Lessons two and three

Lesson Two

Much to the dismay of my team mates, I was not here, so on to lesson three!

Lesson Three

We spent this lesson picking an idea to shreds in order to decide which one we could eventually paper prototype and construct into a board game. Our idea based on the cake-maker stealing ingredients from passers-by, seemed stubborn, we couldn’t translated onto paper; it required a lot of action and sneakiness. We felt it would suit better as a digital game.

The idea based on falling asleep while driving and mixing music to stay awake was reminiscent of digital games like Guitar Hero, DJ Hero and Singstar.

5-a-side football with zombies was a Dead Rising, House of Dead type of game, with its need for AI or multiple players with the role of zombies and fewer for the unfortunate morgue supervisor.

The floor-is-lava but you can’t let steaming hot molten rock halt your education, so get there by rock climbing idea included a need for scenery and varying location which we couldn’t quite fathom with paper. However, we saw an opportunity to improve the situation with a little more of that good stuff: creative lee way, which we have named; development alterations. We simply got rid of the lava and rock climbing aspect. That left us with… going to university, yes, it’s mundane, a chore, the bane of our existence, but a necessity that sometimes has a lot of obstacles in the way, not to mention the cost.

This was where we also added a new aspect to the idea and more detail in the game’s rules and player choices.

Each player is assigned a mode of transport:

-          Car

-          Tube

-          Bicycle

-          Walking

Their ultimate goal: to get to university – but wait, is that really competitive enough? We don’t arrive early and shout “ha ha I’m early, you’re on time, and therefore you smell!” to fellow students? We needed there to be a worthy victory condition our players would relate to, or at least understand the urgency of it, like a job interview!

Perfect, we found our ultimate goal – being the first one to the job interview, and the challenge and the player choice: ruining the other candidates’ chances of getting there by jeopardising their respective modes of transport.

We have yet to decide the mechanics, it could be in the form of a board game where players also receive cards to indicate the nuisance they cause to another players journey, which then causes players to miss a go or to move back a few spaces.

Here are a few scenarios we thought of in class, and which mode of transport/player they will affect:

Scenario	Affects
Call in a tube strike Person on track Hit by car Punctured tyre Traffic Stopped by police for routine check Painful stitch in ribs Stuck behind lost tourists	Tube user Tube user Cyclist Cyclist Car driver Car driver Pedestrian Pedestrian
Other ideas included humorous ones like looking in anything reflective at your sexy spandex clad butt for cyclists, stopping to apply anti-nipple-chafe cream for pedestrians and rubbernecking a gruesome accident, which we are all guilty of. Some are more controversial, like calling in a fake bomb threat to affect tube users and getting hit by a car or being kidnapped. By applying these types of scenarios, we are changing the tone of the game, so we need to decide on which scenarios we keep and which we leave on the cutting room floor.