board game production

A reflection on the brief

After being given the brief i am feeling positive about the task of re designing a board game, I believe that the requirements for the brief are fair and give a clear guide line on what is expected for the finale product and I do not have any objections. The parameters are restrictions on what you must not do but for this brief the parameters seem simple to follow however I believe it will be difficult to give my board game an individual 'product identity' (this is an object requirement) looking at those already available on the market and taking into the account that everyone is creating a board game. Object requirements for the game include that the board game must 'traditional elements', object requirements is what the product has to achieve. I am intending to work in a team, as that is how i work best. I believe that there will be others in my team that will be more creative and therefore helpful when creating the board game however others like myself will be more productive when it comes to visualising what the product will look like and better at researching.

Research

The research I will be carrying out will be field research, going into shops and studying what the board games include and what will my board game include (the pieces, colour schemes, what the audience for the game is) and answer those questions before creating our board games. I will also use the internet for help as it will contain a larger library of games from around the world and with the help of books to look at text for the game. To prove I have done this i will use photographs of me doing the research as well as charts and graphs to ensure that my audience like the board game. These are subject requirements, requirements I myself must do. I am going to carry out this research because it will help me to know what types of colours i should use for my game to look like a game you'd see within a shop. I will also use this research to understand what types of games are on the market and this will influence what my decision on what to make because i currently do not have any ideas and neither does my team.

Evidence of research 

After researching board games in shops, we have decided to create a version of monopoly based on the popular television show 'Pretty Little Liars', we decided to go with this after seeing an version of monopoly using a 'Game of Thrones' theme (see pictures surrounding text). Making the choice to use 'Pretty Little Liars', when it came to designing prototypes for the board game, we went with using the dark gothic themes of the program to fit with our board game, much like the design for the Game Of Thrones board game which uses the font, colour themes and images of the television series in contrast to other board games we had seen targeting an younger audiences, for example the use of bright simple colours and simplistic text shows that the game is for simplistic audience. We also studied the original monopoly, we noticed that the simple block font allowed for the game to stand out and be recognised, its use of slightly faded colours allows for the board to have a vintage appeal to it, with the use of the monopoly man to make the board known. Pretty Little Liars' is for an older audience therefore a darker theme can be used to appeal to them.

After carrying out the primary research needed to get an idea of which board game we would like to create, as a team we carried out more secondary research on the internet. We found more existing versions of the game such as these, i found this website particularly informative because it has useful information such as price points. We also did this because we needed to ensure the game did not already exist. We also found this website which contained all Monopoly games in an alphabetical order which helped a lot to incorporate original game ideas to our monopoly game.

Exploring design ideas

Working on our board, during the first session we were assigned some time to begin our boards, whilst others were creating the board itself, the logo and the cards in which you would use to play. I collected the images which we would use as money in the monopoly game, I decided to use dollars, as the game is set in the US in a suburban town. Seen here; finding the equivalent of monopoly money into US dollars, i added them into a photoshop document in one place, for them to then be printed as examples for game. After printed them out, I decided to develop the idea of money out slightly. As this version of Monopoly is based around a murder program, I decided to cut of parts out of the money to make it look crumpled and cut up to make the money look damaged.

Another idea we explored was using an iphone template to relate to the show for the playing cards. We changed the playing card names to 'community chest and community coffin' to relate more to the show. After potential designs, we decided to stick with the idea and were happy we did.

Production list