Over the past 7 weeks (including week 0), I’ve been working in various ways on a board game in an effort to answer my essential question: what is the relationship between design and development? I started my project by playing a wide range of games, trying to find aspects that I enjoyed and thought made sense, and taking notes on them. During this time I was also reading a book, Becoming a Video Game Designer, and watching youtube videos reviewing games to try and get a better understanding of game design and the implementation of mechanics. After that I started working on my own game, and using everything I had learned from my research and my nearly 6 weeks of time left, I thought I’d be able to create a completed game and be able to answer my essential question. This didn’t really end up being the case. I think that the question I posed was far too broad to be answered by a 7-week project. Instead, a better question may have been: what does the journey from design to development look like for a game. I think that this question better allows me to use my own experience to create an answer and is also specific to game design. The scope of my project was also unrealistic, but I don’t think I realized that until maybe the last week. My original idea was that I was going to create a board game and end the Senior Project period with a finished project. I thought that it would be made of cardstock and foam core. As I started development this shifted and I thought I might be able nicely to print all of my components to make my game look a lot more final and a lot more professional. As a started the process of playtesting, updating, then playtesting again, I realized that almost every element of my game needed to be changed in some way, which is good because it meant my game was getting better and I was getting closer to a finished product, but also meant I got farther from having a finished game by the end of Senior Project. Even as things were steadily getting better, important improvements were being made, and game-breaking issues were being fixed, I (and the people I was playtesting with still kept finding them. This all came to a head during a session of playtesting on Monday where I combined mechanics in such a way that I was able to break the game, moving from one side of the board to the other in one turn and crafting enough potions that I was able to win by over 100 points more than second place. At this point, I became conflict because I knew I wouldn’t be able to print, or even finish the game by the end of the week, and was unsure of how to proceed. In the end, I settled for updating the game and getting to a space where I could keep playtesting and would easily be able to update in the future. Looking at my experience through the lens of the new essential question I proposed here, I think I can come to a  conclusion about the importance of playtesting and that it’s hard to see how different mechanics will affect each other on paper.