The Process – A Journey in Game Design
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Picasso – A Cubist Roll n' Write PNP
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Picasso – A Cubist Roll n' Write PNP
updated 1 year, 9 months ago
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This one you can even try by yourself! It’s a challenge to draw a vase of flowers for only 40 lines and you don’t get to choose the direction. Feel free to modify the grid size and the number of rolls if you feel the area is too small and the 20 rolls are either too many or not enough!
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Do you have any recommended topics we could start with if we don’t have access to those topic cards?
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I knocked up a quick table you can use a d6 to randomly generate an idea from. The key part is to keep hidden what you have rolled. Alternatively, they can be cut up and drawn out of a bag to see what you draw.
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This week I have been furiously playtesting Picasso. One playtest was with my wife and neighbour and the other with my wife and brother. I’ve included pictures from the playtest to see IF YOU CAN GUESS what each picture is supposed to be.
Playtest 1
The pages with 3 smaller pictures on each are from the first playtest. All-in-all it was a success because my guinea pigs asked to play another one when I had all I needed. The experience was different to what I had expected it to be. I was imagining a super quick-playing very light mood game. Instead, I felt that there was a lot of thought being put into decisions and there was a slight air of intensity. It was not a bad thing. The players were just more engrossed in what they had to do. Also, there was no competitive feeling that accompanied the intensity, which is a good thing!
The other clues that told me I was on the right track were exclamations of ‘Oh no!’ followed by a laugh and ‘That doesn’t look at all right’ followed by a laugh. And maybe best of all ‘Only 2 rolls to go… come on horizontal lines’.
The constructive feedback was:
– Can’t put any detail in; can’t get the right angles; some things were too hard to draw
This gave me some quick changes to iterate and I had it back to the table two night later.
Playtest 2
This time I was playing with my wife and brother. Great to have a repeat player and also a new player. This allowed me to see how an opinion changed with the game changes and a fresh opinion.
I wanted to move to a 5mm grid (we had been using a 10mm grid) to allow for more space and detail in your drawing. In place of being able to get a 5mm grid, I upped the box size to 20×20 which had the same effect, with the addition of making the picture bigger. The other change was, that each line drawn could be of any length. Still had to be straight. Still had to be corner to corner.
As you can see in the pictures they were much better drawings. While there was still laughter while drawing and some desperation to get the right rolls, there wasn’t as much. My brother enjoyed the game and my wife still did but preferred the original feedback.
The constructive feedback was:
– sometimes you couldn’t get a line to join another line; it was too easy; wasn’t the same level of challenge to represent something abstractly.
Having adjusted the game from ‘just too hard’ to ‘a bit too easy’ has given me good boundaries to work in. The next adjustments are isometric grid paper, purposefully choosing drawing topics and ranking the difficulty, drawing lines corner to corner up to 3 corners away.
If anyone has had the chance to playtest themselves I’d love to hear any feedback!
