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Board Game : Development pt 3 Review


Doom 

(and not the good kind)

I had a host of problems all arise at the same time near the end of this project. Some were very much miscalculations on my part as to the time certain tasks would take and others were simply out of my control although I should have given myself more wriggle room to work with.

Firstly I vastly underestimated both the time I would need to make the board in adobe illustrator, in addition to vastly overestimating my competency with the program. Every minute of creating the 'final' version of the board you see here was agony. The circles flatly refused to centre on each or anything else for that matter, making it near impossible to create the segments around the edge to create the tiles the players move on. This also meant that the coloured rooms that player are meant to pick items up from are not close to being lined up. All of these horrible errors could have been avoided had I done two things. TWO THINGS I WILL DO NEXT TIME!.

Thing, the first: Create multiple prototypes in different programs at the start to test the capabilities of each program. I really needed to try using illustrator in week 2 of this project at the latest, because if I had I would have quickly realised that it is a hell beast of a program and whatever people say it's good at they are WRONG! (I would have realised that I am not yet competent enough in it to get what I wanted out of it). The photoshop prototype I did create had real promise and leaning into that rather than assuming illustrator is the better program for this, would have yielded a far better outcome even if I had to make some small sacrifice in the form of clean lines.

Thing, the second: Not take the advice of people more experienced than you without first testing it. Now that seems counter to what most people would advise but from this project, I tripped myself up by relying on the expertise of people far more familiar with the programs than myself and as a result, could not even come close to achieving what they had expressed would be trivial. 

I really need to be more self-reliant, know for certain what I am personally capable of achieving and use that as the guide for how long any given task would take. By doing my own exploration I would have built up my understanding of the limitations not only of the programs in question but more importantly what the limitations of my own skill and experience were. Had I done this I would have been able to use my time to push myself in useful directions rather than simple smashing my head into a grey checker wall.

On the other end of the spectrum, I feel that the flavour text I came up with for all the cards is the best part. I'm really happy with what the flavour text adds to the game, I only wish that I could have woven the theme present in the cards into other aspects of the game such as the board and rules as this would have solidified the theme as the dominant aspect of the game and lifted it from what I feel is a fairly weak 'game' with good jokes to a fun and engaging experience overall.

The last thing I must do on the next project is to pick something I'm intensely passionate about from the start and run towards that even if it verges off the theme a little. I stuck too rigidly to the theme in the early stages and because of that made a host of decisions that were below my own interest. I lost some steam and spent an amount of time I should have been prototyping and playtesting (limited by current circumstance though I might be) trying to find my passion for this Idea. I did find it but it left me too little time to properly implement my new vision for it.  

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