LEVEL 4 GAMES - ETHAN PECK

 section 1: what changed from our original idea? we started with conversations on ideas, our conversations revolved around having a star wars themed board game with a hexagonal map not too dissimilar to catan, on this map players would have free movement across connecting lines we decided that movement would be done with a D6 dice (this was the same across all versions of the game), and there were planets the player could go to get resources and tools to complete the bounties. we found this first idea interesting and we wanted to work with some of the mechanics such as tools, bounties and planets but we didn't like the idea for the map and felt like there were too many different ideas happening at the same time. we then conceptualized and made the second iteration of the game, this iteration stripped down some of the complexities of the original idea and made it far more playable, this made this version easy to play test and improve. this version of the game had a semi linear map w...

 introduction: these two projects were great for skill development especially the game jam and most importantly these projects were fun and helped me to learn many other things on top of skill development. the purpose of this blog post is to explain the process of development for both projects, what I have managed to learn from completing both of these projects and an overall reflection on them.  section 1: recreating the classroom in unreal  the first thing we did towards recreating the room was to get real measurements and images of the room as reference, this was to ensure that I could make the room as accurate as possible when I made it in unreal. I then started blocking out the room in unreal ensuring I got the scaling correct, I did end up making the room in unreal slightly larger than the real life room, I felt making it slightly scaled up made the room look better and allowed the player character to navigate the final room. I then blocked out the main details of t...

  Pandemic: Set up/understanding: The rule book and the instructions are far too confusing and wordy for how simple the gameplay is. I would simplify the wording and rule book to help every player to understand the game properly.   Mechanics: The game has multiple different difficulties, we used the introductory mode as we were learning the game. Even for an introductory difficulty it still felt too easy, I found that I wasn’t able to learn of the game’s mechanics in this mode as it was so easy to win, I would’ve made the introductory difficulty harder but still find a balance to ensure that every player can still learn every mechanic comfortably in a single playthrough. Pandemic has multiple mechanics at play, the game is mainly dictated with cards and a pawn this is how the players interact with game. An interesting mechanic is that every player is issued with a role to play. Every player receives a random card with their role ...