Sprint 1 Mobile Game

 Nepo Society Sprint 1 

Entering Sprint 1 as the lead designer role for the first time was a bigger challenge than I thought. Having the vision of a game is a big difference then making a quick pitch for it. The game selected was an idea now needing a full breakdown of the game took lots of thinking and planning. The first sprint me and my team decided to focus on a paper prototype and planning it out helped for a basic outline for the design of the game. My job was to have a rulesheet to explain to all playtesters how the game is going to be but only on paper. 

I tried to make it so everyone could understand, but that made the rulesheet have lots of words for the player to read. During playtests the players would get confused on some of the gameplay mechanics due to a hefty amount of rules. The vision that I had was to bring the mobile game aspect into life, but unfortunately it wasn’t possible and led to a somewhat failure when it came to playtesting. The positive thing to keep in mind is that most of the listed rules would be in the actual mobile game, also the game was a dumb downed version. Meaning that some rules were just implemented into the game just for paper usage and will not be used in the game. The player for example will not get a pair of dice to roll in game the game will automatically do lots of tasks and when it comes to randomness we will have a system that implements it. Something that we did take note of was the playtesters would like to see the game, because it sounded interesting to them. This was good news for the team, but a lot of work still needs to be done and we have a feeling like this game has to live up to expectations to make customers happy.

Another thing that I worked on and was a fast process was the making of the characters for playtesters. I decided to go for a variety of characters because in our game stats matter. Having more characters with different stats and gender will let people pick freely on who they will want to be during gameplay. This is something we will try to implement in the digital game to let players customize the characters appearances, but not stats when starting. 


Looking ahead to what is next for the sprint 2 and future sprints is taking everything piece by piece. The second sprint will follow the UI. Having a set UI for testing will help out a lot. Our team had a discussion that UI should be first then we can start building off. A mediocre UI is a huge jump in the beginning letting us test to see if they work and testing the implementation of tapping and dragging with the use of fingers for the mobile game feeling.  Taking all that was said during playtest and ideas given I will evaluate them and see if we can make changes to the game, and see if it was something that was only a paper prototype rule I won’t pay much attention to. The start of making the game is always going to be hard, but each sprint will be more active and more tasks are being pushed by time. Sprint 1 will be the only sprint with the least amount of user stories because of the focus of non digital tasks. I'm hoping to learn and grow from taking the role of lead designer and maybe become one again for future projects.The Next sprint is already in kick off and more is to come for the game Nepo Society.

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