Experience of Testing a Board Game

As our 'Sensei' says, "To become a game designer one has to have the experience of testing games made by others. So that one knows what are the things one would want to avoid while designing one's own game."

And so our batch was given an opportunity to test a couple of board games made by the BAJM batch of our institute a few weeks earlier. Well to be frank nobody had any idea what we were supposed to do, besides of course playing the game. Made into a group of 4 we started with the game based on the book 'Who moved my Cheese?' known as the self motivational guide. Well talking about the game, it was a multi-board game, one meant for the main game and two others for the maze race part. To enter the maze race you have to land on a specific spot on the main board after with you get to draw a card from the action deck and if luckily it has 'Maze Race' written on it then everyone has to jump into the maze race temporarily. This aspect kinda reminded me of another game we had played a week before, 'The Lord of the Rings'. Don't get me wrong, the two games are way apart but the multi-board mechanism made me do the connect. Other than the card drawing spots the rest of the board seemed empty and so failed to deliver any kind of action itself. While playing the first time we barely landed on any of the card drawing spots which further brought down the fun quotient. In the second game a player manged to land on card space and also drew out the maze race card. So now both of us were on the maze board. Since this mini game was supposed to have all the action of the game packed in it, we had high expectations, well what can I say we were disappointed again. The solution of the maze was so obvious that it was now all the matter of who gets higher numbers on the dice, And thus the only fun part of the game was ruined as it failed to challenge the player. By now we were starting to get the big difference between testing a prototype and playing a full fledged completed game. We now realized how each finished game  must have been put through a lot of rounds of testing before finally publishing it. After the maze race which wrapped up quickly we returned to the main  board. The rest of the game went almost event-less.

Well now came the hard part that we hadn't done before. We were supposed to talk with the designer in the presence of our HOD. We started off the with the most common problem, the lack of action in the main board of the game. We also pointed out how the probability of landing in a maze race was reduced by the fact that two events had to occur mutually in order to trigger the race, and how the maze itself was a drag and too obvious for a challenge. Now we were feeling like professional critiques and so we started suggesting additions and modifications, like including more mini-games or altering the main board  to make it more action pact. Now the HOD moved into the discussion. He told us that despite being interesting and tempting to follow our suggestions were useless as they were solely based on our player instinct. He said that we were taking the game away from the book on which it was supposed to be based on. Though in its current state the game was far away from the book, our additions also were no better. He asked us to read the book first and make suggestion later and till then we were only supposed to point out the weakness of the game. He then turned to the designer and told him to start work on the next prototype and  to try to bring it closer to the soul of the book or else he might end up making another maze game. Now we realized what we were doing wrong, for most of the time we were looking at the game with a player's perspective while we were supposed to look with a designer's perspective. Not that we have understood that perspective now but at least we're starting to. I failed to take notes of the comments made by our HOD otherwise you also could've had a piece of the guy's wisdom. Well thus we concluded the testing  of the first game.

The second game was much more fun than the maze thing. Well it was based on a particular event from Hindu mythology, a gambling game that was played between Yudhishtir and Duryodhan, the one which started the epic war of Mahabharata. The designer took the board layout and added his own rules to make a new gambling game. In this version of the game all players play the part of Yudhishtir so everyone is already destined to lose, the only way to win the game is to be the last an to lose. The Game works on complex reverse psychological mechanics. When a player advances on the board he wins all the coins placed as a bet by the other player but he keeps loosing the game itself as the goal of the game is not to reach the finish first but to be the last man standing on the board. The game already felt great as it is and the gambling part raised noise in the hall and we had a lot of fun and I think we may have gotten carried away as nobody was testing the game anymore we were rather just playing it now. When we finished we realized of s**t we forgot to write anything down to talk about. So this time when the designer came in all we could tell him was that the board could be visually more interesting. But then suddenly something hit my mind and I said "The game was fun with the gambling and all but I doubt the same level of success if the game was meant for four players instead of two". The HOD seemed to agree and I was going "hurray" in my head, it was like u hit a bulls eye in the dark. Apparently I  was right coz when the guy returned after two weaks with a prototype for 4 players we didn't find it that appealing since it ultiplied the game time by 4. Well after two rounds of testing each of these games we felt like some elite testers, but our faces were soon rubbed in the fact that it's a lie by our HOD. He told us that we were still not thinking like game designers.

 At the end of all this nobody has any idea what a game designer's perspective is, but I guess it will reveal itself soon or at least I hope it does.

INDIA as a game market: is it, or is it not?

India is a very prominent country when it comes to visual media, with it's own self sufficient film industry the Bollywood and a growing animation industry but what about the game industry, yes it is growing slowly in the country but then why is it not considered as a market by the game developers. let's take a look into these points and understand what we can do to make India a potential market for the game industry.

Where is the Indian game industry standing?

As per the 'Gaming Market research 2010 for the Italian Trade commission' by Tata Strategic Management Group The gaming Market in India was estimated at 239 million USD at CY 2009

was expected to register a growth rate of 53% p.a. to reach 1298 million in 2013 which includes revenues from consumer market and service market. The console gaming segment had the highest share of 42% followed by the mobile gaming segment at 28%, while PC and online segment had rest 30%.

