To start the year, our first assignment on the course was to design and create a board game. It was not exactly what I expected but after the final briefing I understood the reasons for such an assignment. Although my interests lay in the creation of digital games, the creation and design of a board game is not so different. The mechanics of games either digital or physical are what makes the game playable, without them the game cannot truly exist. It also gives us a chance to gauge what each other's weaknesses and strengths are, which when working in groups in the future will be important.
As soon as I had overcome the hurdle of understanding why we had been asked to design and create a board game my mind began to race though all the different types and styles of games. Although I tried to keep my mind open I had an idea stuck in my head that I could not get out. The idea was a game where, like in some of the more well known games like snakes and ladders, has an end and a start with different variations of completion. Specifically, I wanted to create a game that had two roads, a high road and a low road, that both started in the same place and ended in the same place. The idea was that the low road was the safe road but had say, 100 spaces to the end of the board while the high road was the dangerous road, which had say 50 spaces to the end of the board. On each of the roads the players would encounter obstacles, however the high road and numerously more than the lower road.
After the brief the class was divided into groups, I found myself in Group D1 along with 7 other students (William Pateman, Samantha Pillow, Kai Shepherd, Chloe Pleass, Tyrone Parker, Taisy Selby & Christina Sheehy). Within a few minutes of speaking to each other I knew that our group was full of people who were very passionate and skilful in multiple areas.
To begin everyone had ideas ranging from re-makes of old games to completely new concepts of board games. By the time we had all spoken about our ideas it was pretty much time to split for our lunch break however we had decided on one thing... Our game would be about space! It was in the lunch break that I spent with Taisy, Kai and Kai's fiancée that we actually had a good amount of time to brainstorm ideas but by far one of the ideas we had about a "Space Race" themed board game was the one that stood out from the crowd.
After our lunch break the group joined up again and as me and Kai had joked about during the lunch break, the other members of the group had also came up with some great ideas! After talking through our different ideas we converged them together to create a final idea. We took the idea of a spinner as opposed to a dice, going around in a circuit instead of a 1 lap board, collecting items from planets along the way, weapons and defences and even a control board for each player signifying their lives/health bar with LED lights.
Once we had put the ideas together we had a rough final idea of what our board game would be like. As Kai said "We are in it to win it! ", which is defiantly something I am keen to prove!
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