Atomic Garden Interactive

The Board And so we come to this. The hideous visage of what was once going to be the centrepiece of my great ambitions now laid bare for all to see. The board is, in a word 'ugly' and in three 'really fucking ugly'. This thing somehow fails to convey effectively the theme, tone, overall aesthetic or even where to put all the f'in cards. It is both cluttered and empty. It's vacant of any value beyond its small accomplishment of having evenly spaced tiles for the players to move around. The obstacle markers are unclear at best. The 'rooms' are not rooms they are unaligned, sickeningly bordered copies of the tiles that convey nothing of their nature past what colour card you are meant to draw from and the victory markers are so barely there that I almost forgot to mention them. Overall this board is a 3/10, it's just functional enough so as to no make me physically sick but not so functional that I would call it good enough.  Illustrator my nemesis. Or

The Theme I had intended to create an atmosphere of appalled incredulity with capitalists and their dogma and use the chaotic expression of the proponents of free thought, namely anarchist as a tool to force the players to grapple with the crushing, mundane and defeating nature of bureaucratised meritocratic society. Which can be thought of as a long-winded way of saying 'this shit sucks' in reference to the current state of affairs and 'what if it didn't have to be the way it currently is?'  in reference to systems that are more in line with something like anarchism.  What I actually created in my view is a game in which the system you interact with heavily encourage you to come to the conclusion that both sides are: Equal, in either or both their viability to organise society Only cosmetically different, in that they function on the same axis using the same tool for the same tasks. Rigid, you are unable to alter anything about the side you are on or the other side

The Cards This is probably the element I feel that best represents what I was striving for with this board game. They are both clear in their rules and evocative in their theme and flavour text. The flavour helps aid in the player's comprehension of the rules and the rules reinforce the comedic nature of the cards, creating to my mind the perfect balance of form and function. I also wove element of non-linear storytelling throughout some of the cards creating miniature stories that over the course of one or more games the players will piece together giving them both a motive for further play and an incentive to engage with the item card mechanic. Moving forwards I really want to try to continue to incorporate narrative elements into the mechanicals systems of my games. Telling a story through the actions available to the players and allowing the player's actions to create narratives is something I value incredibly highly and I feel at least in parts my use of narrative mixed me

Doom  (and not the good kind) I had a host of problems all arise at the same time near the end of this project. Some were very much miscalculations on my part as to the time certain tasks would take and others were simply out of my control although I should have given myself more wriggle room to work with. Firstly I vastly underestimated both the time I would need to make the board in adobe illustrator, in addition to vastly overestimating my competency with the program. Every minute of creating the 'final' version of the board you see here was agony. The circles flatly refused to centre on each or anything else for that matter, making it near impossible to create the segments around the edge to create the tiles the players move on. This also meant that the coloured rooms that player are meant to pick items up from are not close to being lined up. All of these horrible errors could have been avoided had I done two things. TWO THINGS I WILL DO NEXT TIME!. Thing, the first: Creat

Creating a prototype I created a clearer prototype in photoshop to help myself visualize the actual playing of the game. This really helped uncover some of the things I had missed in my initial designs. One of the things I had missed was a way of displaying where the obstacles would be. This prototype also made me realise that I had no way of tracking victory points. In future, I think I will attempt to produce a prototype such as this earlier so I can playtest as soon in the design process as possible as this was incredibly helpful.

Bean Life I created Bean life today using Maya, Unity and Visual Studio. I exported the segments of the corridor we had made in a previous tutorial into Unity. I then assemble the pieces in a scene into a simple maze. This was even quicker than it was in Maya, being able to duplicate and then snap into place the pieces with very fewer button presses made creating the level very quick and quite enjoyable. I realised through creating the maze that I don't know how to snap rotation points in Unity which is a bit of a stumbling block I need to resolve. After creating the maze I created a Player Controller in the form of the red bean, attached the camera  then used Visual Studio to write the code to turn the keyboard inputs into movement as well as gravity and ground check. The results are as seen above.  I am very pleased with the whole process, it was far easier than I thought I would be while still having the expected head-scratching because of code that doesn't work. With a litt

Working Title : Escape the Duality The Hook The world has been regimented and ordered for optimal efficiency. There is no war between nations, factions or tribes. Everyone is provided with a place to eat, a place to work and a place to sleep. As a result of this productivity has rocketed to an all-time high. Value is being created at a rate hitherto unthinkable by mankind.  However, there is a growing segment of the workforce that inexplicably feels the need to disrupt our work.  They eat whenever they want to, they sleep for more than the optimal 7.45 hours and they constantly miss their value production targets. These (insert name of rebel faction) are a stain on the exquisite fabric of our society. As with all blemishes they must be (removed) for the good of all. Above Text Not Final With this flavour text, I'm attempting to help the players by framing the rest of the information they hear about the game within this context of big bad authority crushing the little guy. This shou

Brush Creation and Thumbnails I created a custom brush using a vector of a cat by importing the image from google and creating a new brush preset using the image as the sample. Creating new brushes like this will allow me to rapidly compose complex scenes.

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.