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.