Orienting new design students through board game play
My Role
Game Systems Designer
Playtest Analyzer
Visual Designer
Team
Angel Allen
Miles Ainsworth
Ghost with the Most introduces new Loyola New Orleans design students to the department lifestyle by gamifying orientation.
Acting as designers trapped on campus, players race to complete assignments and escape the department floor before “the ghost” (a Loyola design legend) picks them off one by one. Along the way, they navigate the department’s real layout and encounter assignments that await them in later years.
This project’s brief was to create a game that addressed a problem within Loyola’s design department.
Finding our problem
First-year design students felt lost: Literally and socially.
With a focus group, we found that they didn't know where classrooms were, had little connection with upperclassmen, and had no sense of what to expect from future coursework.
Game goals
Foster community and learning
Familiarize design students with each other, the department’s layout, and the degree’s cirriculum.
Keep players engaged from start to finish
Minimize players getting “out” and having to spectate. Even if you lose, you still get to have fun.
Create a collaborative player environment
An energetic atmosphere where players ally, collude, and compete against each other.
Drawing inspiration for an exciting, thrilling, and chaotic gameplay
We knew we wanted to create chaos: where everyone is yelling and hollering. The type of energy when your friends bring UNO, but everyone has different rules. So we looked at games where you outmaneuver, plot against, and then conspire with your previous opponents.
Games with a "secret killer"
Werewolf
Among Us
Games where you “switch sides”
Sharks and Minnows,
(a swimming pool game)
The starting point
Setting the game’s core experience
Knowing we wanted to created a large scale board game and using our goals as a reference, we defined our game’s fundamentals to help us guide every decision onward.
4-10 Players
Avatars based on student stereotypes each with unique advantages & disadvantages.
Design department floor plan
The board mirrors the department's real layout which occupies almost an entire floor of Loyola's main class building
Students complete tasks to escape
To escape the floor, student players must first complete Loyola-design-based homework tasks across the board.
The Ghost picks off students
A hidden ghost player works to “kill” students while they do their homework.
→
“Dead” students return as ghosts
Students killed by the Ghost become ghosts themselves and play to target students.
Game dynamics
Writing rules that are exciting yet balanced
With the basics down, we now had fill in the gaps between them, all without gameplay becoming confusing or some part being overpowered.
Every rule, avatar, task and edge case dynamic was written and then measured against the rules written before it.
If a new dynamic created conflict, one of them had to be either scrapped or reworked.
The first play
Pilot testing our low-fidelity prototype
To allow us to fine-tune spacing, room arrangement, and game dynamics, we used modular rooms and paper cards before committing to official graphics and board composition.
Players took way too long to cross the board
Too many spaces slowed players down. By making each square larger (resulting in fewer spaces), players crossed the board faster and maintained gameplay momentum.
Ghosts moved too fast and eliminated students too easily
Letting ghosts to move through walls allowed them move too fast compared to students. For better balance, we imposed limitations on ghosts' movements and added slide spaces for students.
High-fidelity prototype
Bringing our game to life
To make the high-fidelity game, we divided and conquered to design our components and source game pieces.
Board + Characters (Me)
Cards + Characters (Miles)
Walls (Angel)
Then, we assembled our large board: printing small graphic sections piece them together like puzzle pieces on a firm foam core.
Next, for our walls, we cut leftover foam core then applied paper graphics.
Each wall was then glued onto a placeholder spot I created while designing the board graphics.
Official playtesting
Finally, a complete game was ready for play
We set the board up, explained the rules, and watched our players get started. During the game, we allowed the players to ask rule-clarifying questions to which our team 1) responded with vague answers to gauge players’ thoughts, and 2) eventually clarified rules so the game could continue.
Gameplay observations
Addressing playtesting feedback for an even better game
After a handful of rounds with our high-fidelity game — and lots of yelling and laughing — our players expressed that they enjoyed the experience. It was thrilling, exciting, and collaborative (just like we’d hoped). However, we observed a few areas for improvement.
Adding secret passageways for fairer power distribution
Slide spaces helped students evade ghosts for longer, but they were still at a disadvantage. Secret passageways gave students a way to quickly disappear out of a ghost's target range.
Creating more energy with student resurrection
Few students escaped before the ghosts usually won. Listening to the wishes of our players, we enabled students to resurrect each other if they were in vicinity at the time the other is “killed”.
Outcome
Looking back at our goals
With more revisions post-playtesting, we were able to create a thrilling, energetic, chaotic game that met our initial goals:
01
Foster community and learning
Basing the game concept on Loyola's real department allowed:
Upperclassmen and underclassmen to bond over shared experiences
Organic learning of department logistics through play
02
Keep players engaged from start to finish
The student-to-ghost transition let 'losing' players keep playing, while escaped students got to enjoy watching the rest of the chaos unfold.
03
Create a collaborative player environment
2-player homework tasks, key card negotiations, and a growing ghost force kept players (both students and ghosts) constantly scheming together.
What I Learned
Creating something functional is one type of challenge, but creating something truly enjoyable, that people actually want to play with joy and laughter, is an entirely different type of hard.
With our team, I’m happy to say that we succeeded in creating a game that gets people as fired up as UNO.
