Capstone Showcase and Your Next Design
Key ideas for freezing your game at v1.0, showcasing it well, and writing a useful postmortem.
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Study Smart Tips for Capstone Showcase and Your Next Design
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Active Recall
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Spaced Repetition
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Multiple Sessions
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Explain Aloud
Verbalize answers to reinforce understanding
Questions Covered in This Set
11 cards to master
What does it mean to 'freeze' your design at v1.0?
Deliberately stop accepting new features into the build, label it v1.0, and write down what it is: player count, playtime, audience, pitch sentence, and core tension.
Where should late-arriving suggestions go?
Into a separate file like v1.1_ideas.md — this keeps you shipping instead of looping forever.
What are the four final deliverables for a capstone game?
A clean rulebook teachable without you present, print-and-play files or a digital build, a photo/short video of play, and a one-page overview.
What is an anti-coordination (congestion/El Farol) game?
A structure where your best response is to avoid the crowd — payoffs are higher the fewer players choose the same option.
List the five beats of a showcase.
1) 15-second hook with comparison title, 2) goal first, 3) demonstrate one turn, 4) play and stay quiet while taking notes, 5) debrief with sharp questions.
Why explain the goal before the components?
People can't file information without an objective to hang it on.
What does it mean when you must interject during a playtest?
It signals a rulebook bug — the rules failed to teach that point.
Which debrief question should you avoid, and why?
'Did you like it?' — answers are polite and useless. Ask when they felt clever, when bored, what they'd change.
What sections belong in a postmortem?
What you set out to make, what you actually made, three things that worked and why, three failures plus attempted fixes, the one big lesson, and numbers.
Why track win-rate by seat?
If player 1 wins ~70% of games, that's a measurable first-player-advantage balance defect.
What is a dominant strategy?
An option that is always at least as good as the alternatives, so players never seriously consider anything else.
