MilkyWay Mayhem
"Get your spaceship on and buckle up for an extraordinary 2v2 cosmic clash! Make your way through the colorful corridors of an alien spaceship to find and use the power crystals that activate the ship's generators before the opposition can moo-ove! Will the cows use the generators to power on the transporters and hoof it back to earth? Or will the aliens take victory by engaging the engine generators and rocketing into orbit to take their Bovine experiments back to their home world? In this intergalactic escapade, there's no room for cow-ardice!"
Initial Design and Concepting
​During the Initial Concepting my team and I bounced around ideas and talked about MDA and how we wanted the game to flow. We decided we wanted a 2v2 where both teams are trying to get to the end by activating generators and they have some way to deflect the other player each turn. We also knew we wanted the game to feel fast paced and ever evolving so that the players don't get bored or feel as if the game is stagnant. After we got the basis that we wanted, we decided we needed a way for players to interact with the opposing team. This Is when we decided on the module/action card system where each player during their turn can play a module and action card to cause some sort of effect on the given color and or shape such as "players swap locations with each other". After this it was just about making different action and module cards and balancing the amount of generators and how each player's turn works. After everything was finished and we had finished all of our playtesting and tweaking I got all the files together and sent them off to get printed.
Play Testing
I was mainly in charge of mechanics, organization, and playtesting. We had two main playtesting sessions where we got students from different majors to playtest and try out the game. Both sessions were done with paper models that we made to test out mechanics. The first run through was very rough and took far too long exceeding the 30 minute time limit by about an hour. We compensated for this by lowering the amount of generators and messing around with where the tiles were to never fully trap a player. The second round of playtesting was shorter but still over by about thirty minutes so we added more movement cards and reduced the generators to just two per team eventually leading to a fast paced and quick to play board game.
Presentation and Final Piece
During the final presentation we presented our board game to the whole class. I talked mainly about mechanics, MDA, and flow. We then got people to play our game using only our instructions and though not all players played the game correctly the game never broke and was enjoyed by the whole class. Overall my team and I were able to develop a professional level game that allowed us to learn the basics of game design and present what we had learned.
