Studiowork: Creating physical counters

My team and I have decided to use a stand-up style counter. This style basically involves having a solid base at the bottom, and a slot at the top which will be thin enough to hold a picture - in this case, the imagery will be of the spaceships that Will and I designed.

Above is an example of a counter we will hopefully be creating this week. I spoke to the team about different ideas on what base shape to use, whether it be a slanted trapezium shape or different, and then spoke to Nathan (the board designer) about the counter space sizes, which are 15mm x 15mm.

I was not expecting the sizes to be as small as this and found it hard to find bases that would fit to such a small measurement. How ever, to over come this problem, Nathan has told me that he has some scrap plastic left that will allow us to make the counters. 

Whilst we wait for the plastics to be delivered, I have decided to start designing the pictures that will slot into the plastic base of the counter in Photoshop. I compiled all the designs I have so far, and resized them into the 3 different ship sizes we have planned to use:

- small

- medium

- large

This week I shall be visiting the staff involved in the printing department, and ask for their advice on what type of paper/card to use for our counter pictures. 

More updates to come soon!

Update:

Today I managed to make the card part of the counters! Firstly, I sized up the cards on Photoshop and then printed it off on plain printing paper. I decided that the best approach to take for sizing was to make a small-sized counter, because the spaces on the board game are very small, and I do not want the counters to overlap several spaces as this would cause much player confusion. To add durability to it, I laminated the pieces of paper and then glued an extra strong cardboard layer between the pieces of paper to add extra strength and ensure that the counter cards were 2mm thick, as this would provide a snug fit when placed between the slots on the plastic base. I am happy with the cardboard pieces for the counters and will be adding these to the plastic bases as soon as possible.

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Play testing: The first play

Our team and I meet during the evening in the media lab to have our first play test of the game. Originally we began playing with six players, then dropped down to four after playing the board game for roughly thirty minutes.
I thought it would be a good idea to use the spaceship size that none of the other members were using, so that we had a good idea of how ALL of the spaceships worked, rather than just a few. Therefore, we managed to test out the large, medium and small spaceship counters.

I feel that the play test was incredibly useful as it has allowed us to notice certain flaws within the game.
For example, we discovered that the game wasn't quick-paced, like we hoped. So to fix this problem, we have increased the amount of squares a player can move (depending on the size of their spaceship.)  To add a level of rivalry and entertainment into the game, we have decided to increase the ranges of certain weapons to allow players to use a wider range of weapon cards during the board game.

Nathan decided to change the values in the range, power and capacity weaponry features to help make the board game much more quick-paced, which will be incredibly handy in shortening the average time to complete the board. The notes are as follows:


Ranged Weapon 1:
> Range: 8
> Power: 1
> Capacity: 1
> Maximum permitted: 4

Ranged Weapon 2:
> Range: 6
> Power: 2
> Capacity: 2
> Maximum permitted: 3

Ranged Weapon 3:
> Range: 4
> Power: 3
> Capacity: 3
> Maximum permitted: 2

Mine Weapon:
> Range: +1/-1
> Power: 3*
> Capacity: 2*
> Maximum permitted: 2
> Placement: The player has to place the mine down 2 squares behind them.

*Note: Although the Ranged Weapon 3's power is exactly the same as the Mine Weapon's, the Mine Weapon has a lower capacity, this should balance out the lack or range.

Grapple Hook Item:
> Range: 10
> Capacity: 2
> Maximum permitted: 2
> Special Effect; Latches on to an enemy ship and pulls them back 3 spaces.

Shield Item:
> Capacity: 1
> Maximum permitted: 3
> Special Effect; Protects the users ship from up to 2 damage.

And a possible new weapon?
EMP Weapon:
> Range: 5
> Capacity: 2
> Maximum permitted: 1
> Special Effect; The player the weapon hits misses their next turn.

