❖ Version History ❖
10th of December, 2020:
I spend every day of this week going back and forth between character design and improving my methods for the play testing. There are many variables that are constantly at work as I do these play tests, so while it has been nice to do most of my notes for this on paper, its officially time to start tracking information on excel.
The image above is specifically the first creation of mine from the excel spreadsheet data tracker that I concocted for The Great Chase. This chart is super basic in its setup because it does not track individual game information yet. It is specifically designed for me to keep track of “global mechanics” in the game as they happen across the turns:
– GMT Locations – Destinations on each crisis where Flights are added to the Map
– Rule Text – how each card acts as it affects the players and the game turns
– Spawn Numbers – Crashes per turn based on how many characters are in the round
– Game Difficulty – how all of the above variables come into harmony
As an Additional benefit, this chart is organized to show the three game difficulties all on one spreadsheet, so each of the cards can be quickly compared individually to the other cards from other difficulties.
While this is not everything that I want this data sheet to collect in the end, it is akin to the other prototype designs that happen throughout the artistic process. This document is the setup, and is progressively being rearranged to begin tracking all the outcomes of individual games in more advanced ways:
-checking to see how many & which characters get used,
-how they fared against the crises, and
-what the final outcome of the games were.
Unfortunately during this phase there are so many small details from the above tracking list still being edited that there is little to no point in recording these more advanced numbers yet, as they are not representing the game as it is evolving. But at this point the data sheets evolve literally every day, so this advanced data collection is quickly approaching at this point in the process.
