Week 4

This week we brought in our first prototype of the game, and as expected, we ran into more than just a few issues with it. From technical difficulties in finding matching fonts to problems in the mechanics and rules of the game, we encountered problems in almost every problem of our game. Luckily, we did not allow for there to be room for any groupthink, as we had breath along with depth, and overcame most of our issues rather quickly.
After test-playing the game and taking our Professor's input into consideration we came up with a better idea of how we wanted the game to be played. We took out any action cards that may create a negative playing experience for a player, and only left ones that would only allow a positive game playing experience in order to make the game as enjoyable as possible for every player. For example, we originally had an action card where you could switch your cash cards with any player, so one player could give 2 cash cards to a player and take their 6 cash cards forcing them to spend multiple turns rebuilding their cash card collection before having the ability to buy an item. To resolve that problem, we made it so you can only switch what you have, so you can give 4 cards in exchange for a different 4 cards from that players hand.
Another problem we ran into was that the draft of items was growing too large. Originally, if you could not buy the items in the draft, you could choose a card from the top of the pile in one last attempt to buy an item, and if you could not afford it, it would go into the draft. But we did not want to have a giant draft of items, so we resolved it by putting the randomly drawn card at the bottom of the item pile instead of the draft.
The game was taking too long with budget cards that had such high values, so we decided to make lower valued budget cards. With lowered valued budget cards you have the ability to make the game a little bit more complex because you can play it so the first person with 3 completed budgets wins, or if you want to make it easier the first to complete one budget can win. When you start playing with more than one budget, the items that make up completed budgets are untouchable, so other players cannot take an item from you to make that budget uncompleted.