PROTOCOL
Protocol was an in-house card game that was concepted and created for a project mod by a few of us in a small group. The best part is always being able to watch people play the game and have fun! I'd like to think we successfully made a great hybrid concept game!
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Programs Used: Canva, Board game Simulator, Photoshop,
Genre: Social Deduction
DESIGN PROCESS
Inspiration and References
Protocol is a culmination of various mechanics. Built upon the core of a social deduction and bluffing game, wherein the VIP has to try and conceal their involvement from the sniper. This intense hunt concept works well, and makes Protocol stand out on its own from other social deduction games where everyone is in the same role.
We were discussing various mechanics on the games that we were playing in class and we really liked the ideas of variable missions from fluxx and the concept of a timeline from timeline. That was the birth of our timeline and Missions mechanic of our game.
The timeline serves 2 purposes, firstly to provide information for the players in the game and secondly to have a mechanical complexity in the gameplay. This was the perfect medium for our game which is 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 information on what their roles are.
Social Deduction
Adding Social deduction elements such main goals, alternative goals, alignments into the general game play helped us to dramatically increase the tension during the game play. Taking inspiration from from
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The teams and roles also play a part in making each player feel important in the game.
System Designs
We to determine the action cards in the game, we had to choose the type of action cards that were in the game.
If we were to have more actions that enable the users to manipulate the timeline, then it would be a more points based while adding cards that reveal more information about the users helps to increase the social drama of the game
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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.
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Since we are not playing the game, we took note of the questions they asked us, this is the questions we needed to address in the rule book
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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
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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
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Using the questions posed during the Game play testing, we tried to answer them as much as we could
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.
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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.