This semester wasn’t the best for documenting our games, I’ll warrant. We did some pretty awesome things this semester, though.
World Jams
At some point midway through the semester we realized that most of our games were lacking a setting. In board and card games this may not be entirely necessary, but the Junior GADs were going through their Preproduction class and thought the ability to rapidly generate worlds would be beneficial. Like the first Game Jam, the first World Jam was a process of rapidly iterating on a World. We picked apart the process and pulled out common themes, and things that were central to developing a well-rounded world. Once we had crafted this fairly general overview of a world, we would take that world into the next week’s Game Jam and build from there. We found that every world had questions that needed to be answered to get a proper understanding of how it worked:
- What is the Geopolitical Climate of the world?
- What is the Socioeconomic Situation in the world?
- What are the Beliefs of the world?
- At what level of Technology does the world exist?
These questions could be fairly broad, to create outlandish and wild worlds. Sometimes we would craft worlds by changing a few very key facts about our own history to create wildly different worlds further down the historical lines. More often than not the end result would be a rough set of rules for how the world operates, and from these general rules we could create a game, or system, that resulted in a board or card game.
New Leadership
At the end of the semester, the Club voted in new leadership as Jeremy and I are stepping down to deal with our Senior Thesis. Please welcome
Linnea Harrison, President
Amanda Cha, Vice President
Shannon Berke, Public Relations Officer
With that, I leave the Game Design Club Blog in the capable hands of Shannon Berke. See you all in August!
-Ozz
