Last weeks of Board Game Project ( 12-22/10 )

The Board Cover I designed by manipulating Rick’s logo.

Some time at the beginning of the week we play tested it (with people from other groups as well) to make sure its functional and realized that it is playable, but there are still lots of glitches and unwanted stuff that can happen during a game; such as blocking each other off into a ‘Deadlock’ instead of trying to reach the ‘Goal’, well Rick came up with an ingenious solution to have the player that posses the most tiles in the ‘Safe Zone' to win during a ‘Deadlock’. More amendments here & there.

By the end of the week, everything is pretty much finalized, we finally got all the new, updated version of players (they are now dubbed the ‘Corruptiles’) and antivirus tiles (that I almost killed myself making) on 5 different colored cards (that Sam almost killed herself cutting), which turned out really amazing, we’ve got the board and box ready, we’ve got the box-art done (see above picture) and stuck on the box as well, we’ve got a logo, we’ve got our manual ready, we even played tested it few more times and it definitely works, we are ready to hand everything in.

11/10

One of the Tile-files I made.

It was definitely not one of those morning that I would personally want to relive, it wasn’t bad, but extremely frantic. Josh got the board physically done, we then printed everything out; the board & the tiles which involved a lot of A3s & doing a hasty side-mission to the library to get a Flexicard. Got everything barely in time for our presentation.

The presentation didn’t go down in flames like it could have been, despite the hectic rush to the very last minute situation of cutting tiles (see above picture + 2 more of that) during other’s presentation, all of us still managed to present our games decently.

The other groups did really awesome stuff, I especially liked the idea of the singing game, I thought its like Rockband all over again, on a board! which is great! I played the racing game and it was awesome as well, nothing much to change except I think the randomness of the finish line, which could make the game really short or really long. Anyway I thought everybody did really well for this 1^st project, its going to be a competitive year, its great.

8/10

The very basic Tile design I created in Adobe Photoshop.

We finally decided that the game would be called “Corruption”, hence the game-play of player being a ‘bug’ or a virus that is supposed to infect other player’s ‘CPU’ or bases. The group went back and forth between SU bar and the media lab to get the things done; Rick got the board design down, Luke doing the symbols for anti-viruses, etc, Linden doing the manual, Josh and Sam will be did some concept. I design the tiles; (See above picture)

6 different shapes, 4 different colors & 5 pieces each. The idea that I used for the creation of this is basically to instill the feel that players are now in control of these ‘bugs’ or insect-spider-looking viruses that we can piece together to form some sort of infection or more precisely, “Corruption”, in a circuit. I’m gunning for the Pac-man iconic look as well, instead of the more organic Photoshop Illustration of characters and environments, which probably doesn’t suit our theme; it wouldn’t fit the board design that Rick did, which is a circuit board style.

The team is supposed to print everything out by today, but there were some untimely problem and we decided to get it done on Monday before the presentation. Fingers crossed.

Also, we’ll be calling ourselves now Team Noble (credit to Halo fanboys Josh & Rick).­­­_­­­­

5/10

Back to square one.

We decided to scrap what we had yesterday as we realized that its too complicated, too many aspects are being used as Josh mentioned, so we started on a similar but simpler concept this time. We’ll be having all the players start in a starting point located between the middle and each corner of the board, we decided to go for a computer virus concept. We took the ‘freak’ idea out, we took out the path concept, took out the spinner, the cards and kept the blocks, the grids. A lot of things to resolve and decide on, we’re moving pretty slow. Other groups are already printing out designs. 

4/10

Created our very 1^st prototype of the board game using papers; made the board, the blocks, we also did the spinner & the cards & we’ve got a ‘Freak’ (basically a movable obstacle). The ‘Spinner’ idea seems to work well with the game but there are lots of tweaking to be done. Nigel (our tutor), suggested ideas and inputs such as the different themes that can be applied and how it can relate to the gameplay, also we discussed some glitches and how to solve them as well as the importance of risk & rewards gameplay. So far lots of the technical and details problem arose during the test play, but we definitely got pretty far in terms of game play testing today, everybody is really stressed out, but we just need to resume troubleshooting the problems and keep it as simple as possible, yet still interesting.

3/10

Tried designing different looks and styles of the board, but didn't work out too well. Did an idea of a 'Spinner' instead to replace the dice; made of 8 sides (octagonal) labeled either (1,2,3,4,5,6,!,?) or (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,?), ! being a forfeit and ? being a chance that would have to be drawn as cards or some sort, so this could be used as the game-play itself.

1st Week of Board Game group project

Divided into our groups, My team is supposedly called C1 (for now), with Josh, Luke, Rick, Linden & Sam. Our 1^st project in NUCA is to make a board game concept in 4 weeks. After the briefing and guidelines on what is needed, required and expected from us, on Friday, we went to discuss about the concept and direction of our board game, this is of course after we didindividual research. we basically got our directions down.

- social game up tp 4 players

- simple

- 7 years old plus would be able to play it (this is flexible)

- no conventional ideas like dice usage or dungeons, etc

- able to handicap opponents

- no financial/realism related like monopoly or game of life.

We came out with the idea of ‘Pathfinder’ game-play (credits to Rick) during our brainstorm and decided to use that as a starting point. Its basically a game which the player have to create some sort of a path to the middle of the board to collect a ‘treasure’ and possibly a spinner as dice.