Devlog 7

In designing social deduction games, decision and feedback making is particularly important in my opinion. In the game hosted by my group, we played The Resistance, a game in which ultimately voting upon who goes on missions is incredibly important to the outcome of the game overall. It is also revealing about a player who they trust to go on missions and who they don’t, making the feedback portion as deeply important to The Resistance as the decision-making part.

One major challenge presented in designing a social deduction game like Mafia or Werewolf is balancing the experience for the different player groups. It can’t be too difficult to deduce the werewolf, but it also can’t be too easy. Of course, this does depend quite a bit on who the players themselves are—if someone is a bad liar, they will be an easy werewolf to spot. However, part of the burden in this balance does fall on the game developers. If a game is too easy to deduce the imposter or werewolf in, then it won’t really appeal to as large a group of people to try out. This problem is pretty easily solved in some of the games we played, by leaving it up to chance and changing the “bad guy” every round, whether through a method of passing out cards or rolling for it. This also brings in luck to the game, making it more exciting to not know role you will get as the player.
If I were to design a social deduction game, it would be like the ones we played in class, with there being a hidden role that other players must “sus” out. It would be themed around fitting in within a group, with something like “outcasts” being the players who must be figured out by the “friends”, or something of the sort. This seems to be at least the basis of social deduction games that are fun to play and popular. This theme of having outcasts would support the game because the challenge I would have in mind for the game would be that outcasts could convince another group of “friends”/regular players that another player was the outcast and not to speak with them. Obviously this could be expanded on and improved as a premise and be made to be a little more unique and separate from similar games, but I would aim for this premise as I believe it would set up the design for success by being aligned to what other similar and popular social deduction games are, while remaining distinctive enough.