Ocean Conqueror is a card game that sets players as captains from all over the world in the Age of Discovery, they need to use their special abilities to do business, complete quests or combat against other player in order to establish the strongest fleet in the world.
In order to make an Age of Discovery theme game. I read a lot of books about that history and collect a few events and vocabularies that we will use in the game. Then I wrote a basic draft for the proposal with another teammate and fill all other teammate in with the current concept we have.
After added more details to describe all the cards, resources and maps, we built a mature rule of the entire game, then started to create the first draft of our game. Thanks to the graphic designer, our art designing was proceed smoothly. I am very satisfied with our current game since I put a lot of effort on designing the contents.
The prototype did not go well due to a couple of reasons. First, the game is so complicated that it took almost 20 minutes for new players to understand how to play the game. Second, we did not visually explain the functions well, players were slow down by reading through the description. For a card game, icons are more effective than word explainations.
I arranged some more game tests with my friends. After the play test, I deleted almost half of the content in the game in order to make the game simpler. The graphic designer helps to design icons instead of text on the cards. From this game experience, I learned the importance of the player testing and how we are going to use what we got back from the players.