Teodor Granberg, Producer



OK

So I am the producer of OutoftheBlue and I will on this site try to bring you as much insight in our work process as possible. As well as my own thoughts.

Week one
The first week we had two official design meetings, Wednsday 10:00 to 16:00 and on Thursday afternoon from 16:45 to 17:15.

On Wednsday we discussed mostly about systems from the other board games that we had tested for an earlier assignment. We decided on a few things such as we wanted to try to make a board game with alot of cards because this will give us the oppertunity to have more content and give more decisions to the players. When discussed other board games that we had tried we concurred that resource systems combined with, decising making and risk and rewards systems is interesting in a competetive multiplayer game.

Johan came up with a simple board with levels thats you can move up and down and you could collect more resources the farther down you dared to go. We tested these systems togheter and tried to make improvments to the systems balance and over all game play.

For thursday everyone had the assignment to try to come up with more actions for our cards and improvments that could be made. So we discussed everything that everyone had thought of on thursday.

Week two
This week we had two group meetings, one on Wednesday and one on Friday Afternoon. On Wednesday we played another board game that uses different types of cards for all of the game play. This was interesting because we want to combine using cards mostly with a movement system that is reflected on our level that we have designed.

When we played this I tried to break it down to as much as possible and see how the aggressive and defensive cards worked together and also how the resource collection worked. Then we play tested our own system a few times while making small changes to the systems that seemed logical to us. We also discussed how we were supposed to make playing cards for Monday in the most effective way. We worked from 10:00 to somewhere around 16:00.

So for Friday we play tested some more and made some small changes to make our systems a little bit less complex so that we could communicate them easier but with out changing our core system and game play to much.

While we can only have 4 play test at the same time Marcel sketched out how we could design our “beta” version playing cards so that we could produce them fast by hand. We divided all of the necessary work load for Monday as evenly as we could. And finished our day around 17:30. I am going to write a rule sheet for Monday and it is going to be interesting to try to communicate our systems as effectively as possible while still being pedagogical.

Week 3
For this week everyone had a small assignment to do at home so that our system could be playable for the other groups. All of the graphics students in our group had a semi graphical job to do while the programmers wrote the rules.

Tuesday

So the first thing we did this week was to test our system with the rules we had designed. The system works fine as we see it.

Later that day a group that was supposed to test our game the next week played our game and they later gave us some valuable feedback. The biggest concern that we could see from our first round of feedback was that the rules have to be written clearer so that no misunderstandings takes place when groups are playing. As well as we still need to make balance tweaks.

Wednesday

On Wednesday another group got play our game as well as we got the opportunity to play both of the games that we were supposed to try this week. I wished we would have had some more time to play the second game, the State-Machine game. As it has an interesting way of using states but in the end they did not seem to have had enough time to test it themselves and some of the rules and dynamics did not really fit the system.

We also got feedback from the other group that played our game and they seemed to have played it in yet another way that neither we or the other group that played it before had and that gave us even more things to consider for our next meeting.

Friday

Our last work session of the week was hectic because we now both needed to fix the flaws that the test groups had found as well as transform our system into a game that both plays well and looks well. So it was a lot that needed to be decided on and a lot of input to be analyzed worked with.

In the end we got a lot of work done even if it was not done in the most effective manner. Our system now should have an aesthetic hull around it for next week as well as some fixes have been done with the rules to hopefully create a better player experience.

Assignments

All of the graphical assignments that needed to be done for next week has a name on them, they are not supposed to be finished for Monday but a draft needs to be done so that we can see that everyone is moving the right direction. The rules should be updates both with the misses that we had last week as well as having a better structure for readability.