Yesterday was my first solo presentation at a professional event. I presented on “Remote Testing of Tabletop Games” for an event with the Indiana UXPA. I feel a little embarrassed about how much time I spent on an event that was only observed by 11 people. But the event was recorded, so maybe other people will see it in the future. And it was a good step forward for my professional path, and for my desire to share what I’ve learned with others.
This morning I removed food as a mechanism from Villanostra. It was just another way to add stress to the villagers (if they couldn’t afford it) that could be mitigated by some of the buildings. But as the buildings have been updated to experiment with new moral-related mechanisms, only the Granary remained as a building related to food. I’ll figure out something different to do with it.
This puts more pressure on a good design for the Village Life cards for each villager at the end of the year. Food mostly caused stress for poor villagers, so the Village Life cards need to do likewise. But the end-of-year processing for each villager was getting far too complex, and needed to be streamlined. Food was the least interesting mechanism in the list, so it needed to go.
I’ve had a timed coding evaluation for a job opening waiting for almost a week, and I was determined to do it yesterday. But then our AC went out and someone was here working on it all morning. I spent part of the morning on FreeCodeCamp learning more about JavaScript, but by 10am realized I needed to make more progress on my Remote Playtesting of Tabletop Games presentation for tonight. So I worked on that until about 1pm, when the AC guy finished up. I took a break for lunch and went through the coding evaluation. It was pretty easy, technically, compared to the stuff I’ve been learning in FreeCodeCamp. But it can also be tricky to make sure you’re following the instructions correctly, even if you write code that does what you think it should. So, being careful to read and re-read the requirements, it still took me almost all of the 90 minutes available.
After that I had about a 20 minute break before a screening phone call for a UX Design position. (And during that break people showed up to clean our rain gutters!) I spent some time on their website and going over my notes on the position before the call. It seemed to go well, and unless there are other candidates who are far more qualified, I expect to have a second interview.
Karen came home while I was wrapping up that call, and we barely had time for dinner before I attended my first event with React.Indy. They were super friendly and I got a lot of great info about resources for getting into JavaScript development.
(After that we planned meals for next week, I made a grocery list, and ordered groceries online for me and also for my sister. Collapsed in bed around 11pm. Whew.)
Back to thinking about annual life events for villagers. The d10 – stress die roll I used previously did a good job of cycling the villagers through injury and death, but it was abstract and slow. In my last playtest, however, I forgot to include anything like it, and the villagers were too prosperous and effective for the game to be interesting. So, I think a set of cards is the way to go. They should almost always increase the villager’s stress–“stress” was originally “age”, until I realized I could combine the two–but they’re also an opportunity for more interesting and engaging things to happen. It’s a little tricky coming up with ideas that don’t overlap too much with stuff that’s already modeled by other game mechanisms, especially related to work.
My epiphany this morning was to design each life event card so that it includes a first-person quote from the villager. Instead of the Robbery card just saying “This villager gains stress and loses coins”, now it starts with “They took so much stuff. I don’t feel safe in my own home anymore.” Designing the effects of the card from there already seems to be inspiring me to come up with more creative ways to model the event. And I think the players will find it more engaging.
Spent too much time yesterday posting on social media to announce my presentation for tomorrow evening. The problem with posting on those media is that it’s very, very hard to do without also getting distracted with what I see on the media. Between crafting the message, tailoring it for each outlet, and the distractions, a lot of the day gets consumed.
I have a coding evaluation I need to perform for a job I applied for, and I hoped to do it yesterday afternoon. Unfortunately, by the time I sat down to do it, I didn’t feel like I had enough time to complete it before Karen would come home. (Turns out, I was right.) I took that time instead to make more progress in FreeCodeCamp.org. Not wasted time. It looks like the lessons I’m going over now are applicable to that evaluation, so that’s good. I want to do that evaluation this morning, but remembered people will be here this morning to fix the air conditioning, which will be a distraction. I guess I’ll do more FCC exercises until they leave.
But I also need to finish assembling and polishing my presentation for tomorrow evening. Gonna be a busy day.
This morning I picked up a Villanostra playtest that I started yesterday. Things are going too smoothly for the village. I accidentally removed the end-of-year mechanism that causes the villagers stress (and previously, injury as well) at the same time that I unthinkingly added the new support mechanism to counteract stress. They are far too happy. I was trying to simplify the game so I could move on to testing the new buildings, but by changing the testing context I rendered the test invalid. Oops.
I spent much of yesterday working on a presentation for Remote Testing of Tabletop Games for this week’s Indiana User Experience Professionals meeting. I was able to run through a first draft of the presentation with Mike Miserendino, the chapter president, and he gave me a lot of great feedback and ideas. I was worried about not having enough to say, and now I’m finding instead that it’s much too long. I need to trim it back, and yet also make more of it relevant to the UX professionals in the audience.
I was also concerned about being nervous during the presentation, but in the practice with Mike I could already tell that I’m so excited by the topic that stage fright isn’t a problem. It might also help that I recently listened to this Choiceology podcast on stage fright and reframing it as excitement.
This morning I started a new solo playtest, using feedback from the last multiplayer playtest. First year went very smoothly, all three projects were completed. Second year looks to be well-funded already, will probably complete all three buildings again. Probably too easy! But the main thing I want to test in this solo is the effects of the buildings, so getting them into play earlier is probably a good thing. At least, for now.
I’m struggling with how to process the changes to each villager’s life at the end of the year. I’ve tentatively added a support mechanism, and checks against the village’s moral values. I still think life event cards are a very interesting idea, but they seem like they would add such variability that I should get the basic mechanisms in place first. (Similar to how there’s no event deck yet for the entire village, even though that’s also something I think is important.)
I think a lot of my uncertainty comes to not having tested the buildings. They’re the core mechanism of the game, and I need to make sure that they are on the right track before I try changing a lot more things. Problem is that it takes almost two years of play before the buildings can start having any effect. I guess I should start some playtests at year 3, with random buildings in play, to see what happens.
I want Villanostra to show (among other things) relationships between the moral values of a community and the well-being of the people that live there. Right now it feels like I’m modeling some aspects of the villagers’ well-being, but not others.
There are lots of ways that researchers measure well-being, but the ones used at Sharecare.com seemed to be well-suited for my model. They look at the following aspects:
It’s somewhat appalling to realize that most of our games–at least, the games that aren’t purely about physically destroying enemies–measure success / victory by no metric other than the financial. That’s certainly endemic in western society, but all games are educational: game designers should be teaching people that other things in life have value too.
A first idea to model the Community aspects of well-being is to compare each villager’s moral values with the same community moral value measures the players use to earn victory points. A high correlation will make the villager feel like they belong, and reduce their stress. A low correlation will increase their stress, and possibly add to the community’s unrest.
A first idea to model the Social aspects of well-being is to give each villager a support metric. Different life events each year affect the support. Higher support helps a villager recover each year from stress. I’m not thrilled about adding a new metric to track for 3-15 villagers, though. And it seems like support could be related how the villager’s values match those of their neighbors (especially if they value Loyalty!). Also considering how life events like Marriage and Having a Child would affect support. Lots to think upon.