Climbing Meow Majesties

Game Changers, my STEAM class for the Elective Term, changed my views on why games are important. We learned about the many different mechanics behind a game, such as player elimination, goals, player interaction, luck vs randomness, and score ranking. Before going into the class, I thought creating a game was simple and could be done in a few days. The game process is much more difficult than brainstorming for a day and acting upon it. The class talked to Eric Garneu, an event organizer for Chicago Playtesting Society, about what makes a game interesting and gave us motivation to make a game of our own. Game creation is now considered a talent and an art to me, as I had empathy for what playtesters and game designers go through in this project. Since the first day that my group decided on what game we were going to create, our game evolved from three different games as you can see in our prototypes. Our first couple of prototypes used cheap materials and ideas scattered all over the place. With a lot of playtesting and feedback, we have come up with our game called Meow Mountains. Meow Mountains is an interactive board game for three to four players. In this game, you are a prince cat trying to gather all of the jewels that fell off of the princess cat’s head and down the pyramid. You can move in any direction, two spaces at a time. When you have collected the most jewels and made it to the princess at the top of the pyramid, you win!

KM, Meow Majesties, (2019)

Bankaroo, a virtual bank for kids, can utilize Meow Mountains by having an interactive, fun lesson on how to budget, save money for goals, and spend money wisely. The jewels in the game can represent real money. Having money may have ups and downs, which is shown through battling other cats, but in the end, the amount of money you have for different wants and needs is dependant on yourself.

At first, the game was going to be about the life as a cat in the city, and by using time management skills, the best scheduled cat would win the game. By letting go of the desired theme and putting more thought into the mechanics and structure of the game, the theme changed according to the rules that were placed. The first playtest made me a little anxious because I felt that the game was not ready. I learned that the point of playtesting was to gather thoughts from outside of team and think about how the game can be improved for the future; that a game wasn’t supposed to be at its final version in the first week. Watching my classmates play the game and have fun without needing any instruction from me or my partners, made us more excited to make the game more user friendly. My partners and I had multiple ideas, but we sat and tested each and every idea and whittled our list down to make the best version possible in the time frame we had. It was interesting to me to see how we were sticking to a 2D game board for the majority of the creation process, but at the last minute we questioned why we put that standard down. We challenged ourselves to make a 3D game board that looks more appealing and nice aesthetic. I was feeling stressed that we would not have a final version by the deadline, but with teamwork and timed goals, we made it happen. 

I am very proud of the amount of work I put into the game. I am generally a more creative, artsy person, but I challenged myself to look at the mechanics part of the game. Being able to come up with a player interaction mechanic was hard, and it was critical to think of one up soon or else the game was no fun. By inserting a triggered battle when a player is by another player, made the game more exciting and have more of a luck side instead of being all strategy. After I put that rule in, playtesting got more exciting and had the players on the edge of their seats. I am glad I overcame that challenge, as it helped the flow of the game a lot. I designed the graphics of the board and measured how big each square should be so the layers would fit perfectly, and it came out to look professional and clean. I came up with the idea of using polymer clay to make some of our props, which came out to be handy because it gave the team more use of their imagination to make something what they really wanted. I also wrote the rules and proofread it many times, as clarity and grammar means a lot 

to new players. The creation of this game changed me as a critical thinker, and made me realize that I am great at a lot of skills, but I have room to improve in other areas. As a move forward as a collaborator, I want to improve in listening to others, creating schedules on what needs to be done by each team member, and every positive and negative piece of feedback important, as outside ideas are just as important as those in my head.