 Why does the Indian Game industry fall behind from the global market?

 The India game industry is tiny when compared to the global counterpart, the reason being that it is not considered an industry at all. What I mean to say is, sure there are game companies and other companies monitoring the industry but the common people in India have no idea that game making is an industry in India. Sure they play games and love doing that but they don't know or rather they don't care who's making those games. But this doesn't mean that the industry isn't growing. There are many game developing companies coming up these days. But again these companies face a problem, the lack of skilled people who actually know how to make games. This leads us to another question why is there a shortage of 'game educated' personals.

Why there is a shortage of game guys?

Indian Parents don't appreciate games as an entertainment for children

The answer seems obvious because there are very less institutes who teach game all over India. Though that is a fact that the institutes who really teach something globally relevant about game making in India can be counted on your fingers like Seamless Education Academy, Pune. but that is not the only reason, another problem is that students as well as their parents don't know that such an industry exists in India.Games as an entertainment is not very favorable in India. Those who know about it are not sure if it can give a career to a student. Indian parents don't realise the potential of this industry. Yet another reason for this problem is lack of attention from the government to the industry in economic form which restricts the growth of the industry.

What can common people do to bring the market to India?

The next big problem in India is that there is no market for games. Most of the people either play free games or play the cracked version of games, only a very few people who we call gamers actually buy games to play. Due to this no developers or publishers release games in India. Even the India developers make games for the US, European, Australian and Japanese markets but not for India. so what can we do? we can start buying games,we can start regarding gaming as a prominent source of entertainment, we can start recognizing the industry as valuable one and show the developers that they can make profit in India. this will ultimately help our own Industry. We can also setup more institutes who can actually make skilled personals. 

NFS MW 2005 an all time fav racing game

This is my research on a very popular racing game NFS MW 2005 which is quite old but still has a lot of fans. This was my first research assignment as a game student. Most Wanted was the 9th installment of the Need for speed series and probably the most appreciated one.

What was the game about?

 The game is about a guy(the Player) who drives into the city of  Rockport in his BMW M3 GTR ( Depicted as the Hero car of the game). He runs into a group of racers lead by Razor Callahan the guy on the no.15 spot of the blacklist, which happens to be the list of all most wanted racers of Rockport. Razor tricks you by messing with your ride to win a race and take your car. You are then helped by a chick named Mia who happens to be an undercover cop and a guy named Rog to get a new ride and take on the blacklist, and while all this happens Razor reaches the top of the blacklist. And hence starts your mission of beating the blacklist and retrieving your ride.

Have a look at the final pursuit of the game and you'll see why it's so awesome:

The Awesome Gameplay

pursuit screen

racing screen.

The gameplay of most wanted is superb. You can play a lot of different types of events other than just simple racing like speed-trap races, lap knockouts, tollbooth timers etc. And the signature feature of the NFS series the cop chase part is awesome two with the UI changing at the time of pursuit and at the time of a race event. The storyline gets a small grudge like thing to the players mind which makes the gameplay event more fun.

who was the game meant for?

The game covers and banners say that the game is meant for the teen age group, but the audience of the game are not limited to teens. It attracted anyone who likes speed, adrenaline and action. One of the reason's for this was some very popular movies like the fast and furious series which shared some similarities with the game and this extended the audience for the first racing game that was attatched to a storyline.

Who made this awesome game possible?

The game was published by Electronic Arts(EA) co. and was developed in the collaboration of EA-Black Box. We've gotta say they did an awesome job.

The market of the game.

The game was made across almost all platforms available in 2005, i.e windows, PS2, Xbox, GameCube, Nintendo DS, GBA and recently in 2012 a PS3 version was also made.

However the first launch was made on Nov 11, 2005 on DS which is way more insignificant compared to the real deal, which was released on PC, Xbox on 15th of the same month in the North American continent. The game  hit the European market on 25th Nov and Japan on 22nd Dec that year.

How did the market receive the game?

The game as we all know was very popular all across the globe. Just the Demo version of the game had more than 300,000 downloads and it sold over 6 million copies of the game. It was given the game of the month achievement for the month of November 2005.

Why it became so popular?

The sharp graphics of the game made better by the HDDR motion blur tech and the awesome sound effects and cool sound tracks were some of the most appreciated features of the game. Other features liked by the audience were:-

 1.The game was the first racing game to be put on a storyline which by itself was quite lame but with the game it made much sense and was interesting.

 2.Contrary to conventional racing games released before it this game had interconnected map structure and an open world feature wich made exploration a very pleasing experience about the game.

 3.No. of different modes of races and pursuits also made the game worth it.

 4.You can directly jump into any accessible race without having to go there, a feature also found in NFS U2 but better implemented in MW.

And So, as they say it was rightly named NFS most wanted which is rumored to be a market trick to make NFS most wanted the "most waned" NFS of all time.