Week 11 - Making a Game With a Title too Long to Cite, an Isekai Tale

This last Tuesday, we introduced our game- nicknamed ‘Isekai’- to the rest of our class. In taking ‘Battle Battle’ and attempting to make it different while keeping its original idea intact, we created a meme-filled atrocity… but that was the entire point. The game functioned similarly to the initial game, but we added things such as Bosses, Player Characters, and Minions- revamping the entire process. Our group, along with all of the rest, kept one preexisting concept, tokens. At first I thought- why is that? However, after reading the Board Games chapter of Mary Flanagan’s I realized exactly why. Our game follows the pattern that Mancala does, resembling “contemporary game boards by having territories (zones for play), actions (moving stones), rules (direction on board, number of tokens distributed), tokens (pieces that represent the player, the player’s team, or other types of subject positions), and feedback (amounts collected)”  (Flanagan). Many games follow this pattern, even those you wouldn’t expect like Werewolf or Cards Against Humanity.

For example, Uno has territories in the card colors, actions in some of the wild cards, rules on the cards - like plus 2 -, tokens being ourselves, and feedback with our amount of cards. Our game also follows this pattern that Mancala, the first board game, does despite being mainly a game played with dice. However, this line is easily blurred with our addition of a board on Friday. “A board is mentioned in conjunction with the dice game…” just like our game, ‘Isekai’ (Flanagan). This shows that the two have long worked in conjunction, and that our dice game is the possible beginning to a different project. Custom cards were also used. They were how we labeled our Players, Bosses, and Minions and like ancient times, “used in conjunction with game boards [...] far earlier [than dice] in Asia” (Flanagan). 

Using dice and cards along with a board were shown in our game, with cards and dice being the centerpiece of all the games presented- “the fact that [the] early mancala boards were developed and customized speaks to the aesthetic importance of games and how the play experience has, for thousands of years, been intertwined with aesthetics” (Flanagan). We designed our game’s board to have a simple aesthetic with increased functionality, but the idea that this thought process has existed for a long time is an impressive one. This only goes to show that human minds have not changed over the course of thousands of years, only our surroundings. The fact that all of the groups, including our own, reached similar conclusions with the limited information we were given - proves this. 

However, it was not only history lessons that I learned. My group spent ~20 hours working on our project to make it balanced and fun, with Wednesday, November 3rd being our longest work session with about nine consecutive hours clocked. In that time, we learned how tedious and important balancing truly was. Only through many playtests did some cards and their faults appear, only through one did we need to revamp a card. Eventually, we realized only by changing the system could some errors be fixed. After playtesting on Tuesday, that is when the idea of a board was brought up. This helped clarify many things, and ultimately made the game much smoother. This week was an important lesson not only in history, but the entire game making process. For my next and final project endeavor- for this class- I hope to bring these lessons and create something very amazing.