Overview & Design Goals

For the final project of the semester, students will choose a game they have worked on previously and polish it by playtesting it both in and out of the classroom, iterating on it, and developing it into a fully playable experience. The goal of this project is to showcase a fundamental understanding of game design by building out a full game experience.

Design goal: Make a smoothly functioning player experience. Using formal game approaches (luck, strategy, meaningful player choice), you should strive to make a game that is balanced and playable. You should leverage your formal constraint to develop gameplay that is compelling and engaging.

Design goal: Use mechanics to express content within a game experience. Your game design should somehow connect to the thematic constraint your group received. This might be a “light theming” or you can take a more detailed approach. The goal is to find a connection between the theme and your mechanics – to express the theme though the gameplay itself.

Design goal: Clearly communicate your game design to an audience. You also have a design goal of presenting your game as clearly as possible. This means preparing a Tabletop Simulator mod where everything is set up and ready for play. It also means spending time with your rules document so that the rules are written and presented for new players to learn the game as they read.

Process & Constraints

The following are the constraints your game will receive:

• Any structural constraints that include a formal mechanic and one or more examples of existing games that use that mechanic, from the project before. These can be changed if the design process requires it.
• Any thematic constraints with the content that should be expressed through your designed mechanics, as well as any constraints from the project before. These can be changed if the design process requires it.
• To create the game, you may use custom elements in any form as long as they can be imported into Table Top Simulator. These include custom cards, pieces, dice, and figures. Students will have full creative freedom to make whatever they choose.

  GETTING STARTED

  First: Play Research.

  Before beginning you / your group should take time to research other games similar to yours. Find games that match the same thematic, mechanical, or other constraints that you are looking for. Analyze their mechanics and see what you can apply directly to your own work. It is recommended to play several different games before settling on one specific idea.

  Deliverables

  On the day that the project is due, please have the following ready:
• A Tabletop Simulator mod with all of your game elements present and the table set up and ready to play.
• A single PDF file that contains:
  • the name of the game, a 1-sentence logline, and the designers’ names
  • a 50-100 word summary of what the game is
  • the complete rules for the game
  • a 2-3 paragraph design statement that outlines the ideas behind the game – in other words, what your group thinks is interesting to point out about the game and its design

Tips

PROTIP: How long should a game last? While tabletop games can often take hours to play a single game, we would like you to focus on making a game that takes about 15 minutes or less to play. (It’s OK if it is much shorter!) Fifteen minutes is not a hard limit, but we are offering this guideline because if your game takes longer to play, we might not be able to finish playing it in class during the final critique and discussion. Also, if your game takes a long time to play, it will be that much harder to play and adjust many iterations in the short time you have for this project.

PROTIP: What if my group wants to break the rules of “good design?” Great question! You are welcome and encouraged to be creative and unconventional with your approaches to gameplay. For example, perhaps you want to make a game about chaos and confusion and therefore your game might not seem like a “smoothly functioning player experience” (as stated in the design goals above). The most important thing is to be aware that you are breaking these rules and do so intentionally rather than just stumbling through them.