Postmortem - Emopoly

Successes:

The main outcome of this game was to socialize and to have fun talking to each other even if players are random strangers, we have successfully reached our goal in that sense. Most of our playtesters are either not as familiar to each other or students from Parsons that don’t know each other at all, but everyone had fun socializing during the game. Despite the unfamiliarity between players, most players are willing to participate in completing the tasks given in the game. Therefore, our playtest was really effective. The game mechanics were easy to understand and navigate overall since we are using a dice.

We worked cohesively as a team where we had a clear division of roles, effective communication between teammates, and organized plan for time management. We communicate with each other almost everyday throughout the week to keep everyone on the same page so no one is being left behind. Oftentimes we overlapped tasks and helped each other.

Challenges:

This should be the first time our group has made a real game, and also the first time to make a board game. The first challenge we face is we have many ideas, and most of the ideas lack some important elements. We analyzed these ideas and it took a long time to decide the theme of the game. Then on the design of the board, the balance of the game is far from as simple as we imagined. Both Playtests have revealed a lot of game balance issues (about the pricing of Likes and the total duration of the game). There are also some ideological choices in the way the game is played. At the beginning, the "tasks" we did were all visible to the player, so that the game became boring every lap during the game. Finally, we decided to remove some of the "tasks" and replace them with random "task cards", which can effectively improve the mystery of the game.

What have we learned:

In the process of making the game, we learned the importance of the system in a game. During the initial brainstorming, there seemed to be so many good ideas and choices. In fact, when studying each system, it was found that the necessary elements were missing, which made this idea unfounded. So our final thought was decided after the study of what a system means in the Studio class.

Next steps:

The next step of the game will be updating the mechanics of the game by adding more rules within multiple mini games in Emopoly. For example, when players are playing Never Have I Ever, you have to say one thing other players have never done or experienced before or else you lost the game. Maybe if there is a player who has experienced the same thing you have, they can probably steal the likes from you instead. Or, when players are playing True or False, other players have to vote for true or false and put down 1000 likes on one side they believed in. Players who guessed correctly will get all of the likes on the table. There might be tasks where players do not have any option to pay the likes but it’s either you do it or you lose it. Perhaps, there are much more mini games and tasks that have an endless amount of possibilities players can also fill in.