Second Round of Critiques on Prototype Presentations

Last class there were another four presentations and one of them was ours, leaving only three to crit this time. So, here we go:

3rd Cloud

It was interesting to see someone actually doing an electronic prototype. With the introductory description and abundant screenshots, it was also easy to get a feel for the type of game they were making. But being unfamiliar with RPGMaker, I was unsure how much of what I was seeing was original and what things were part of the engine. I'm assuming that all of the art is not original content (though I could be wrong about this), so I remain unsure about whether the team is planning to pursue original art or not, or how much planning/effort actually went into this stage of the game.

The presentation, however, was quite engaging and I got the feeling they really learned from their user testing. They seemed to realize the different styles of play that apply to RPGs, the issues of equipping items, and various associations/expectations (such as random monster encounters) arising from familiriaty with a host of similar games.

Drive-thru Tycoon

This presentation wasn't as entertaining as the previous one, but I did like the exceptionally thorough description of the prototype's mechanics, as well as the testing circumstances. I found quite a few grammatical errors in the document and on occasion found the text a bit too small.

Overall though, the prototype and testing process seemed well thought out and quite successful. This genre also seems to translate very well into paper form, and aside from the AI, it appears that all of their major game mechanics were representable.

Food Fight

As I understand it, this game is intended to be a realtime, Flash-type game about cafeteria food fights, but it was represented in paper form as a turn-based Battleship-look-alike. I could, however, be mistaken here.

As with many other presentations, I found this presentation a little short on information provided, but I really liked the look of the prototype setup and the game characters. In fact, judging just by looks, this was the most impressive paper prototype thus far. Looking at the setup image, this could almost be a fully fledged board/card game in its own right.

Since I know very little about the prototype's mechanics or what the final game mechanics are going to be, there's little I can say about what could have been done differently here. From the team's own observations though, it seems they had quite a lot of issues with the prototype, which is surprising considering the competent look of the setup.