How many cards needed in PER deck:

Ranged Weapon 1 x 4 Cards
Ranged Weapon 2 x 3 Cards
Ranged Weapon 3 x 2 Cards
Mine Weapon x 2 Cards
Grapple Hook Item x 2 Cards
Shield Item x 3 Cards
EMP Weapon x 1 Cards

= a total of 17 cards.

pictures photographed by Christina

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Presentations: Group C and Group D

Today we had to present our board game concept to Group C, Group D, Mark and Nigel. We presented for roughly five minutes, each talking about certain aspects of the game.

The game overview - Kai
The board game box design - Samantha
The board game design - Nathan
The rules and star cards - Christina
Weaponry - Taz
Character concepts - Tyrone and Will

I spoke about research into the generic counter designs and research into spaceship designs from fictional and non-fictional pieces. I also explained to the groups that we are still deciding on what style counter to pick for our board game, how ever we seem to be swaying towards the stand-up counter at the moment as it allows detail of the design to be shown, whilst keeping production costs and timing lower than what a 3D model counter would.

In my opinion, the presentation went well considering it was our first time presenting in the GAD course. Other teams questioned certain aspects of the game which helped myself and the team know whether certain aspects of the board game may be a little confusing to the public, and will allow us to present in more detail in future presentations.

Nigel suggested that next time we should not add long pieces of text in the slides so that the audience can concentrate solely on the speech, which is definitely a handy piece of advice I am sure to be taking a note of for the future.

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Studiowork: Designing the counters in digital form - 3D models

A print screen of the loading screen of the program I used to create the models - Maya.

"Stealth"

"UFO"

"Space plane"

"Speed"

Above are all my digitised models of the rocketship counter designs. There should be six in total, but we will be using Will's designs too, so we shall be splitting the amount of work done by working together. This will be incredibly time-effective for both of us as we can concentrate on putting more detail into our own designs rather than rushing to finish all six designs.
I will be creating a special concept page for each of my designs to present my sketches, models and a short paragraph on each of my designs.

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Studiowork: Designing the counters in traditional form

Designing the counters - traditional form - drawing:

For the red and white rocket ship I decided to design a generic spaceship - I decided to go for this design because the space theme will then be easily recognisable for our target audience.

Next, I went for a 'spaceplane' design. The wings are large just like a typical turbo jet's wings and could easily be recognised as a modern-day aeroplane. 

After designing a fairly typical aeroplane design, I decided to aim towards a cartoon style design of a flying saucer. This design is inspired by 'aliens' with its antennae and long 'tentacle-style' claws. This design led me to an idea of 'special attributes' for each rocket ship, for example, the flying saucer could have a special trick of using his tentacle claws to 'steal' another player's weaponry. How ever, some members of the team were skeptical about the idea because it may make the game too confusing.

Here is a design I decided to name "Stealth" in order to be able to refer to each of my designs quickly when communicating with the team. Possible attributes for this spaceship could be it's long, slender wings on this design to give the representation that this spaceship would fly quickly but gracefully through the space environment. The ends of the wings have been styled into 'pincer' shapes, as I feel that pincer features connotate well to the words 'evil' and 'danger'. The body is shaped like a snowmobile as I feel that this machine refers well to 'speed' once again. The size of this spaceship is a lot smaller than the rest of the spaceships. This could make the spaceship difficult to spot, just like a ninja.

This is my design for a UFO-style counter. The tentacle-style legs are inspired by 'aliens' in sci-fi films such as 'Star Trek' and 'Star Wars' and links incredibly well to Tyrone's alien character design. This link is incredibly affective because the 'space' theme is being carried across from counter design to characters in the board game. 

I added legs to this counter design as a possible alternative way of movement for the counter, instead of having a flat-based counter. The metal framing around the design adds to the 'futuristic' style of the counter because as my research showed, most spaceships have large circular framing around them.

Here is the developed design of the 'space plane' - I have incorporated jets under the wings which I discovered during the research stages of the project would help power the ship. I decided to colour the front of the aeroplane red, as this resembles a typical fighter plane's front.

