Don't take it out of context.

     Ooh, a snappy title! Down to business. While we have been working on our project we have also attended weekly sessions focusing on contextual studies, aimed at helping us in our development of our board game. It was suggested that some of the tasks we were set in these sessions should be documented within our blogs. The first of these tasks was a short narrative of our experience a game so here it is: "The game begins with my character waking up after being shot in the head by a casino owner called Benny. I will later retaliate by having him crucified but that's not important right now. What's important is the old man sitting in front of me telling me that I'd been found in the wasteland with a hole in my head, and that I'd been promptly transferred to my present location to be patched up. A likely story- I don't know what kind of sick stunt this man is trying to pull, but I know it somehow involves me....and America. I excuse myself to the bathroom where after some shameless cabinet rummaging, I locate a straight razor. 30 seconds later the "doctor" is in 5 seperate pieces over his living room floor. It would be more but this is all the game would allow. Bloodlust is clearly only acceptable to a point. I then spent the remainder of my afternoon hiding his body parts in humourous locations around his house. In the evening I ransack the possessions of the house just to see what this guy was all about. Oh...oh dear...Turns out he may have been a doctor after all. Awkward." As you can see looking at a game in this way shows just how easily an audience can become immersed withing a game. Focusing on this level of involvement when creating our boardgame is the type of practice that will help us create a successful piece of work. Signing off.

Behind...again

     As I am in charge of the board game box within our group, and have already begun looking at deifferent box structures I decided it was time to begin making some trial versions. To begin with I made a very simple design in keeping with the decision I had made from earlier research. These can be seen below.

     After discussing this design within our group, It was mentioned that in the Disney version of  "Trivial Pursuit" the box had a front cover type effect where a layer at the top folded over like a book. It was decided that it would be worth using this kind of design as inspiration, and in turn giving our box design a little more visual appeal.

     After discussing this I made a second version which, after discussing with my group, I feel will likely be our final design, and therefore, for now, I will be treating it as such which will allow me to focus on creating the artwork for it. Pictures of my new design and how it unfolds can be seen below.



Still catching up.

        As we needed to rethink our concept drastically we worked from home the next day giving us the full 24 hours to focus on it. My personal role withing the group was the creation and artistic design of the box, therefore to make up for lost time whilst we re-evaluated our idea I also created the concept page above to help me prepare for the design of the box cover. I tried to create a variety of character styles as at this point we no longer had a definate age range and I did not want to create one solitary style when there was no way of knowing that it would suit our target group. I also considered a female character within the design as a member of our group had raised concerns over the game becoming too male orientated and potentially alienating female players.

     Over the next couple of days we recreated our concept. As a group we agreed that we believed our cowboy and indian theme to be a winning formula, and therefore decided to keep that idea on board. For me this was a positive move. Research into modern day boardgames had shown me that general interest, particularly that of young children, was on the decline. Modern day entertainment such as T.V, films and videogames are now so advanced and well integrated into family life that boardgames have steadily lost their appeal to many. With this in mind I felt that a once hugely media dominating theme such as cowboys vs. indians, could be just the kind of idea that would help to turn this around. By going back to basics and using a theme we know works, we could include the influences of modern board game mechanics and create an idea that is not only original, but also appealing to play. We also decided that the idea of building a tower to win the game was another feature we wanted to keep. Whereas before the games focus was purely Native Americans, in the revised version we had players spit into either cowboy or "indian" teams. Realising that a totem pole structure was unsuitable for the cowboy team I decided there should be two different structures, concept pictures above and below. We now have the origional totem pole idea for the "indians" to build- whilst the cowboy's structure is a typical Wild West guard tower.

     Before the end of the week I also drew up a quick plan of different box net ideas (below). It had been brought up for consideration within our group that a unique box shape could be an effective idea for our game as it would help it to further stand out from the crowd. The first idea I looked at was a cube shape. One main issue with this kind of box shape is that a cube shape as opposed to that of a cuboid has a larger surface area and therefore uses larger amount of packaging. If we were a company mass producing this product, the extra cost this would incur would have to be taken into consideration. As would European packaging regulations which limits the amount of unnecessary packaging that can be used per product. (For more information on these regulations see here: http://www.satra.co.uk/spotlight/article_view.php?id=375) I also considered a 14 faced polygon (tetradecagon) shape which was another unique style; however reseach proved that these kind of mathematical shapes for box designs were much more common for academic or logic based games, and would therefore be misleading for the style of our game, preventing us from getting through to a target market quite as effectively. I finally did a quick sketch of a typical box design. Whilst this design is commonly used, it is not only efficient for packaging, but also makes our product visually distinguishable at glance. Therefore for now I will use this as the net for my mock up box.

Hello again!

     My my...Whats all this then. A new post and the writing is in a funny colour...Swanky. Now lets sum up day two. 

     The picture above was an initial design for the box art. I decided to keep it in a child friendly cartoon style which suited our main target group for the game. I also decided that seeing as we had a relativly young children in mind, rather then having four characters that were only distinguishable by colour, it would be more appealing to give them further visual differences, which can be clearly within the above picture.

     Whilst at this point we felt fairly on track with our idea, by the afternoon a critical group session highlighted some key issues with our work so far. For example we had been inconsistant in our age consideration for different parts of the game. Whilst the game theme and artwork was typical of a children's game, the gameplay elements we had included were, in places, far too complicated. It was agreed as a group that if we wanted to continue with a children's game, much adjustment to the game mechanics would be required- as would a considerable amount of research on child psychology as an element of successful children's games, and how we could effectively use this ourselves. The alternative was to build around the more mature gameplay which would then entail us coming up with a carefully chosen game theme, and sufficient justification as to how this theme would be appealing to adult players. We gave ourselves till the next day to brainstorm our ideas and attempt to decide on a successful concept.

My first post....nearly a week after the project started...sigh...

     So we have been given our first project to design and create our own board game. We immediately began by talking about successful pre-existing games and what exactly it was that had made them so successful. With this in mind we then began to concept a game of our own.
     Mt initial idea was something of a two part game- Which commenced in a typical "traversing across the board towards a common goal" style of play. However the player would be dealt a hand of "monster cards" at the beginning of the game ready to do battle with at the final point of the game which would ultimately decide the winner. As we developed this idea we decided there could be multiple paths across the board where players could pick up various "boost cards" with the intention of optimizing their hand to its multiple potential.
     Our next step was to make our way over to a local toy store "Langleys" where we examined various examples of different board games for inspiration. Looking at these games made us realise that our intial concept may be too complicated for the age group we had in mind and within a couple of hour we had scrapped it and were working on a new idea.
     The new plan was for a native american themed game aimed at young children which had players racing against each other in order to collect up and complete their tribe's totem pole- thus winning the game. With the basic concept of our game in mind we assigned various roles in the creation of the game to different group members- mine being the creation and design of the box, and proceeded to work further at home on our ideas.