Nov 20 Devlog

Jason Schklar's role in games in games in pointing out flaws in user experience in games and brings in possible options on how to fix said problems. To do this he studies people as they play, in fact he believes the ideal way to play a game is learning as you play, not learn then play.  It makes sense that the usability of board games would and should work with this form of play as they are group gaming experiences and no one wants to wait and hen be taught the rules before they play, it can take a while and people can grow bored. Schklar helps to make sure games are easy to understand and quick to use and a technique that he uses is taking the rules away. He will get a group of people that have never played a certain board game before, take the rules, and then let them play based on their understanding of what the game could be based on the board and pieces they were given. He will then watch to see if they can figure out what the game designers intended the game to be. Based on their answers he will point out fixes to how the game can be better understood and used. For example in the game Cartegena, players will try to get to the boat while collecting things pirates would typically want: keys, weapons, and treasure. When the game was played without rules, Schklar noticed that players immediately assumed that because there were cards with weapons they were supposed to fight each other, which was not the case. After the study they took out the weapons cards and changed them to different types of treasure like goblets, crowns, and gold coins. This example had me thinking about our game because we originally had weapons in our game. It had us spiraling on how to gain and use the weapons and if it had us confused, players would be lost, which would take usability out of the game entirely. Our game has now changed where weapons are not used at all, but we do have a new problem: our basilisk. The game's villain does not have a set movement pattern and, without rules available, players may be lost on how it moves. This is and has been a goal of our group to fix this confusion and what we have come up with is adding numbers to tiles so the numbers can be a clue and a tie in to the d20 dice given to the players.