My evaluation

Overall, we came across a lot of obstacles in our game’s mechanics and we ironed them out by playtesting and then altering them, they are not completely balanced now, but more so than before, we had a lot of issues with the over powered train and under powered pedestrian and balanced them out and tested them again, although trying to keep all the modes of transport different and not have them be carbon copies with only visual differences, but functional characteristics. These characteristics were defined by rules, so differrent rules would apply to different players, so the balance was crucial. We learned that we had to play our game with the intention of breaking it and finding ways fo fixing it.

The sabotage feature was added early on in the game’s development and although we were reluctant to get rid of it, we realised that not all features make it into the final game, like the city map on the board. We felt that sabotage allowed the players to interact with each other more directly and making them think up alternative routes. When we played through it we really enjoyed ruining other’s journeys and that felt like a secondary goal. Our game has a very basic aesthetic which lacked because we didn’t use our original idea of the city map, it would have added another layer to the game, making it seem less abstract and more relatable on a human level, seeing the roads laid out below you and having to make the jouney in your head before playing your move.

We believe our game had a strategic quality similar to Chess and an aspect of competition that set the tone for our game, although there were dominant strategies that we could not fully address and fix where skipping across all the stars; this will irritate players after a few play throughs, next time we may use less of them, making less of them may make it more of a risk, but it would be worth it for the reward.

Personally, the beginning of my blog had a litle humour in it and felt like it was written for an audience, but by the second and third lesson I began looking more closely into our game and wrote it for myself; any troubles we had, what we had achieved and what we needed to do, this way I was focused on reflecting and evaluating what we had done in the lesson and then use that information, to further develop our game and later refine it.