Call of Duty: War zone (Board Game)
Role: Lead Designer, Board Designer, Documenter
Overview:
The game challenge was to create an existing digital game and find a way to transform the theme into a playable board game. I picked out Call of Duty as my main theme and utilized other game concepts such as Clue into the game. The game is played by players of 2, where each teams are assigned 3 soldier classes in a grid environment and are suppose to eliminate the other teams.
What I did:
Researched all the CoD weapons stats on the internet and used the gathered data to create our game cards.
Created a board layout from scratch and used various obstacles in the environment.
Gathered all assets used for teams and crafted some of the game pieces.
Postmortem
For the things that went well for this game, I believe we’ve managed well with gathering materials, especially with the game pieces and the card layouts. Knowing nothing about 3d printing, I decided to run to game depot and purchase at least 12 figurines and some life stones for tracking. Other things that went well were the basic understanding with the rules, even if they seem a bit lengthy. A lot of people understood how to play the game and had fun with the challenge. The last thing that went well was our presentation was well explanatory.
For the stuff that we should’ve corrected on this project, we never had any good way of communicating with each other beside the UAT emails. The only way we had kept tabs on is if we meet up in the commons area. The next error that we found in our game was the lack of exploring within the game board. Not a lot of people wanted to run to a few corners of the map, even if they had both weapons and perks pickup. The whole game flow was all concentrated within the center of the game, which lacks any type of barrier to deter both teams from exploring the other areas. I had made sure players were able to distinguish these classes by color code. Finally, the last part that went sideways was the theme of the map. I had followed a sample from one of the Call of Duty Maps online called Crackdown. There were some templates, which I could not find the right ones online such as scattered trash or any materials added into it.
There are still a few things to go over, but we need to study for next time. The first is to understand 3d modeling since none of us even know how to use it and finding the right 3D model for our pieces; this way we can avoid buying pieces from a store. The next thing is to establish a solid way of communicating with each other. We could try calling each other rather than messaging and we need to show each other’s work to receive proper feedback for needed changes. The last lesson that I will need to rectify is to find a good source of clip arts to add more into the board design. Without anything to distinguish any theme of a death match, the stage doesn’t convince players they are in a hot spot environment.