9/6-9/12
The primary objective of Week 3 was Quarters, where faculty visits each project room and gives their feedback on the initial direction of each project. Since we had time to prepare over the summer, we were still a bit ahead of the game in terms of production.
Frank created a model for the Alien and Human cards, and he and Ayman created 15 color variations for each. At the same time, Alvin created an arena and the programmers developed the basic system to allow for cards that appear on the board and engage in combat, as well as basic card descriptions that could modify card power and health.
While our cards weren’t quite ready to be produced with the flat stickers, we came up with an alternate solution to cut holes in cardboard and place the development glyph pucks inside. While these cards couldn’t be stacked or held like regular cards, they were at least the correct shape and made it easy to imagine what the final product would look like.
Once Quarters came around on Wednesday, we received a ton of great feedback. Faculty was generally impressed with our progress and happy with our direction, but had some important suggestions, some of which were out of scope or contradictory ideas, or
Our biggest takeaway was this: Traditional TCG card design doesn’t work great for us, because seeing numbers go up isn’t particularly exciting on a digital screen. We had to come up with more exciting mechanics that would show better on the Board. At the same time we also decided the background arena needed an overhaul. It didn’t show well with the busy screen and bright lighting.
We also experimented with cards that had holes to see the screen underneath, but came to the conclusion that it caused more problems than it solved.
Our most important next step was to come up with more interesting game mechanics that were less focused on numerical upgrades and synergies.
