Written by Elizabeth.

The next steps for this game’s development at the start of Semester 2 are listed on this page. We want to be sure to hit the ground running and get playtesting as soon and as often as possible to give this game as much time in the oven as we can, so we’re going to use Scrum, an iteration-first methodology we found really helpful during our second year, and take inspiration from game company Valve’s methodology with a tight weekly schedule.

Every week will start with a Scrum meeting where we go over what we’ve done the previous sprint and set out a plan for the next sprint by determining where we are currently, where we expect to be next sprint and what our largest bottlenecks will be in the near future, in order to figure out what to focus on. Every week will then end with a playtest (ideally more than one), and the next Scrum meeting will prominently reflect on that playtest and the feedback gained from it.

The first things we want to handle when the next phase of development begins (in the first week or, at latest, the second week) are as follows:

• Design our minimum quota of cards to start playtesting. If these cards are a little rough around the edges, that’s fine.
• Set up a simple Figma project for creating prototype cards quickly from Google Sheets (following this tutorial).
• Build a Tabletop Simulator prototype to playtest remotely and cut out long sessions of producing and cutting out physical cards in early playtesting.
• Run the first playtest of the game.
• Begin work on designing the symbolic grammar for the game and translating cards into symbolic versions.