River Rafters Post-Mortem
- Joshua Angel
- Feb 9
- 2 min read
River Rafters is a mechanically well polished game with a lot of room to grow from this base game. I feel its been balanced well and that the rulebook makes sense. I enjoyed making something in a different medium than what I was used to, it gave a fresh perspective on how to prototype and iterate games.
Overview
My team for this project consisted of 4 designers, we all got along well and I think it contributed massively to the scale and success of this prototype, being a polish well balanced game that would be ready to release if it had a bit more Art! The feedback was always constructive and led to our rapid iteration being so successful in letting us change so many different things about the game so quickly.
when we rapidly iterated through the production of this game, we started with a terrain editor class based character survival game with a shop but with many layers of iteration, we refined this into a card strategy game with obstacles and a tilable map. We were able to do this so well since we met up and played the game so often allowing us to talk about what worked, what could be improve and ultimately what was unnecessary, this was further helped by the course content guiding us down this rapid iteration.
Asset Production
Due to this being a board game, a lot of physical assets needed to be produced along with the digital assets, this presented a new challenge as all of us had only worked on digital up until then. It was nice to make something so quickly and be able to put it to the test almost immediately, getting straight to the point and see if we wanted to keep the feature, mainly with the board and the cards.
Physical prototypes did become an issue when it can to playtesting though, since this project ran over Christmas, only 1 member of the team could take a copy of the board game home and get people to playtest it, causing us to not receive as much feedback as we would've liked.
The rulebook also became a challenge as we entered our playtesting phase since it was difficult to spot everything we needed to include for the players to understand how to play the game since we already knew how to. That took a couple rounds of play testing to sort out.
I really did enjoy working on the assets of this game, it again reinforces the impact that rapid iteration and paper prototyping can have on a games polish and the team's understanding of how the game will both play and feel.
Conclusion
I really enjoyed this project, its been the best team I had for a University Project and is my best work that came from it. I enjoyed the change of pace and different medium to work in. I also learned a lot more about general Design and what other factors I can think of when it comes to my Development inside Projects.
Until Next Time!
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