This week, Jun finished the first design solution for the branding of Tiny.
logo
poster
halfsheet
Lena did concept design for poster and logo as well.
Jibran create a few paper prototypes with the team.
Carl worked on a digital prototype on ipad.
We met Jesse on Tuesday and following his advice looked at each of our main ideas using various design lenses, in particular using the lens of spectation atmosphere and fantasy and help to help us come up with art concepts for the game.Also we considered each game in terms of transformation, activity and game.
Following Jessie’s advice to better to use specialization, we refined the paper prototype, and playtested it. We also created two more paper prototypes and play tested those.
Jesse also commented that ‘spatialization’ was a good avenue to investigate for teaching angles. So considering his advice we adapted Angle Ninja. Instead of making gestures to create obtuse, acute, right angled, and straight angles to defeat a single enemy we would instead have multiple enemies which we would attack from a fixed position on the iPad.
The shift in design was due to wanting to focus on the fundamental lesson of teaching familiarity with angles rather than the more advanced one of the special properties of angles.
Concepts Through Lenses
Using the Lens of Fantasy, and Help we brainstormed up a number of concepts for the game answering a number of fundamental questions such as:
- What fantasy does my world fulfill? Powerful
- What does my player fantasize about being? King, Adventurer
- Who is the player helping? A monkey, the kings subjects, garden gnomes
We then applied these concepts to the three paper prototypes we had.
Three to Two
At this point we had three prototypes, and a number of concepts:
- Angle Ninja
- Spaceship Angles
- Abstract Glue Circle
After some consideration we folded Spaceship Angles into Abstract Glue Circle because they essentially presented the same problem. Both prototypes boiled down to relative connect problems of selecting from a 360 degree and firing to the next node.
By the end we had two prototypes and two concepts:
- The first was Crayon King (Angle Ninja V2 with a crayon art style where the player is the King defending his castle from incoming monsters)
- The second was an abstract game where we would fire balls from surface to surface.
We then considered each game in terms of transformation, and activity.
Angle Ninja V2 (AKA Crayon King)
- Transformation: Familiarity with 180 degrees, measurement, and estimation
- Activity: Correctly estimating the angle at which to fire at a fixed position
Abstract Glue Circle
- Transformation: Familiarity with 360 degrees, measurement and estimation
- Activity: Correctly estimating the angle at which to toss at a relative position/ Following his advice looked at each of our main ideas using various design lenses, in particular using the lens of spectation atmosphere and fantasy and help to help us come up with art concepts for the game.
We decided on two general direction for further explorations on game design, one is space themed shooting game, and the other one is a farm themed tossing game.
When we met our instructors, Scott and Ricardo challenged us about what we can bring our client, students at Colonial School. They suggested that our approach needs a more refined concept: making a game simpler is indeed a more complicated process.
After some brainstorming about content, we drove away with several initial ideas. For example, we wanted to create a game that involved with physics. However, we then realized that it would be too much information to handle for our audience. That is why we decided to change the direction: adopt the concept of angles only.
Next Week:
In addition to work on the next prototype, we will refine the branding materials based on the critique next week. We will also continue to work towards our next prototype goal in anticipation of 1/4 Review.