We have an icon! It suits perfectly with this game’s story: Under space war time, we are trying to identify the hidden enemy. It feels cold because every player can be the betrayer. But during gameplay and playtesting, what we heard the most is people laughing. It feels fun to combine these elements.

In this week we discussed a lot about the new character “Monkey”. It starts with that during our playtest, the win rate of human side is much higher than alien side. So we’ll either nerf the human players or buff the the alien side.

Another thing is that if there is too many human players with the same job, they might use up all the ideas. It is also frustrating. So we have to limit some human players’ access to the secret message by giving them a category of words instead of detail. Let the human side also take part in guessing instead of observing.

Here goes our “Monkey”, this character will receive limited information and might mislead humans. Firstly we only tried it with conditions, like 6 players can have one monkey player but 7 players should not have one.

Soon I realize that it’s not a competitive game after all. Monkey did raise alien side’s win rate effectively and it is fun to watch. And alien might feel that they have a company on guessing things. It’s a win-win strategy. So let it appear in every game is acceptable.

So objectives and aims should not easily change unless there is enough reason. Party game is to make people compete and laugh together.

Will information games combine well with party games? Somehow it reminds me of Overcooked. There are also games like the Cooking Simulator to give the player a chance to destroy the kitchen. Cooking meals for customer needs collaboration and accuracy. And games can make it fun by setting barriers and traps. With conversations and rhetoric, a spy can get enough info, but we deprive it of players. These are the barriers alike to cooking games.

Once in our class, Prof. King showed us a way to make good games: change only one rules with a classic genre. This is really helpful in our development. We didn’t start with this idea, but it suits well with our game.