OUGD405 STUDIO BRIEF 4 - GENERATING IDEAS

I started off by producing a mind map for this brief, to brainstorm ideas of different games I could produce that would be both fun and easy to produce/design in the limited time available, and which provide an opportunity for learning to take place. 

I thought of puzzles, however there is not much room for interaction. I also thought about card games such as pairs or snap, but I’m sure these types of games have already been produced about the world, and I didn’t want to produce a game that has already been made. I thought about online interactive games, as a lot of the games I found from my research were online, where you select the country it’s describing. However I wanted to produce a game that can be played by all members of the family, rather than sat at a screen. I considered producing a world version of Monopoly, although I don’t want to simply copy a game. I also thought about frustration, a classic game, and perhaps I could adapt that to fit my brief. In the end I designed my game by combining both Monopoly and frustration, whereby the players must move around the board collecting pieces of the map by answering questions, but must get their playing piece to the STAR tile to win.

In this notebook page I tried sketching out different layouts of the game, to see how it would work logically, rather than just an idea. I started with a 6 player square game, but found the centre paths would have to be diagonal to fit all the paths in, so then tried a circular game so everything would be even, however this looks a little odd being circular, traditionally board games have been four sided. I then came up with a rough sketch of what would become my final board game, a four player game with the dice clicker in the middle like in Frustration, and slots to put your pieces of the map in in the spare square quadrants inside the main path area.