You can vent here. We'll read and support you.
Thanks. It's been pretty difficult not being able to talk about it.
In situations like that, it's best that the team avoid feature creep in order to cross that finish line.
Lock down 5-7 "must have" features on a document- these features make for the minimum viable product.
Write out the rest of the teams ideas in a "suggestions" list.
Work together implement the 5-7 ideas until you have a playable product.
During development, all additional ideas need to be immediately added to the "suggestions" list. Don't hesitate!
When in beta, have outsiders play the game. If it's not fun to them, ask what's missing. (Outsiders can be quick to find bugs too)
Analyze their suggestions and report back to the team.
Decide on pulling 1 idea from the suggestion list and implement each extra feature, one at a time.
That's the process that my team uses.
Thanks for your suggestion. We already conducted some external testing and our testers were just unable to get through it because of how the instructions were written and the confusing information given to them.
I've met with the team yesterday we've gone straight back to the drawing board. We've pulled our original three design documents (which, unsurprisingly, no one has read after I wrote it and uploaded it). We found that, in adhering to the original 6 design pillars, we were able to simplify the game considerably and set to work renovating our poorly thought out battle system. In addition, we ditched game-board exploration, collapsed our min-max character building down to predefined characters, and reverted to a board modularity system that allows us and the players to create board presets for play. Having done this we've got a clearer aim for our game.
One of my team members is concerned that we might be too similar to two other board games and wanted to find ways to differentiate ourselves, but I shut him down as quickly as I could. The original design document was written well before I knew any of the board games he's talking about and even then I don't care. Our Professor is willing to overlook similarities and at this stage I only care about making this game something we can be proud of.
It's also relieving to have been told by our professor that we've got the most complicated game this semester and we're well ahead another group in terms of progress and design.
You shouldn't be too afraid to stray a bit from your original idea as that's really quite natural, however it seems like you really don't work towards a unified goal, or perhaps there is one but actions aren't being made towards it..
Does your group have any kind of "leader" for the overall project or perhaps different aspects of it?
Make sure that person leads you towards your goal, make sure a goal is set that you work towards, sure it can be tempting to include lots of features but what does that matter if you can't actually get the project finished.
Or something.. but good luck either way!
We have moved away from certain parts of our original design, but it's come to our attention that in moving so far away from the original pitch it's gotten into a huge mess. We're backtracking now to make sure we hit our core mechanics and elements and toss everything else that's unnecessary out the window.
Since I was the person that made the original pitch, I was made team lead for the project and I've tried to make decisions democratically so that everyone has equal input and we can think out and discuss problems and solutions together. This clearly hasn't been working and I've had to shut certain members down when they raise concerns; one of whom questions every design choice or attempts to solve every problem before we discuss it.
Yesterday he kept throwing out solutions to an idea that I hadn't even heard out fully from another member. I had to rudely hold my hand out at him to keep him silent so that I could hear the idea in full. I don't like being a team leader that has to shut up a member, but his talking over others just wasn't working.
