Week 6: Starting with the boardgame concept

After the last weeks presentation we had our boardgame concept chosen and we were ready to start to work with it.

The goal of the week was to define the gameplay more and also make an asset list to help make our production more straightforward. In Unity we started working with linking the augmented reality marker tracking to match the grid based map system to get the basic gameplay to work. Lots of planning for the forthcoming weeks was also made.

We received a comprehensive list about the actors included in the field of urban planning which greatly helped us to understand the mechanics behind and also we will be able to use this information straight for the game design.

In overall the week was more about changing our focus from the three different concepts to the chosen one and also to process the feedback we got from last week's meeting.

The next week 7 will be a holiday week for our group so it means also no updates here in our blog!

Overgrown week 5: concept presentations

This week everyone focused on developing and brainstorming on the 3 concepts for the presentation. We finished up all the development to a stage that we could show the client the essence of each concept and a small representation of it.

We separated during the week to work on the concepts, this gave us the opportunity to playtest the concepts on each other and get feedback with a fresh state of mind.

Friday we held the presentation with the client. We presented the three concepts and in the end the board game was chosen, we held some discussion about the concept. The main parts of the discussion were the following:

- What kind of buildings will we represent
- Which roles are there in city planning and what events are important.
- What gameplay representation will there be for the game, are there opposites? Are they're co-operative problems.
- the representation of the roles (merging)


Next week we'll start working on the chosen concept with the group, taking with us the feedback we got from the clients.

Overgrown week 4

The concepts are finally taking shape. It took hours and hours of brainstorming but we choose three game concepts we all feel comfortable with. Trying to find suitable concepts that fit the assignment takes a lot of time and brain activity. The good news is that most of that is behind us and we can focus on fleshing out the concepts.

We visited De Digitale Werkplaats on Wednesday again, but thanks to rain we weren't able to view the area again, although Timi, Ferry and Kana were able to find a half hour dry period to take some pictures. We spoke with Sahar Fakouhi over Skype about her projects “Grid” and “Detonator”.  2 games that use augmented reality to inform players about the problem of landmines all over the world. We asked her about her motives and what effect the game had on players. It was great to learn what she experienced and I think we can use her knowledge  in our games.

There is still loads of work to do and in the next week well be preparing for the pitch for our clients. From now on there will be more interesting post containing more than plain text, so look forward to that.