Matthew Jordan - The tic tac wars

   
     
             Going into the third week of the capstone project we were finally able to get our prototype into QA testing and it went a lot better then I could imagine. Everyone who played the game was having fun with the mechanics that were in the game and said how they wanted to play some more. Watching the testers play helped us determine where we wanted the game to go. Most of players spent their playtime just trying to kill one another in various different ways like trapping someone behind the walls and pelting them with bullets. The idea of building and destroying walls was received well but most people wanted them to be tweaked. At the end of the QA session we had a lot of great suggestions and recommendations about what people  wanted to see in our game.

       Of course I enjoyed finding out so many people liked our prototype, but what I found more interesting was the context the players decided to give to the prototype when they did not receive one. The first group of testers started saying it was a war between tic tacs who decided to start shooting each other with giant sugar cubes. Next came the great snow ball war where everyone was saying they were throwing around deadly snowballs. Hearing these wacky scenarios and seeing the testers having fun comes as sort of a relief to me because over the last few weeks me and my team have been told that our context needed to be more realistic or else it would effect how fun the game was. When first creating one of our capstone games I had envisioned this sort of world that was similar to the world in Who Framed Roger Rabbit or Cool World. In both of these worlds there is a clear distinction between how cartoons work and how real life works and they are still able to co-exist. A anvil to the head in this type of world is no big deal because of things like toon physics and hammer space. Yet after hearing the advice of our fellow peers we decided to go with a more realistic approach. Now I don't mind doing a more realistic context, in fact it's been fun doing the research about Prohibition and what weapons were commonly used in the 1920's. Games grounded mostly in reality are not bad some of my favorite games are based in reality. I just believe that a game that is considered "weird" can still be fun even when the premise is far away from reality.

Even though both games have both changed from their original designs I am still excited to work on both of them for the rest of the semester.