10/4-10/10
Week 7 was Halves week! It’s important to practice getting your ideas across in the industry, so we took the opportunity seriously and spent a lot of time revising and rehearsing our slides. Fortunately, since the game itself was more or less ready, it allowed us to focus on the presentation without any significant crunch.
Our halves presentation focus on one main theme: Iteration. We spend a lot of time explaining how our design has shifted from the start of the semester, with many cards, a complex system, and a more competitive focus, to a simpler, family friendly design. In the same way, we experimented with the art, card engineering, and other aspects of the game.
We were very happy with how the presentation went, and then moved on to prep for Friday’s faculty playtest.
That went even better! We received a ton of great feedback from faculty and other guests, but overall they had a great time.
Amanda Anderson, the Career Consultant at the ETC, gave us the biggest compliment of the day: her husband keeps trying to get her into Magic the Gathering, which she never loved, but in playing our game she found the fun quickly and for the first time understood the appeal of card games. This was a huge win, and felt like a large improvement from our Hunt Library experience last week.
We also got to playtest with a very experienced, advanced TCG player, who pointed out some significant flaws with our game design, mostly involving Board Control and Snowballing, which made it very challenging to come back from behind. We planned to address these concerns in the next iteration.
We went into Fall Break with a surge of motivation, ready to head into full production in the second half of the semester.