With this design I chose a generic rocketship shape - a long, thin body with a sharp tip. The rocket wings are slender, in order to provide a faster speed attribute with this design. I decided to choose three different 'racing-style' colours for the rocketship to have. I feel this adds elements of realism to this design because whilst researching different style rocketships I discovered most ships had white, red or blue colouring to them.  

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Advice: Nigel

Today we had to present our board game idea to Nigel and received handy constructive criticism on our concept. We have decided to tweak our ideas to fit with Nigel's advice on creating a board game that allows the player to have more control over playing the game, rather than letting a dice decide their fate e.g. how many moves they could take.
Earlier, Nigel told us today that our target audience of 8 - 12  years was very specific, so we decided to go for 8 years old and up for our new target audience. This would allow us to research on what children of that age enjoy and find out how complicated we can make the board game without confusing the 8 year olds, but at the same time, not limiting older players from joining in playing.

In order to add more depth to the concept, we choose three different types of ship for our characters.
Each character has a colour. Each character has his/her own planet to start from on the board.

The ships are listed below:

Large Spaceship - This can move only 2 spaces at a time but can hold up to 8 tokens/cards at any one time.
Medium Spaceship - This can move up to 3 spaces at a time on the board and can hold up to 8 cards/tokens.
Small Spaceship - This super fast machine can do 4 spaces at any one time in a move. However because of it's small size and power it doesn't have much room so you can only have 4 cards/tokens.

Our team leader reminded us that there are six different characters that need to be designed and those characters need 6 planets to accompany them.

Furthermore, today we recognised each group members' role in the team, in order to work well to the time deadline and ensure work runs smoothly (hopefully!)

It was established that Kai and Christina are  working on putting together the rules of the game and an instruction/rule booklet to go along with the game that is correctly focused on our age range.

Taz is working on the design of the different weapons. Make as many as you like we can refine which ones we want to use at a later date.

Nathan is focusing on the board. That will be the board design and the look of it. The illustrations on top, the electronics and how the board will work. i.e if it folds, how many spaces people will move in total, how those spaces will look. It was also decided that Kai and Stina will get in touch with you about what features the board needs to have

Samantha is going to be designing the box, where the characters to go, and whether there is going to be trays to keep everything organised inside the box.

Myself, Will and Tyrone are going to be looking at the characters, planets and ships of the game. This will end up coming out on the board illustration with Nathan, and the box design with Samantha.

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Research: Spaceship designs

http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/145956main_NTR_borowskii.jpg

The first picture I have taken is over a spaceship from the NASA website. The long slender bodywork is a generic design for a spaceship and therefore, I feel that it would be a good idea to incorporate this shape into the board game counters because a large amount of the general public will be familiar with this design of a spaceship.

                     

                            http://www.templates.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/spaceship-by-joel-carlo.jpg

I have saved this picture for research purposes because the plane's sharp edges on the wings and the angled tails suggest the plane is 'dangerous' and 'evil'. The dark colouring also suggests the plane's 'evilness' because dark colours often connotate to 'villainous'.

                          

                    http://allcretansareliars.wikispaces.com/file/view/spaceship.jpg/32185801/spaceship.jpg

I feel that this spaceship design could be used as part of the counter designs because you can see turrets for the spaceship's weaponry. These designs could be taken and developed for our counter designs because we are planning on incorporating spaceship weaponry into our board game.

http://www.instablogsimages.com/images/2008/03/29/lynx-rocket_5965.jpg

I also researched 'space planes' which designs are often similar to typical modern-day aeroplanes yet combine these with typical spaceship features such as weaponry. I feel that this space plane design could be used in our counter designs because the general public will instantly recognise the design as a way of air travel. 

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Research: Board game counters

My next stage of research was on existing board game counters that are already on the market. Whilst looking at different board games during class and from my own knowledge, I wrote up a list on the different styles of counter that we could use in our board game.
I spoke to the rest of the team about these different styles via our Facebook group and then I decided to write about the pros and cons of each style.

