Revisions to the Core Concept

I missed last class because of an illness. I was now disadvantaged because I was unaware of the progress our group had made with the game. My group was kind enough to fill me in on the game and explain what I had missed during the game. When Peter was explaining the game it seemed to me like there was too much complication. I could tell by the reaction on Hardi and Pinal's face also that they seemed to feel the same way.

It was after Professor Parks came by to discuss the game did it really seem like our game had too many loopholes and complications. He pointed out that the adding and subtracting on our playing cards was tedious and a bit of an over complication. We also then as a group worked to address the fact that the "Major card", the way it currently was, made no sense. At the time, the "Major card" instead of adding value to related major buildings, actually subtracted value from the player. This was originally done to aid the player in achieving the goal of wasting the most money, and hence fulfilling the title that is "R U serious?"

On realizing this problem and a few others in the game we decided to change the game a fair amount. I felt bad proposing the idea to Peter because I could tell that he felt passionately about his initial plans for the game, but if we were to move forward there would be too much complication. I did not want people to not understand our game, or my grade to be sacrificed as a result of this. We decided as a group, that it would be best to change our initiatives as the players in the game. Instead of trying to be as wasteful as possible we now aimed to be the outlier at Rutgers and aim to create as much value as possible (with buildings/major card combinations). We also decided to add in RU Express as a mock currency in the game that would help make the game player feel more in the setting of our college while also allowing them to have something tangible to keep for value.

We also spent time discussing how it would be a good idea for people to be able to pick majors as opposed to having their major randomly selected. Professor Parks said it was a good idea because it gave the players something to strive and plan for. It seemed as though the group agreed. I personally was pushing for this change because it would allow players to have a strategy or goal from the beginning of the game as opposed to forcing them to engage in random building until they were given a major card.

In conclusion the game seems to be going well. We aimed to discuss possible flaws of the game, but after being able to find none we decided to wait till play testing. We also have to decide the amount of rounds involved in each "year" of the game, but again that is an aspect best left for when we play the physical game. Finally, we decided the game would keep it's name of "R U Serious" and just have a secondary title of "Trying to find value in a university of bad decision making".