Skip to main content

Board Game : Development pt 3 Review


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: Create multiple prototypes in different programs at the start to test the capabilities of each program. I really needed to try using illustrator in week 2 of this project at the latest, because if I had I would have quickly realised that it is a hell beast of a program and whatever people say it's good at they are WRONG! (I would have realised that I am not yet competent enough in it to get what I wanted out of it). The photoshop prototype I did create had real promise and leaning into that rather than assuming illustrator is the better program for this, would have yielded a far better outcome even if I had to make some small sacrifice in the form of clean lines.

Thing, the second: Not take the advice of people more experienced than you without first testing it. Now that seems counter to what most people would advise but from this project, I tripped myself up by relying on the expertise of people far more familiar with the programs than myself and as a result, could not even come close to achieving what they had expressed would be trivial. 

I really need to be more self-reliant, know for certain what I am personally capable of achieving and use that as the guide for how long any given task would take. By doing my own exploration I would have built up my understanding of the limitations not only of the programs in question but more importantly what the limitations of my own skill and experience were. Had I done this I would have been able to use my time to push myself in useful directions rather than simple smashing my head into a grey checker wall.

On the other end of the spectrum, I feel that the flavour text I came up with for all the cards is the best part. I'm really happy with what the flavour text adds to the game, I only wish that I could have woven the theme present in the cards into other aspects of the game such as the board and rules as this would have solidified the theme as the dominant aspect of the game and lifted it from what I feel is a fairly weak 'game' with good jokes to a fun and engaging experience overall.

The last thing I must do on the next project is to pick something I'm intensely passionate about from the start and run towards that even if it verges off the theme a little. I stuck too rigidly to the theme in the early stages and because of that made a host of decisions that were below my own interest. I lost some steam and spent an amount of time I should have been prototyping and playtesting (limited by current circumstance though I might be) trying to find my passion for this Idea. I did find it but it left me too little time to properly implement my new vision for it.  

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Art and Design Exercises : Decontructing Art into Basic Shapes for 3D Modeling, Glastonbury Dam

The Poäng of Art Glastonbury Dam, By Tyler Edlin, can be broken down into one large cube for the central building of the castle with another rotated and reduced for the roof. The wall is comprised of 4 cylinders with cones on top for the rooves. The tunnel section of the wall could be constructed from rectangles and cylinders using the difference boolean. For the details on the turrets themselves such as the wooden beams, I would use rectangles sunken into the surface to create the depth present in the facade. Alot of the surface detail is heavily repeated on a micro-scale and then on a macro-scale so I would probably try to create a detailed wall for example by creating the largest parts first then cut to get the tunnel, then add the rectangles to make up the supports on one small section and copy that across its breadth. Finally, I would then copy the whole thing for the other walls and make any changes that need to be made to distinguish them. using the same technique I would make t...

Affine texture mapping : Subdivide Mesh

Af fine map indeed Another bug I  encountered in my previous project was when using the PSX shader on large surfaces the warping became severe which was disorientating while playing. This is because the affine mapping that the shader does to emulate the affine mapping the PS1 did, approximates the positions of vertices in screen space meaning that if the vertex in question is far off-screen the approximation becomes more inaccurate meaning that if you subdivide the meshes into smaller triangles the effect is drastically diminished.

Technical tutorial : Illustrator and Photoshop

REVENGE OF ILLUSTRATOR First I loaded an image into illustrator then using the pen tool created shapes with which to create a clipping mask. This made the image into the same shape as the panel frame. I then used Image trace to change the image to black and white as well as adding the flattening effect which bands the colours. When I came to adding the image of Godzilla I opened it in photoshop and created a clipping mask to extract only the parts I wanted. Once I had done that I saved it as a png and opened it in my comic illustrator file. Both panels only took about 1 hour combined to create, so this was a very streamed lined process. The only issue I ran into was that if you modified a file that illustrator has open such as the photo of Godzilla the program will pester you incessantly about it until you relent and let it update at which point it will change all instances of the file to the updated version. This wiped about 10 min of work I had done extracting a photo of Godzilla. I ...