GASPING For Air
Hello fellow activists! Thank you for rising to the cause and joining in our fight to improve air quality in South Western Pennsylvania! Each of you will need to make decisions on how to improve your living conditions. Make sure to react accordingly to whatever situations occur. You will be working to make your sector a better place. Good luck! We hope you manage to make great changes and maybe even learn some new information during your time with us.
Overview
Time Frame: ~4 Weeks
Date: April 2022 - May 2022
Team Size: 2
Team Members: Caitlyn Lenhoff and Ryan Cumpston
Organization: GASP
Links: GASPing For Air Instructions, GASPing for Air Gameboard
Role: Experience Designer, Level Designer
Keywords: Board game, Transformative, Air Pollution
Transformational Theory:
Players will play cards in reaction to situations affecting air quality in Southwestern Pennsylvania to change their knowledge from uninformed of the dangers of air pollution to informed and aware to ultimately achieve GASP’s goal of raising awareness of poor air quality’s harmful effects and how it influences our environment, community, and health.
Description:
GASPing for Air is a trivia based game where players play cards in order to react to different situations. It was made for the Intro to Game Design course at Carnegie Mellon. In this game players will take turns being the dealer who reads out a prompt from a situational card. The other players will anonymously react to the situation with a reaction card of their choice. The dealer will rank the responses based on reaction category and their preference, and will allocate resources points to the players based on their ranking. The activists (players) will use the resource points to move forward on the gameboard, which signifies improving air quality. The first player to improve their air quality and reach the end of the board first, wins.
Duties/Personal Contributions:
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Level Designer for gameboard
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Experience designer for the game mechanics
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Wrote rules of the game.
Process
The Gameboard Setup
During playtesting it was discovered that the separate boards were not an asset, but rather confused players and made them feel disconnected from one another. Since there was no intention of having the separate counties in our board of Southwest Pennsylvania mean anything in particular, the decision to cut the separate boards and create one single board was made. This improved the cohesiveness of the game and made players feel like they were actually playing together and competing, rather than in their own separate sections.
The Health Gameboard
In a later playtest, after further changes to the health bar iteration, I noticed that there was a lack of interest in the health gauge, even though there were supposed to be benefits to using it. However, when interviewed, the playtesters said that the health bar bonuses were not overly different from the bonuses already offered by the cards and health was not easy to change, so there was not really any reason for focusing on it. I saw that it was actually over complicating the game for no real beneficial purpose, so I cut it from the final version after discussing it with my teammate. In the end, taking the health bar out simplified the game and made the game less confusing and more playable.