Week 09- "Life's a Game Log #9"

When my team was in the process of thinking of our idea, we had difficulty at first. Starting was the most difficult point when thinking of the initial idea After we acquired our initial idea the rest flowed easier. Compared to Garfield in the "Design Evolution of MTG," he stated, "It wasn't easy; there were three months of false starts on the project, there are so many aspects of a card game design that have to be reconsidered when designing trading card games." This shows that card games are not easy to make and our initial struggle is similar to professional game makers as well. This past week me and my team we have started to design a card game that is portable like a normal deck of cards and consists of nothing else to make it able to take anywhere. This allows for the game to be small, portable, and playable almost anywhere! On the first day, we had lots of difficulties starting with our initial idea. But we loved the idea of combining it with some fiction ideas and making it a more fun experience with many custom ideas that we could do. Doing so allowed us to be creative with our ideas and not stick them to reality and go beyond that and make them more interesting. Next, when Garfield talked about balance it really reminded me of my team when we were curating this part. Balancing our game was confusing at first because we weren't sure "these cards added something to the game," as Garfield said in his book, that is something that we did as well. We knew we had to make the game balanced so we had to add another set of cards in order to make it able to make it fair and balanced. So that is exactly what we did. We did the same thing he did in order to make it equal. As Garfield in his book said, "The whole game's flavor could change if a handful of seemingly innocent cards were eliminated, or even made less or more common." This right here strikes our team planning very well. We had to make the game balanced, and well so we made our "potion" cards more valuable than another and worth different values than each other in order to ensure people weren't getting the same score for having better cards over another and give people the opportunity to have an advantage over another player for having a better card. All in all, my team's planning process this week was very similar to Garfield's planning process in which our games are actually kind of similar as well. We have similar rules and ideas used that are able to make the game balanced and fair so that the game is able to be played without much skill-based and more of luck based on the hand of the cards.