Develog 9- Star Cards

Devlog Prompt: What connections can you make between the design process undertaken by Richard Garfield (and team) and your own team's iterative process in the past week? In what ways was Altice's chapter helpful?

In our design process of Star Cards, I found a couple of similarities between the iterative design process my group had taken, and the iterative process taken by Richard Garfield and his team.  In the process of my team designing our game, Star Cards, we first thought of different power-ups for cards so that they gave players a way to control some of the randomness and chance of drawing a random hand at the beginning. For our game the theme is Star Wars, and at the start of the game you are given a team by randomly drawing a card that decides whether you are a Jedi or Sith/Light or Dark side. With red cards being Jedi/Light side and black cards being Sith/Dark side. We had to make sure cards powers or abilities were evenly balanced between light cards and dark cards, that way no team had an a greater advantage when playing. In reading, Design Evolution of Magic:The Gathering, I found that Garfield and his team also ran into the problem of deciding how to balance card abilities in order not to make them over powered, which is what my team had to do in balancing the Jedi and Sith card abilities. "First of all, You can't have any bad cards-people wouldn't play with them. In fact you want to prevent too much range for the utility of cards, because players will only play with the best-why make cards people won't play with?" (Garfield pg.541). In our game, we had to spread out different cards with different abilities to counter act different abilities of other cards in order to balance card strength to not make any cards too overpowered. The only exception we made to this was the addition of the Joker card that could negate any other card effect or ability in the game when played, and we only did this because there is only 2 joker cards and they are very rare. "It was not just determining the right card mix that players and designers found challenging." (Garfield pg.546). My team found this to be true as well, when trying to balance which cards had abilities, we made it face cards, Jokers, and aces, and on balancing how many cards to play with, we chose to play with two decks or 104 cards. "Magic’s simple rotational gesture exploded the playing card design space, prompting designers to reconsider how cards, as a material form, could be used for games beyond the standard suited deck." (Altice pg. 36). I found this helpful from the Altice reading, because it showed the use of rotation of cards to add to the game, and my team looked into how we could add to the normal suited deck by giving certain cards abilities, and allowing the card abilities to play off the theme of the game. For example, the Obi wan/ Yoda card does a "Jedi mind trick" ability and you are allowed to look at any players hand.