Tuesday, November 26, 2013

11/26

This was a short week for our group to accomplish a good amount of work. After play testing our game for the first time last class, overall as a group, we were very pleased. We decided to stick to our original plan of how to move around the map, and we also liked the way the zombies popped up on the map. We decided to incorporate a rule where every other day we would add new zombie tokens to spaces that had no zombies. This new rule made the game more challenging and did not allow one player to dominate the area right around their base.
 After class and over the past few days our group individually worked on separate pieces of our game. Evan took care of the resource cards, Amanda is working on the board, Pj worked on the objective cards, and I made the day tracker. As of last class we were still waiting on a couple of game pieces. We are on a good pace to having a complete, functioning board game that is fun, easy to understand, and entertaining.

Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Class 11/14

In class on Thursday, November 14th, our group decided on what game pieces we needed to have in our game. We also edited the paths on the draft game board that will affect the difficulty level in obtaining resources. The final paths will be determined after play testing next Thursday.  Also during class, our group was made aware by Professor Parks that in order to have our final game pieces in time, we needed to order them very soon.  We all left class that day after deciding on a meeting time during the week.


On Tuesday, November 19th, we all met in the student center for a couple hours to work on game mechanics. Paul had ordered all of the character game pieces so that they will be delivered in time by the day the game is due. I had written down a number of things we still had to do before next class. My list included creating "moon phase" bonus cards, resource cards, zombie tokens, and deciding on the strengths and weaknesses of each component of the game.  Paul suggested the number of resource cards needed to create men and buildings in the colonies. Also, we all contributed to how a player should be able to kill zombies and attack other players.  I had already created the draft game board, but there are a number of cards that still need to be made by Thursday's  class. We split up the duties as equally as possible: Mark and Paul have to make the bonus cards and zombie tokens and Evan is in charge of making all of the resource cards.

We also have a first draft of the computer-designed game board that I created over the weekend:

Thursday, November 7, 2013

Week One

On Thursday, October 31, every student in our Collaborative Writing class presented a unique concept for a new board game. Many diverse ideas were presented. After the presentations, five games were picked to be developed over the course of the next several weeks. Accordingly, students were split into groups to work on each project.

Paul Munnelly's idea for a board game, Zombie Colonies, received a high amount of votes. Joining him to work on this project is Amanda Licciardi, Mark Gainfrancesco, and myself.

At the end of the class last week, the group met for the first time and Paul went into more details of the game. Currently, the game is being designed to be played with four players. The basic concept for the board layout is as follows: 
 
The group is excited to continue working on the game, and it will be interesting to see it progress. The major theme component, zombies, will undoubtedly spice up the dramatic elements of the game.