Las Tractoradas

Amanda Brown and 2 OthersJames Brink
Joshua Shapiro

Josh: The first draft of the game worked well but was not very challenging, fun, or engaging. The goal was to make it more fun and also keep it true to the events of Catalonia. Minor improvements to game mechanics and basic coding improvements have made the game more interesting to play and ensured that it works well on different-sized screens. Certain game mechanics were changed to make the game more complex, and thereby more difficult to play and more engaging. In the new version, beyond creating protests and protecting them with tractors, players now need to transport protests from Barcelona to polling stations in order to gain points. These points can be used to purchase tractors to protect the stations. The game now has waves with increasing difficulty, and players win once they make it through all 8 waves.

James: The first iteration of Las Tractoradas was a major accomplishment because the game was playable, and it had a relevant purpose and featured detailed art. However, from a technical and design perspective, the game lacked depth and was not genuinely enjoyable to play. Las Tractoradas 1.2 has more features that make the game a more engaging experience.

The game needed enhancements both in the code and in the game mechanics. The code was inefficient and disorganized, making it arduous to add new features or to adjust some values, for instance, to change the way an object gets destroyed. To combat this and make editing easier, the code was refactored using abstract classes and parent classes, so that the relevant lines of code can be found in one place. A significant new feature is the addition of polling stations, which corresponds to how the referendum was achieved In reality. In the old version, players simply placed protesters to gain influence over time. This proved to be uninteresting, involving little interaction; this was remedied by allowing the protesters to move like the tractors, which players found more engaging. Players now gain influence points when the protesters reach a polling station.Another problem was there was no sense of progression in the game. To make the game more dynamic, waves were added to make the game increase in difficulty as time goes on, as more police spawn in the later waves. Finally, a new police unit is added, the Elite Police, which is faster and harder to stop.