Today we got a assignment from the serious game course, to make a serious board game about a up to date topic. Me and my group came up with a basic concept about the homeless in Stockholm. We needed it to be small and precise in order to be able to convey the message through a board game.
We then started thinking about what the best way of conveying this to the player would be. Being shown from the homeless perspective make it easier to sympathize with the homeless and then draw the conclusion that the player should try to help them. But we thought that this kind of sympathy would be easier immersed into by people from lower wage family’s and we stated the assumption that those people already knew and sympathized with the homeless so the one actually needing to be enlightened are the ones of higher standards.
With that conclusion we then started to design mechanics for a game where you play a volunteer worker at a charity help organization. The lack of resources available leads to the player having to choose which homeless person is getting supplied and which one is not.
Still very much at concept stage, we must research in order to be able to proceed properly.
Advanced game design gave us a assignment in which we are to make a board game and we are supposed to have a prototype this Thursday (10/17). We had a concept and some mechanics for it but this morning Adam had a short presentation for the few people attending in which he pressed the matter of designing mechanics alone before putting a game on them.
So we scraped what we had and started over in order to do that instead of trying to make what we had fit into that. So we concept-ed a couple of ideas but did not really come up with anything. It really is hard making mechanics without a context to fit them into. But then I remembered the “Garden” technique that Marcus talked about this morning. A technique where you play around with a couple of possible mechanics until it is fun.
So we did this and it resulted in a system based around spin able cogs which will move objects around on a board. The board is a square with pins on it in order to be able to place cogs on these pins. So when there are multiple cogs connected to each other he player can move objects around the board by spinning these cogs.
Still just a concept for a mechanic which we will have to work more on before we can have a prototype and play test it but it’s a start. So far I’m quite happy with it and the possibility’s for it are interesting.
GAME Dev 