ePortfolio Post 1 (Rule Sheet)

Section 06 Group 3

    Apologies in advance as both my partner and I believed Solitaire was used as simply an example, and we were meant to use any card game. For our game we created a heavily altered version of "UNO", in which double the amount of colors and numbers would be used on the cards. Gameplay in general would be more fast and complex with players asking themselves why they would willingly endure such repetitive torture.

Original Ideas and rules

    While developing the rule sheet we were attempting to figure out ways we could modify the game to make it more than just a direct ripoff by simply changing the title. We decided that by adding additional rules we could amp up the games difficulty significantly by throwing in 4 addition sets of colors and numbers to the card set (1-8 for example instead of the usual 1-4). Along side that all multiplying actions cards would be doubled, for example the "draw 4" card would be modified to "draw 8". Speaking of blatantly copying the name, our original title was going to be "DOS", but we quickly found out that this was taken and was a legitimate game. At this point we figured to simply bump that number up by one, to find no popular games by that name, and only a single comedic image displaying the title (seen below). 

                                                  

    Continuing with the theme of making UNO more difficult, we made it so players would have to place 3 cards at a time, instead of the usual "1". If they didn't have three cards to place, they would have to draw three more. To spice up the game some more, we added our own unique action card. The "Steal Card" gave the player the ability to replace that action card with a card from anyone else's deck, assuming they could guess what card they had correctly.

Revisions and Rule iterations

    It became quickly apparent that a game structured like this would not only potentially take hours, but would be very boring to play. Our first solution to help cap the games duration was to highly recommend each run had only two players (unlike UNO's theoretically limitless player cap). We also made it so each player only had 5 seconds to play their turn, forcing both players to make more rapid decisions in the hopes of speeding up gameplay and preventing a stall in entertainment. This is theory could either strongly help in the games enjoyably by making it very fast paced, or severely hurt it, causing the game to be too stressful by forcing the player in doing such rapid moves.

Because of the pandemic, we were unable to have people play test our game, because of this we only had my teammate and I to figure out suggestions/improvements for the game. We first came up with what we thought were the biggest flaws in the game:

-The game could take hours if not days to beat, as it is more RnG based then skill.

-The repetitive actions performed every 5 seconds for hours on end would be very stressful and unenjoyable.

-There is currently no incentive to play our modified game instead of the far superior "UNO".

With our biggest flaws now in front of us we were at standstill. We simply saw no easy solution for any of these issues. Thats when it became apparent to us that there's a reason that we couldn't create a entertaining version of the game, and thats because it already exists. We took a perfectly fun game, UNO, and tried to modify it by removing functions that made it fun, and adding ones that made it more annoying to play. At the end of the day we realized why it's so difficult to create a fun and original game.

What would we have done differently?

We thought that it would have been easier to take a very simple game and modify it heavily, but in the end we just created an annoying monstrosity. In the future I think it would have been better to choose a game that either had visible flaws or potential improvements in gameplay, or just pick a game that had a lot more base material to work with. Other then that our actual development process felt very effective despite not making any notable successful progress in this particular endeavor. The way we displayed flaws and issues to more easily resolve them helped us contemplate potential solutions and additions to our game.