Postmortem Unit 3

 Group 7's Sketch Express! is a game where players make randomized collaborative drawings. 

• A player starts by making a scribble. The second player uses that scribble to draw a randomly generated prompt. 

• There’s quite a few prompts, divided into categories ranging from pop culture to food that the player may choose from. 

• The prompt itself is randomly chosen. 

• While that player draws, the scribbler must guess what prompt they have. 

• So, the game has two elements: Finishing a drawing using the limitation of two randomized components and guessing. (This is also how points are awarded.)

• Our target audience was ages 6-12, playable by two people. It appeals to artist types. 

• It’s a drawing game but it doesn’t require any actual skill. If anything, wonky drawings make the game more fun. 

• It’s a development on Pictionary because of the random scribble, but it’s still pretty easy to understand. 

• Our first batch of critiques was largely about the provided list of prompts. 

• They ranged from being too difficult to draw (due to vagueness) or too easy;

• For instance, a flower is easy to draw with a scribble because of its stem, but a kangaroo takes some extra creative thinking. 

• The flower is actually the problem in this scenario. The kangaroo adds fun and challenge. The flower makes the round boring. 

• In other words, the difficulty level of each prompt varied too wildly. 

• That was clearly becoming a little frustrating for playtesters.

• So, we added categories and doubled the amount of prompts.

• The choice of category allows for the player to adjust the difficulty. 

• Yes, some prompts are more difficult than others, but you can avoid those respective categories.

• This also made it more appealing to an older audience, which playtesters seemed to want. 

• The biggest hurdle was playtesters ignoring certain rules. 

• The rulesheet does say players may add whatever prompts they want. Playtesters repeatedly read over this. So, I placed it higher up in the rule sheet. 

• We continued to struggle with our point system. 

• Some playtesters thought our system worked, some thought it could be simplified.

• To reiterate, we were concerned about making the game competitive but not allowing the players to make completely unintelligible drawings. 

• Thus, the player drawing got extra points for completing a drawing, but the guesser still received credit, too. 

• This caused slight confusion but we decided going any simpler would result in too many ties. 

• Would the game work better with three or more people?

• A playtester suggested this, and while I agree that Pictionary-type games tend to work better with groups, this process of finishing a drawing only requires two people. 

• It is possible, but I still believe it could be improved. My group really struggled to generate ideas vis-a-vis points. We opted for the simplest system; one point per person per role. 

• I think we needed to bounce a few more ideas off of each other to really make this game shine. 

• It’s fun and it works fine, but it’s missing something that could really evolve it. 

• There may have been some miscommunication about certain elements we added along the way. 

  -What exact categories should we add? Can we include verbs and adjectives, or does that make the game too difficult? 

• Generally speaking, playtesters really liked the game and wanted to see more. I think this is the type of game that could have expansion packs added to it; it’s sort of endlessly customizable. 

• For that reason, we decided to keep it simple. 

A play tester in deep contemplation over his opponent’s drawing.