hands. We also found out that Simon had not created the video and had given Wesly the task of doing it too. To be completely honest the final product was completely done by Wesly. It had no resemblance of any of the discussions we made prior nor the play testing and decisions we had come up with. I'm not blaming but I have no intention of lying or claiming credit where it is not due. The end product on presentation day had 0 influence from the group and was solely Wesly's "revamp" of a game we had agreed upon. There is something about Wesly's psyche. He is very against any outside suggestions and recommendations. During the course of the 3 week projects, he changed the decided project with a completely new idea of his own twice without the group's input. He was against Dr Oons suggestion of removing the unneccessary "0"s even though I and other group members brought it up during discussion. On the day of the presentation he even crushed the step by step guide our group had decided to write for the playtesters as he insisted that what he wrote on his notebook would serve as a better guide. Up till the presentation minute, he insisted that he had "lost" the guide which Simon then pointed out was crumpled up in his pocket. Wesly is different from every group member in any project I have ever worked with. He is so against outside suggestions and cooperation that I might think it is something built into his psyche that he can't help. I have seen lazy people, people who don't do work, people who don't know how to do work, people who like to solo etc. But Wesly is the first i've seen who completely cannot accept outside criticism and change. Besides the group discussion and the facilitation of ideas. I have to honestly say I had no part to play in the final product. I am also to be blamed for my lack of resolve and initiative in resolving this issue during the development phase. From this project I have come to learn that people who absolutely cannot accept group work do exist, and that they would go to any length (even behind the group's back) to ensure that the product is solely their own, even at the expense of quality, or others. The Gameplay Video https://drive.google.com/open?id=1YmEUYdas7MBJknYBNhjJ38VpeLnx6jE2
0 Comments
|