- Counter style e.g. 'Connect 4':

Coin style:
Pros: 
- cheap to make
- available in different colours
- lightweight
Cons:
- might be difficult for the player to distinguish between different counters without looking closely at the detailing

- 3-D style e.g. 'Monopoly':

3-D style:
Pros:
- high level of detailing makes the counter interesting to look at
- makes the overall appearance of the board game much higher quality
Cons:
- might not be cost or time efficient specifically for our deadline




- Silhouette style e.g. 'Jigsaw puzzles'

Silhouette style:

Pros:
- cheap to make
- available in different colours
- lightweight
Cons:
- might appear as 'blobs', thus making them not eye-catching or fun to look at
- does not capture high amount of detail as opposed to a 3-D style counter or stand-up

- Stand-up style e.g. 'The Beatles'

Stand-up style:
Pros: 
- allows higher level of detailing to be added to the counter
- much more eye-catching and fun to look at, as opposed to a coin counter style
- cheap cost production, as opposed to a 3-D model counter
Cons:
- the counter might be unstable and fall over
- the products' life won't be as long as the other styles



After writing out the pros and cons of each style, I decided to digitise some possible counter models to post to the other team members via Facebook.
We decided that due to our strict time conditions because of the deadline, we decided to sway towards the stand-up style counter design. We decided to use this counter because we are still able to reflect high levels of detail on the counter through the use of the spaceship imagery on the card, whilst keeping production costs and time efficiency fairly low.

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Research: Board games existing on the market

Today we decided that it would be a great idea to play test some board games already existing on the market. I feel this was an excellent choice to make because it would allow us to see what factors make the board game successful or unsuccessful and therefore, would allow us to take this feedback into account when developing our board game concept.


Blokus Trigon:

Attitude of play: Ludus
Game definition: Agon

This award-winning board game was play tested by us during our day at University.

Information on the board game: 
This game is suggested as an abstract strategy board game meant to be played between two to four players. There are four different coloured tiles provided within the box (one colour to each player) - red, yellow, blue and green.

Gameplay:
Each player is assigned a colour and keeps their coloured tiles close to them, these tiles will act as their counters throughout the game. All players start in a corner of the board by placing down one of their tiles, and then take it in turns to place down a tile so it touches the corner of one of their other tiles. Only corner-to-corner contact is allowed when playing the game.

Objective:
The game ends when no player can place down a tile onto the board - therefore, the objective of this game is effectively, to be the last player standing (hold the ability to place down all their tiles.)

My opinion on the board game: 

The aesthetics of the packaging e.g. shape, graphics and use of colour:
When first picking up this board game, my thoughts were that the designers had created an interesting board game box shape. The hexagonal shape of the board game does not follow the generic convention of other board games on the market, which are normally a square shape. I believe this was a great choice for the designers because this eye-catching box, coupled with it's use of bright, solid colours on the front works well in standing out from other board games in the shops.
The graphics used on the front of the box instantly suggests to the possible buyer what the game holds in store for them. The picture of the board game on the front of the box works well in allowing the buyer to see the board game, without having to open the box. Therefore the graphics on the front of the box could be effective because they allow the buyer to make a choice on whether the game is right for them just by picking up the box and reading the front.

Playing the game itself:
My team and I played several rounds of this game because quite frankly, it was addicting! As soon as I began to play this game, it was extremely apparent that Blokus fitted into the strategy genre. I found myself racking my brains each turn, planning out my next move in order to be 'the last one standing' - this could be seen as an extremely effective way of pleasing the player because they find themselves losing contact with the outer world by getting absorbed in the game through planning their next position on the board.

However, as I became more familiar with the game, it became obvious that each player was adopting several tactics towards their gameplay.
I took the tactic of spreading my tiles across the board, with hopes that by claiming most of the board, I would be able to use many different open spaces to my advantages when placing down my next tile.
However, I noticed another player was keeping their tiles in a close corner and was being quite 'territorial' in their mannerisms, yet not ganging up on other places by moving across the board like I was, 'invading their corner'.

