Developing a boardgame
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Hey again, a lot of things has happened since my first post. We’re currently developing a boardgame as our assignment in advanced gamedesign and it’s tough but fun. The boardgame we’re making currently doesn’t have a name or proper theme yet. As we had our first meeting brainstorming ideas for this assignment we all agreed on making a survival game. We figured using a already existing boardgames board as a base would be a good idea, we picked up the settlers of catan board and kept brainstorming. After an hour or two we realized that our brainstorming had went from making a survival game into making settlers of catan. We threw away the board and started over, thinking; what did we want out of the survival game we had initially thought about. We narrowed it down to; paranoia, the feeling of being hunted and competition between players. These three formed out aesthetic goal and shortly after we approached the assignment this way a new idea came up. The new idea involved four hero players, one monster player, a labyrinth and a d6. The players would all start in one corner on the square shapes labyrinth. I just have to mention that what i am to adress today is merely the coresystem we’ve been testing and iterating. More features will come and i will write posts about that later on. The monster always starts out in the middle of the labyrinth and what’s fun about this system is that the monsters movement is hidden from the players. Each square that you can move over is marked with a number that the monster player uses to keep track of his movements. Every fourth round the monster has to reveal his location on the board, placing his monster token there. The token will remain there until he will have to reveal himself again after another four rounds. If a player walks through the square the monster is standing on, hidden or not hidden he will die and respawn in his corner. If the monster ends his movement phase in the same square as a player that player dies. Players can’t walk through each other and therefor body blocking is possible For now we don’t have a winning condition but we’ve more or less decided upon one. I will tell you more about that later as things are more settled. However the play testing went really well and it was a lot of fun playing this just by using this core system we came up with. That’s a good sign and so far we’re happy, we all think this will eventually turn in to something great. Especially when we can get more player interaction in to the equation and a set goal. You could say that so far we’re going slow, adding one variable at the time to make sure we don’t mess with the aesthetics. Been pondering just this a lot lately, how you should go about making games, taking design decisions surrounding said game. Small steps is the best way, not rush forward and try to make the whole game at once. Well this is what i have for now, more will come soon. Probably after tomorrow when i’ve had a meeting with my group. That’s all i have to say about gamedesign and how that goes, i’m going to write a short thing about art which i am spending a lot of my free time on. I’ve been seeking a way to combine my skills with traditional pencil drawing and digital and to get a good effect out of the two mediums. Two days ago i drew a sharkcyborg in my sketchbook which i came to like a lot so when i got home i took a photo of it, sorted out some contrast problems and put a sepia tone on it. I looked at it for a long while before i decided to try working with it in PS, see what i could make of it. I liked parts of it that i basically wanted to stay the same but some other needed some color and rendering, especially the background in order to create a mood. After some experimenting this is the result i got, playing around with very few colors. I liked the result a lot and i will keep developing it; This is all for now! |
