For the Frontier of Freedom assignment, we're designing a game in a group of three, which turned out to be quite surprising to me, in a way that I didn't expect we can be so efficient and inspired by each other.
At the beginning - before spring break - we were just talking about each of us could come up with some brainstormed ideas during the break, and have a short meeting after it to see whether we need to form a team to develop one major idea or just to do it individually on our own ideas.
But as expected, no one really did the brainstorming since none of us wanted to waste our break on working at all, which was totally understandable.
So after the break, we gathered together to do a group brainstorming, at which time we hadn't decided to make a team yet. I was even 30 minutes late for that meeting.
Surprisingly, however, the meeting went quite well that we only took like one hour and a half to successfully locate the idea we are interested in and a basic mechanism of playing it, from zero. During the brainstorming, we were just talking about all the sudden ideas that snap in our minds as like we were just casually chatting with each other about games. We talked about games and ideas we've played, heard about and imagined. Soon enough, we all found one of the idea quite interesting, and started further discussing about it in a more serious way. We ended up deciding that was what we want to further develop, and coming up with the basic rules of playing it before we left the meeting.
Unconsciously and unspokenly, we were already working as a team, which I didn't really expect but turned out to be, as I said before, surprisingly efficient and comfortable to me. We told our stories, experiences, thoughts and ideas honestly and unreservedly, which in turn greatly inspired the rest of us to recall and come up with even more, since we were really sharing ourselves instead of deliberately "brainstorming". It felt so good that I didn't consider it as work - well at least normal tedious work. At a certain point, I remembered a word guessing game I played before, and shared with them, we were all interested, and started talking about how we could develop the word guessing idea. Suddenly it just felt right, like we turned into working mode instead of casual chatting immediately, but in a good way. Then we tried to build up that concept by our ideas, one by one, everyone's ideas were so good, even though some of them were not as good as others at first, but those ideas just inspired the rest of us and magically turned into a great idea.
Same thing happened in our second meeting, where we used only like 30 minutes to come up with an initial but complete rule set that we could playtest. The playtest was surprisingly interesting and funny, we laughed so hard and had lots of fun with it, which made me excited about the following meetings.
I haven't systematically analyzed the pros and cons of working in such a team or individually, but I've started to feel it.
