Week 04 - Learning Procedures

The game my group chose to create into a board game is Beamer, developed recently by Doug Yurchey. If seconds into the video, "Mr.Animate" states that the game doesn't require physical contact and that it's best if men play against women, or younger people play against older people. To our group, this aspect made the game seem unfair. Although there is no physical contact, you still need to put in some physical characteristics such as running into play. By turning this into a board game, we're able to remove all physical components of the game and have no underlying physical capabilities needed. 

Around the 10-minute mark on Bennet Froddy's GDC session, "Making it Matter: Lessons from Real Sports", he mentions raising the stakes to bring out "emotional and physical suffering to the maximum allowable degree." The way that our group decided to raise the stakes was by introducing a "pickups" aspect, where each team searched for their game-winning tools through marked squares on the board. The only problem for players is that those "pickup" squares have the potential to be empty, resulting in the end of your turn while also having acquired nothing towards your team's success. I decided on this so that the game runs for a longer period and gives everyone a sense of anticipation as to what could possibly be beneath the "pickup" square one is heading to.

21 minutes into Bennet Froddy's GDC session, he talks about making "the events in our game matter to our players." Going back to the previously mentioned "pickup" squares, if you are lucky enough to stumble upon a square that does contain an item, you have acquired a game-winning component for your team. The green team has keys they need to find to reach the exit; the red team has weapons they need to find to eliminate the green team. Before the acquisition of one of these items, every player is nothing more than a colored square wandering around our game board.