Board Game : Brainstorming

As the first part of our interaction unit, we are designing a board game using the theme symmetrical. The game will be for 2-4 players. I have to use iterative design practices to achieve this which means lots of playtesting.

I started by trying to break down the theme of symmetrical into slightly more digestible parts so that figuring out how and where I could leverage the theme would be simpler.

Symmetry is an interesting concept as it has a rougher common meaning and a much more precise mathematical meaning. Commonly it can mean anything from reflection, pattern, harmony to balance, whereas the mathematical meaning is that invariant under some transformations.

There is also the fact that different types of symmetry also perceptibly don't offer the same amount of symmetry, for example, reflectional symmetry is what most people think of when you mention symmetry as its the most common type seen in mirrors and commonly used in board games such as chess, but offers the lowest amount of symmetry only being symmetrical across one line/plane. Other types often occur together and across many lines/planes or even infinite lines/planes like spherical because it is infinitely devisable like a circle.

I want to try to incorporate multiple layers of symmetry into my design both in the physical elements such as the board, game pieces, rules and meta-narrative. Utilising the theme of symmetry to be more than just a surface level aesthetic is important to fully explore its potential in my eyes, so I'm going to try to use make use of narrative symmetry as well as ludic-symmetry.

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The Barbican

Enemy at the Gate The Barbican estate in London features a lot of the style of architecture that I wanted to emulate in the art and design project, so for this project, I'm going to try to create my own barbican estate using the real one as the palette. To do this I'm going to create concept art using the barbican as part of a reference sandwich to create unique architecture that should both be evocative of contemporary London, retrofuturist and contain elements meant to subtly guide the player through the area to their goal.

2D Side Scroller : The Final Idea

When the rubber meets the road. The Panda here represents Covid-19 During the course of recent events, it became clear to me that my time was somewhat limited in this project. As a result, I have elected to go with my first idea, the Dung beetle puzzle game. This should provide me with a decent opportunity to stretch myself in the implementation and iteration of mechanically without requiring nearly as much in terms of asset creation which for this project at least isn't one of the marking criteria anyway. The Dung Beetle Puzzle Game is changing slightly to just a puzzle game but keeping the core idea of pushing a large ball around as its main mechanic. So the player characters job is to get the ball to its goal and then make their way to the exit of the stage. This gives me a solid and simple foundation to build some hopefully cool puzzles off of without bogging me down in extra systems, which if you refer to my previous ideas was rampant. Even when stating that I have eyes...

Technical tutorials : Maya

Modular Corridor Part 2 Using the pieces I made last week, I duplicated and then arranged them into a labyrinth-like structure by moving the anchor point to a corner then using snap to point to align the pieces. For the sections that didn't quite meet, I selected the vertexes of one face and snapped them to the connection point of the piece I wanted to connect to, effectively making bespoke pieces. This was very easy and relatively quick to assemble a complex structure. Using this workflow would enable me to create large spaces in a very short amount of time.

Atomic Garden Interactive

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