BRIEF
For this brief we were given free reign on what to produce but we had to consider the theme of ‘collide’ and three key areas to comtemplate; happiness, my future self and the internet & digital age. We have to collide these themes and create a final outcome of our choice. I want to first research into the three areas find out what makes me happy, where I see myself in the future and my connection with the internet and digital age, then using that devise three ideas to then further develop for the final outcome and exhibition in April.
SWEET SPOT
DIG I T A
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ES GE R E L TU F LA U
HAP P
INTERN
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S S E IN
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Happiness is a vague term and it’s definition is disbuted because it’s so subjective. One persons happiness is completely different to others, this presents a problem, how do we make everyone happy? This is often very difficult and in some cases not possible at all. So that’s why businesses aim for a specific target market, it’s easier for a business to appeal to a small segment of the market instead of the majority. Films, music and arts all share the same prinicipal. Happiness can be evoked all the time by any action. Happiness to me is being with my friends and family, playing games and creating work. Theres nothing that puts a smile on my face more than being proud of a finished outcome. I think one of the best ways to be happy is by playing games and when I was a child playing board games with my family was the most fun. Whether it was the competitive element or just spending time with family together, board games are a great way to evoke happiness.
3 Family
things that make us happy
Relationship
Job
FUTURE
I think I have a naive optimism about my future, I wish to be successful in Graphic Design through marketing and advertisements. I feel that going through school you already pre determine your future years, decisions like what GCSE’s to take, What A levels you take or college course, we decide our futures at least for the 2 or 3 years ahead of us. I decided to study Graphic Design at university so it then becomes my future.
?
The internet has been a massive influence on modern society, and advancements in technologies over the past decades, has accelerated the need for accessible, fast and free internet. The digital age has also made our society less private and more open as a result of social media. Social media has also had a positive effect on the way we market products, using cookies companies can market their product to someone who has similar searches, for example, If I had been looking at buying golf clubs online, Facebook would start to put adverts on their newsfeed related to golf in some way, whether it was a deal for some clubs or golf tournaments etc. This makes advertising less wasteful and more likely have an impact.
concept
My first concept is to design and produce a board game. Studies mainly show that people are most happy when around families and being in relationships. When I was a child I used to love sitting around with my family to play monopoly, cluedo, etc and those games in my mind brought us together even if it was for an hour to have fun and relax. So creating a board game that’s fun and interesting to play would evoke happiness. I want the game to be about progression and finding the right path, much like what we have to do for our futures is choose the right way at the right time and I think thats the boards games main concept. I also think a board game is a great testament to the fact that you can have fun and be happy without using the internet .
BOARD
FIRST SKETCH
SLIDER
I was struggling to come up with a board game concept at first, I found the task quite daunting but I had one idea about a sliding board and what that would look like. I first envisaged the game during a lecture and started drawing the board, with idea of being similar to a chess board. I then drew it bigger in the back of my notebook and tried to explain the basic rules of the game so I wouldn’t forget. Later when the lecture finished I tried to reproduce the game using paper and paper sliders. I tried playing it with a friend and found the paper to be too annoying and kept moving which presented the problem of how they are going to slide in and out. I decided to rethink the idea at this point and design a new board on lllustrator so I could introduce colours and make the game easier to play in terms of creating rules and moving sliders. I also had to decide on what the board game would be made out of and how I was going to keep the sliders in place so that they could be seperate from the board but also when on the board they are locked in so they can only be moved left and right. I was going to do this by putting long thin bits of cardboard between each level called lips.
BASIC RULES
SIDE VIEW CARDBOARD LIP
DESIGN OF BOARD GAME
A Name for my Game
UNIVERSITY-
This was the original title for the game. I felt like it represented my journey through university, slider 1 first year etc. You have to answer questions to move forward is a representations of exams and assessments and then a roll of the dice which is the luck which has always been a key part in producing some of my best work.
PATHFINDER-
I like this title it’s more relevant to the game itself and again links with the university theme.
SLIDING-
More literal title.
NAVIGATE! PATHWAY SLIDING SQUARES SLIDERS
SLIDER 1
Rules BOARD
SLIDER 2
Put sliders in place so that no colour is aligned with the starting squares. Players have to answer a question correctly for the opportunity to roll the dice. The value of the dice is how many squares you can move the slider either left or right. A player can change direction while sliding but only once per dice throw & if they manage to line up their colour they progress onto the next slider. On the first three sliders if a player answers the question correctly they do not have to answer any more questions on that slider until they progress. On the fourth slider you have to answer a question correctly every turn until a player wins. Sliders have to be on at least one square of the board at all times.
SLIDER 3
SLIDER 4
FINISH
1.
A typical starting board, all the counters at the bottom 4 coloured squares and the first line mustn’t have the same colour connected to it, e.g. a red square being directly above the starting red square is not allowed.
START
2. After deciding who goes first, the player must answer a question correctly (questions increase in difficultly the higher the level), If they do answer correctly they get to roll the dice, which then decides on how many squares you can move the slider. In the example the red player rolled a 3 so therefore gets to advance to that square.
