PHIL HOARE TIME
Overview
Over these weeks I worked on refining my ideas and narrowing them down to three. I went about this through a few methods to eventually decide on the final ideas. I went about prototyping as many of the games as I could, as well as researching around some game ideas to get a better idea of what they would be and finally I asked for feedback from the group on my ideas.
feedback
To begin I printed out each of the game boards, which I created in weeks six to eight, and stuck them to a physical board in the studio. Doing this also allowed me to clearly see each of the ideas, with their core premises visualised alongside each other, every time I entered the studio; this encouraged me to quickly flip between ideas for prototyping without needing to remember them or review notes. The main purpose for doing this, however, was to show the ideas to the rest of the group and discover which ideas they felt worked best, whilst also stating any thoughts they had on improving the ideas. The image below, taken at the end of week ten, shows the final result of the board after it was left up for a couple of weeks.
The game favoured by most was the 4D murder mystery so I decided to go with this game as one of my three ideas. I did, however, change the format of this to be a board game that is driven by narrative. I discuss more about this in the “Murder Mystery” pages.
prototyping
I prototyped four different ideas, and two of these were playtested. The prototypes can all be found in the “Prototyping” page. I aimed to make each idea playable, so that I could get people to playtest them as early as possible and build on the games based on that feedback; one prototype, built for Control the Sun, was unplayable as it only illustrated how the village would grow, rather than demonstrating any interaction.
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When building my prototypes I used Pygame, as I have a lot more experience with Python rather than game engines such as Unity, and paper prototyping techniques. With Pygame I created the game loop, along with the code for the player interaction, and simply copied it onto two files, so both Pygame prototypes used the same framework. With the paper prototypes I used a mix of pen, paper, Lego and pieces from other board games.
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Both the Time-Travelling Trading board game and the Spring Balance game prototypes were well received during playtests. I eventually chose to go ahead with the Spring Balance game, as one of my three ideas, because I was already taking forward a board game. You can see the documentation for this game on the “Spring” pages.
research
In the final sprint of this phase I focused on researching more around specifics for the three games I chose. I researched genres and platforms, as well as visual styles for each game, to better prepare for the next phase and eventually building the game. You can find all of this research in the pages for each game idea I went forward with; the last of which was the Propulsion Through Time game, which can be found in the “Propulsion” pages, because it was the idea I was personally most excited about.