#systemexperience

Final Blog post

Yukadis- an interactive card game designed to encourage players to reach outside their comfort zone in a humorous and enjoyable atmosphere.

Academic description

One of the underlying messages we want to bring forward through our game project is to bring awareness towards the pressure of social normality’s. All of our cards individually challenge at least one belief that society has weather it is interacting with a stranger or taking risks publicly. Our game encourages these behaviors to occur more and therefore become a normality. Our game may not have been risky in the 90’s before social media and technology was a big part of society. For example, one of our cards require a player to ask for a stranger’s number (or email), this would not have been so hard because people already did these tasks. Communicating with people face to face was a norm oppose to today’s society where most interactions are done online through social platforms. We also noticed that card games do not get as much recognition as game apps/console games, which also contributes to our project of changing social norms.  

Reflective statement

Reflecting back on day 1, we have come a long way from our first intentions. Our first intentions being inspired from Fortnite emotes/dances as we wanted to focus on a game that is immensely successful today. We then started to stray away from the actual Fortnite dance itself and focus on one of the systems that play a huge part in Fortnite, proximity. From this point on we started prototyping and playtesting learning that these two processes were crucial to improving our game. Finding that our game needed players to have a motivation to win after realising during playtesting that our players sometimes lost focus while playing. We also started to think about the different elements each of us liked about playing card games and relating it to the play aesthetics. Personally, I enjoy challenging games and I am a very competitive player when playing any game, so I thought if we brought in a motivation for the players, our game would become more competitive which it did. The motivation being that the loser of the round was punished by being forced to complete a challenge/dare that is chosen from the other players collaboratively. After bringing this rule a lot of our players had more motivation oppose to having no consequence from previous play testing with different groups, as the winner did not have a glorious win or ‘safe’ victory with no consequence for the loser. We thought of other ways to improve our game and give our players more victory by bringing advantages and disadvantages for the different levels of our card. My initial idea was to bring in different colors to describe how extreme each challenge was associating the colors with a traffic light. As a red light means stop so it prevents a player from processing forward towards their goal or destination, while green cards meant go also known as our easy challenges that did not stop a player from coming closer to a victory. After creating this idea we also came up with different risks that the red cards could become a disadvantage to not only the player but also the opponents, with receiving an opportunity to place another player further away from the objective only after completing the task. However there is much I would have changed or added to our game such as adding maybe an analogy that relates to coming closer together and incorporating an illustration on the cards as we ended up not illustrating traffic lights on our cards. But an analogy of maybe the middle objects being an attic that protects that players from a tornado known as a dare card for the loser, and each of the cards illustrated as obstacles that one may find in the event of a tornado such as wind, flying objects etc. Also our games audience focuses towards 16-35+ with players that are in a public space as our challenges require a lot of interactions with strangers. So maybe creating another rendition of stack of cards that can be played in a home. But overall looking back on our play testing systems  process I believe we have succeeded at understanding how to create and improve a game and focus on systems in depth.

Play Experience Description

Tagline

Yukadis is an interactive card game designed to encourage players to reach outside their comfort zone in a humorous and enjoyable atmosphere.

Rules of play

Start with having each player located at a fair distance away from the centre and from other players. Forming a circle around the centre, where the objects are placed (Objects = Players - 1)

Evenly distribute 3-4 (cards vary depending on the amount of players) random cards from the deck, to each player, choose a starting player to start the round.

At the start of the round, each player passes (switches) a card to the player on their left, when everyone gets a card the start player begins the round. The player is to read it aloud to the group.  

He/she has a choice to do the dare on the card, if he/she doesn’t, they must take a measurable step back and keep the card. If they successfully complete the challenge card, they stay in their position and that card is now dead. The player on the left is next and so on until it makes a full round.

Cards have different colours (Red, Green, Yellow) Red cards - hardest cards, If red cards have been completed the player that beholds the card has the power to send another player back TWO steps. Green - green cards have no ability, usually the easy card. Yellow - These cards are the medium level cards, when done you have the power to send a player back ONE step

When doing the challenges, players MUST NOT let other individuals know that you are apart of the game other than the players that are participating.

The person who hands you your card is the judge of deciding if you completed the task, this must be done wisely.

All challenges that do not have a timer on the card must stay until the game is completed.

Each round requires a ‘switch’ and all previous rules abide, until a player has finished their cards, they have an immediate safe object, and once the player picks up an object from the centre, other players from their position can then attempt to grab an object.

The player left with no object must do an ultimate dare, from the deck of cards that is chosen from the other safe players collaboratively. This player has no choice, he/she MUST do the chosen card.  

Players are influenced to use their phones to record anything they want!

Tips-  

Players should look to give the hardest card over to the person beside them. This will force the other player to want to take a step back, however you’d be taking a risk if that person does decide to do so then you could be a target.  

Also think about targeting the closest person to the circle, but also keep in mind that the player closest to the circle has the highest chance of winning and the object of the game is to secure safety, so choosing to put a player that is already far from winning to secure your spot is not a bad idea too.

Youtube Link

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTF4LXydb4Q