Posted April 04, 2022 by MisterSpectre
#post-mortem #postmortem #design #game #game design #gamification #game hacks #board game #hacks #board #board game baboons #finished game #production #post-production #achievements #accomplishments #metrics of success #playtesting #fun #entertainment #education #edutatinment
Introduction
Boy-oh-boy it has been quite a year. Our board game, Game Hacks, is complete! There's still a lot we wanted to do with it before the deadline was here, but that's more work for another time. Game Hacks itself is in a great state from a production perspective. The only thing that remains is a wrap-up period of writing our post-mortem and showing the product off to our classmates. I wish I had the physical version now in order to grab a picture to put in this dev log, but the digital assets will just have to suffice.
Achievements
We've accomplished quite a bit in what feels like a small amount of time. With a roughly 5 hour work period each week, over 20~ weeks, we managed to encapsulate fun in a simple educational board game. But that doesn't include the extra work my teammates and I did to really make this nifty little game shine. Since it's my dev log, I'm going to take a moment to emphasize my achievements in the undertaking of this project. This isn't a means of saying my team did nothing; they did a lot. Every week I felt like I was slacking because of how much effort each of them put in. I'm going to attach their dev logs at the bottom just to give them their own place to shine too. So, to highlight a few of my accomplishments:
Metrics of Success
Fun and Learning tend to define success for edutainment. Given that Game Hacks is a educational board game, the metric for our success is how effective it is for teaching people about cybersecurity, as well as how fun it is. These are both relatively difficult to judge, but playtests have been very helpful across development for tailoring the experience to match our intended goal. The team and I all agree that the game succeeds at providing a fun and educational experience, but that doesn't mean it couldn't be better. In light of the latest tests that were done before halting development, we still have some areas and pain points that we could improve upon. Personally I'd give this game a solid 7/10, but it definitely needs and deserves improvements. I hope to revisit it with the team again after this semester is over.
What's next?
Really, not much is left or us this semester. But further in the future, I want to get my team together again to go over our whole design process once more, run some more playtests, and make a brand new fully-fleshed out rendition of Game Hacks. Until then, we're just going to go through a post-mortem then showcase the game to our peers.
Conclusion
tl;dr it was a wonderful learning experience and a real pleasure to work with my team. I hope to work with them again in the future and as far as the development of Game Hacks is concerned, it is concluded. Thank you everyone who has been keeping up with me through these dev logs and an especially huge thank you to my team for being awesome. We had so many road bumps but we stuck it out and made something great. Furthermore, thank you to our Professors, Dinath and Kawczynski, for being great mentors and providing the guidance we needed to remain on track and come out with something fun.
My team member's posts:
https://33ap33.itch.io/fake-project-for-dev-logs/devlog/365567/dev-log11
https://rj-design.itch.io/y3-game-devlogs/devlog/365614/semester-2-devlog-5