In Health Nuts, eating too much fast food is a health risk that can cost you your life… and your degree! Players must survive as college students by attempting to eat as little junk food as possible while also dodging the competition.
My name is Sonia Ayala and I worked with Elisha Farnsworth. Our group is called the Health Majors and our game is called Health Nuts (working title). Our group was tasked with creating a survival game involving fast food for people between the ages of 20 and 31. When thinking about our demographic, we talked about how we're in that age range so we made the players in the game college students. We also knew that a lot of people in college eat pretty poorly, but are also fairly self conscious about eating more healthy. So we decided to make a game where players want to eat as healthy as possible and avoid eating as much junk food as possible. In order to keep the survival element we made it so if players pulled too many red cards they instantly lost.
I felt that tasks were pretty evenly split. Whenever we had to turn anything on Blackboard, we'd take turns typing up the document while the other person would mostly give feedback on what else to add. One of us focused on making cards for the two card decks we needed, but we both would give feedback on what types of cards to make and how to phrase things. One of us also focused on designing the game board and making individual game pieces, but the other person was always willing to help out.
The main problems we encountered during playtesting was playtesters being confused about the rules and how to place the path tile pieces. We made sure to let playtesters read the rules and play the game based off what they had read instead of just explaining the rules right away. By doing this we quickly found out that our wording was confusing at times and even redundant. The main rule playtesters got confused was whether they rolled first or placed a path tile first. We edited our rules attempting to make them easier to understand and during our second playtest playtesters had a much easier time following the rules. The other big issue we ran into was how to place path tiles. While playtesting with friends, someone gave us the idea to use a space that the path tiles would connect to. This would make it easier for players to understand how they place path tiles and it worked!
I feel like my team did a fairly well developing our first paper prototype. Our playtesters seemed to have fun. We got a lot of helpful advice from faculty and students that had taken 170 before. We could have done better though. It would have been helpful if we had used the google form sooner. We could have gathered more data and kept better track of how many playtesters we had. We also didn’t ask any questions on demographic for our form. Next time I make a google form for playtesting purposes I’ll make sure to add questions such as if they’re male or female and what age range they fall into. Something else we could work on is paying better attention in class, especially during playtest days. We missed an announcement Jenn gave about how the following Monday we would be working on our paper prototypes. I’m guessing it’s because we were too busy focusing on playtesting and/or it students weren’t talking loud so we couldn’t hear. As a result, my partner and I came unprepared the following class. We still got a lot of work done, but it would have been nice to work on our game in class that day.
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