Devlog: October 19 & 21

My group and I created a card game this week, that deals with the 4 elements: water, air, fire, earth. Obviously, we took the game Bartok and used it as a template. The biggest achievement that my team and I wanted to accomplish was making a game that is completely our own and not just some other version of Bartok. If our game was too similar to Bartok, then it would make us look very uncreative. In Richard Garfield's "The Gathering," he explains to us that his card game came about because he got most of his inspiration from another game called Cosmic Encounter (Garfield, 539). Garfield used another game to assist his designing process, but his game is still extremely different and original. For us, adding the theme of elements and adding variety makes our game unique and original as well. We started the design process by starting out with the more simpler game mechanics. On the first day of working we came up with a theme we could all get behind. We also created the rules for the face cards of the deck. For example, the joker card means you get to create a brand new rule that is implemented into the game. Garfield's process that he talks about seems different than our thinking. In the reading, he tells us that trading card games are so hard to make because there's so many things that must be considered. An example he uses is making sure the game does not have any bad cards because no one will want them/use them (Garfield, 541). In my opinion, he had so many ideas to reconsider because his game was a trading card game. Our design process was pretty different than his because our game was not a trading card game specifically. Trading card games are much more complicated, just like Garfield says in the reading, than the simpler game we had to design. In my eyes, what he had to go though was very challenging and he did a great job thinking about all the possible things that could go wrong. After coming up with face card rules, we moved onto the more difficult task. Which was, incorporating the theme of the elements into the game but in a way that makes it feel earned. Me made the water, air, etc. actually represent someone unique in the gameplay, instead of just having them there and make no sense at all. An example of what we did was, the 2 of hearts means a tsunami is happening. Every player has to pass their hand to the player on their right to represent they just got hit by a wave and their hand is gone. 

In all honestly, our group really looked at all five of the interleaved characteristics, in Altice's chapter, to help guide us on making our game. Altice says every card game revolves around these characteristics and it's been that way for centuries (Altice, 38). My group and I read up on the chapter and tried to design our card game with his ideas in mind. Some characteristics were more useful to us than other but none the less, we actually did get something from revisiting Altice's chapter on card games.