PROTOCOL

Protocol is a culmination of various board games. Built upon the core of a social deduction and bluffing. The game takes place in a dystopian Singapore where a VIP has to try and conceal their missions involvement from the sniper. This intense hunting concept creates social drama even the game begins.

Programs Used: Canva, Board game Simulator, Photoshop,

Genre: Social Deduction, Strategy

DESIGN PROCESS

Inspiration and References

We discussed various mechanics of the games introduced during our Analog games class. We liked the ideas of variable missions from "Fluxx" and the concept of a timeline from "Timeline". That was the birth of the Timeline mechanic of our game.

The timeline serves 2 purposes, firstly to provide information for the players in the game and secondly to have mechanical complexity in the gameplay.

This was the perfect medium for our game which was to slowly reveal a character’s true identity through the actions they attempt to do in the game. Everything the player does in the game gives off slight information on hidden roles and objectives.

Social Deduction

We added Social deduction elements such as having a main goal, alternative goals, and alignments into the general gameplay to increase the tension of the game. Taking inspiration from similar games such as Avalon and Resistance

System Designs

We had to determine the types of action cards to balance the game to fit our intended player fantasy. The action cards would mold the game dynamics

Some of our considerations was whether to have more cards to manipulate the events in the Timeline or to have cards that unveil the goals of the characters in the game.

Thus we created a chart of cards and how they interact with each other.

Quick Mockups

Using some pieces of paper, we quickly came up with some character cards, some action cards that we thought of and colored representation of event cards within the timeline

Game play Testing

Finding some players that are in our demographics, we decided to let them try out our games and the cards that we have made.

We took note of the player's behaviors during the gameplay, the moments they seemed confused the questions they asked us, this is the questions we needed to address in the rule book

We also tried playing this on board game simulator within ourselves and some of our classmates

Card Designs

Using Canva, we created a standard template for each category of card which we had split into Role Cards, Objective Cards, Action/Timeline Cards and

Rule Book Design

We referenced various rule books and came up with a general structure: Components, Introduction, Setup, Game play, Mechanics, Ending, Additional Rules, Card Legend

Using the questions posed during the Game play testing, we tried to answer them as much as we could

Read Here

Rule book Testing

For this stage of testing, we found a new group of players who have never played our game, Fluxx or timeline before thus they would be coming with a fresh set of eyes. We took note of where they had difficulty in playing the game and stepped in when necessary.

We then decided to repeat this process a couple of times to make sure that the rule book has all the information that is needed

Additional Components

Finally as the finishing touch we added a sniper token to denote the sniper inside the game.