I played a Print N Play game called "The Empire Engine" with my fellow classmate Maria. In the game you run an empire, and in each round you can choose what actions to take, whether it be collecting supplies, defending yourself from enemy empires, or attacking them. The end goal of the game is to collect as much soldiers, inventions, and goods as you can. The one with the most overall wins.

     The core mechanic of the game is your left and right engine cards, you twist them clockwise using gear cards to execute actions such as attack, defend, or gather supplies. The game is card based, with a few tokens to represent items in the game. However, the aesthetic and artwork of the game makes the environment feel steampunk-esque. There are three key objects in the game that you have to collect: soldiers, goods, and inventions. There can be quite a few states that the player can be in during the rounds. They could be focusing on collecting resources, they could be defending their empire, or attacking other player's empires. By choosing one of these three actions the results can vary. You can gain the resources you needed, you could gain a soldier by defending yourself from an attack, or you could lose resources if you leave yourself vulnerable to attack.

     The one thing that I noticed about the game was that it was almost an elaborate form of rock paper scissors. You use the two gear cards to turn one card two times and the other once. You cannot tell what your opponent is planning because you flip your gear cards at the same time. There is a bit of strategy, you can try and predict what you opponent plans to do and work with your gears against the odds. Overall, it does seem to be a bit more of a matter of chance than anything else.

 

     I played a few Print N Play games with my fellow classmates. We played Lance, Final Boss, The Big Time, and Sweet Nose. There was quite a range in complexity, some enough to frustrate my peers just in preparation. By far The Big Time has the most interesting artwork behind it in my opinion. The game play was great as well. The hardest game to construct was certainly Sugar Nose. The confusing cutting and folding guidelines, and the directions written in Chinese, and so many pieces made us unmotivated to play by the time an afternoon was invested to cut it and set up. I admired the games that had something new to me. Final Boss was practically a table top card rpg, and The Big Time was a delightful concept for a game. The thing that frustrated me the most was that for most of the games the directions were tricky to comprehend, and the first game was always full of errors out of confusion or miscommunication.

https://docs.google.com/a/c.ringling.edu/presentation/d/1ZwjABqhUlHCYPkCkBhrF3VL29e6YOn-rbcRJpw079Ss/edit?usp=sharing

Current Work In Progress on a digital painting I am doing. Plan to have the whole piece done by the end of the week.

 One of the bigger projects I worked on in my freshman year of Ringling was in 2D Design with my instructor Aaron Board. The final assignment we had to create an interior space (bedroom) for a character in a film, that did not already have one revealed. I chose Bunnymund from Rise of The Guardians. I sketched out concepts, evaluated lighting ideas, and then painted a final piece. This class in general was enriched with information I will carry with me throughout my career path, but this project pooled everything together into one satisfying product. How to balance lighting, how to imply moods, and how to divide light and shadow.