3.
Now the second player answers a question correctly, rolls the dice and gets a 2. This in turn throws the red player off his path to victory. In the next round you repeat the same, try and move the slider to match up your colours to progress.
4. After the blue player answered their question
correctly and managed to match up his colour it seems that green has also been lined up in the process. For the green player all they have to do is answer the question correctly to advance (this can only happen when you are in line with the same colour BEFORE throwing the dice).
5.
The game progresses as normal. Usually the red counter would move from the line it’s on currently but for the purposes of the demonstration they will stay in the same position.
6.
The red player is close to winning, when a player is on the last slider and gets a question right, he moves the slider he’s already on to try and line it up and win. If the player doesn’t manage to line up their square then on their next go they have get another question right for the opportunity to roll.
7. Once the player is lined up to the final square they have won!
I improved the board after playing through the game with my housemates. I found that when using the original board the game was fun and the response was positive from everyone else. Unfortunately the fourth slider colour positions meant that when everyone got to the fourth slider it was almost impossible for one player to win. So I changed the position of the colours on the top slider and added more coloured squares to the bottom line to make the game easier to hard. I also added a single square to each slider so that the game becomes longer and more competitive.
SLIDER 1
SLIDER 3
SLIDER 4
FINAL DESIGN
SLIDER 2
L A IT
R F
M O
G I D
So for my formative assessment I thought the best way to show my board and how it works was to make a rough mock up of what I thought the board might look like. After creating a board size I was happy with I began to make the sliders and lips for the sliders to fit in that they would only go left and right. While in the process I noticed that the sliders would have to be quite long to fit with the board. Nevertheless I completed the board & sliders to a sastifactory level and showed my tutor at formative assessment, he advised me on the size and material of the board and I agreed to change it.
From big to small, I started looking at how I should size the board and decided to print paper copies so I could visualise it. I came to the conclusion that I would make them much smaller than my first prototype so small in fact that two boards (without sliders) could fit on a side of A4. So I took my skeleton design to the laser cutter, where I was able to cut 4 boards and 16 sliders on 3mm MDF for ÂŁ2. Then a week later I collected my material and took it to the print office, where I booked a UV print appointment.
Laser cut MDF
1 Size Comparison
2 3 1 of 4 boards, 4 of 8 sliders printed
1 2 3
Burns from the laser cutter, this is a common problem. There are ways to minimise this but unfortunately I was pressed for time. For the most part I could just turn the slider upside down so that these couldn’t be seen and that side wasn’t used for UV Printing.
Because of the material I used (MDF) my board had line marks on it from where the printer had hit a mark on the material and dragged that colour across.
Again, the material being slightly rough meant that the UV printer couldn’t recognise it and so produced this fluffy effect. If I were to do this again I would use laser ply instead to get a smoother finish.
Rulebook I designed a rulebook to go alongside my board game for the exhibition. It has simplistic visual instructions using vectors. I explain about why I chose to do a boardgame, set-up, rules and “what do you think?� page to have feedback from anyone who played it at the exhibition. The book can be found on issuu:
issuu.com/samuelbarran/docs/ pathfinder_rulebook
Questions To make the questions I used google to find general knowledge trivia and designed the cards so that each question could fit on and answer also printed upside down and in the corner of the card. Here’s 30 out of a total of 50 questions. I printed them on a thick card back to back and cut them out using a paper trimmer. It took a lot of trial and error to get the right effect when printing back to back, but I’m proud of how they came out and makes the game complete.
Working out the kinks
The main problem I had throughout the development process was figuring out how to keep the sliders in place so that they would only move left and right. I first addressed this problem at the cardboard prototype stage but didn’t decide on taking that idea further because I found a simpler solution after talking to the UV printer technician, Steve. He suggested using small metal poles in between the sliders to hold them in place. I also purchased the counters and dice for the exhibition opening night. Because of the size of the board and timescale before the exhibition I had to use an alternative solution and purchased some small pins used for sewing. After drilling holes at 0.8mm in diameter (marked on the board to left) and cutting the pins down to about 5mm length (3mm thickness of the board and 2mm to influence the sliders movement) I was able to successfully solve the problem.
Exhibition So this is what my project looked like at the collide event. It was great to be a part of the exhibition and interesting to see how others had interpreted the brief. As soon as I heard we had to make something physical I instantly thought of the boardgame and how that would look at exhibition. I really wanted an interactive piece that could get people socialising, playing together but most of all, having fun. I really enjoyed this project, it was the one I connected most with and I’m proud of the final outcome.
Animation I decided early on that if I was going to produce a boardgame I would produce an animation on how to play it, showing something through movement and actually playing through helps the audience learn the crux of the game instead of reading through.
I decided to use the stop motion technique as it brings something physical to life through small movements. I spent over three hours compiling photographs and ended up taking just over 200 to use for the animation. I would then split the photos up into seperate animations and use photoshop frame animation to create the desired effect. The Pathfinder Animation can be found on my Vimeo account;
vimeo.com/samuelbarran