As the game progressed my mood deflated a little due to the result of the different tactics players were adopting, coupled with the rule that players can only use corner-to-corner contact.
I noticed that once players began to invade other players' corners, it would often lead to the player being invaded unable to make their next move or providing very little effective response in their placement of their tile. At first, this would make the game exciting as it would make the player feel excited that they had a shot in feeling authoritative and had a shot at winning. Yet, as more and more players had their area 'invaded' and were unable to deliver an effective response against this, the game became slightly frustrating when unable to make a tactical move against another player.

What we learnt from play-testing:
Play-testing board games already on the market was invaluable help to us, as it allowed us to draw up conclusions on what we felt worked in certain board games and what did not. The game 'Blokus' helped aid us in a possible design of our board game shape, and we have decided to explore the different shapes available that we could design our board as.
The rules of different board games has allowed us to understand what rules could make the board game fun, difficult or strategic. For example, 'Blokus'' rule of corner-to-corner contact only helped develop the whole board game genre of strategy, as it encouraged tactical thinking and placement of the counters. As explained earlier, this held it's disadvantages and advantages and therefore, has spurred us on into developing our board game dynamics.

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Research: History of board games

Archaeological evidence:

Rich, grieving parents often used to bury their children amongst their favourite toys and games - since then, many games have been found in tombs. 


During 3000BC, the Egyptians used mud gaming boards. Evidence has been found in an Egyptian tomb of a board and peg game with heads of dog or wolves on. 

Chance vs. Fate:
Evidence taken from Egyptian tombs dating from around 2800BC showed that dice were used during that period, and therefore, it can be suggested that luck and skill were involved in board games during this time period.

The first board game to be manufactured in the USA:

Namely "The Mansion of Happiness" was manufactured in 1843. The board game business began to expand greatly, as improved printing and production techniques bought about increased prosperity, allowing more board games to be manufactured. 

Themes of board games during the 19th and 20th century: 

Most board games involved educational or moral themes during this time period. A good example of these themes could be presented in the game "Snakes and Ladders" which held great moral significance - rewarding virtue, but punishing vice.

Small pictures of a child carrying a load for a member of the elderly would be able to move up the ladder, how ever the greedy child would go back down the snake's body.

The Great Depression:

During the end of the 1920s, many members of the public were put out of work due to the Great Depression. 

A picture of Charles Darrow.

A particular individual, namely Charles Darrow, improvised a board game which had street names of Atlantic City around the edge of the board, and had the objective of gaining properties. As the game became more popular, Darrow sold copies of his board game to a department store. Leading to the Parker Brothers selling over a million sets after 1935. This game has now became world-known and is known as 'Monopoly'.

Using board games to advertise:

After World War Two, manufacturers used board games to promote and advertise their products. A good example to enforce this statement is the company 'Huntley and Palmer'. 

During 1926, the company produced a checkers game and used real ginger nut biscuits as the counter pieces. 

Manufacturers produced board games based on comics, TV programmes and radio programmes, in order to help promote their products and aim for a larger gross profit. 

A good example to enforce this statement is the company 'Huntley and Palmer'. 

During 1926, the company produced a checkers game and used real ginger nut biscuits as the counter pieces. 

References taken from: 
http://www.ccgs.com/games/index.htm
http://www.techitoutuk.com/projects/boardgames/history.html

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Social media interaction: Facebook group

A print screen of our group (D1)'s Facebook group page. 

Incredibly early into the project, group member Nathan set up a Facebook group exclusively for our team only. Each team member in our group was sent an invitation to join the group on Facebook, thus allowing us to keep in contact with each other at any time of the day in any place (providing we have access to the internet.)

One can infer that this was an amazing idea in terms of group communication, as we have used this group to converse with members of the group and build stronger relationships with each other.

Furthermore, it has allowed us to comment between us on different ideas we came up with earlier - critique, suggest, question and applaude different ideas we would post on the Facebook page wall.

An example of how we provided critique, suggestions and feedback on each other's work.

Also through this social media group, we have been able to contact each other and set up days and times to meet up in order to show our work physically and develop it further.
All-in-all, a fantastic way of communicating with our group when unable to meet in person!

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