Theme For Board Game Project

In my Game Development class I am in the progress of creating my very own board game. I have come up with a concept called "Don't Wake Mommy" where the players are children running around the house. They have to complete quiet dares and activities to gain candy, and if they wake Mommy on red tiles they get "spanked" and lose candies. The ultimate goal is to collect 30 candies first.

The game setting is inside of a typical home. The layout will be similar to a Clue board but trail the player follows goes through the rooms There are different rooms that the characters have to navigate through. I also have to come up with a theme for the game. I feel like the best description would be "Survival of the Quietest" or "It's all fun and games until someone loses a butt cheek". I also plan for this game to have a pastel color palette.

As for the art style I am not overtly certain which direction I want to take whether it be a Candy Land esque thing or otherwise.

Art Style/ Mood Ideas

 

This was a small project I was doing for myself. It was something I always had in my head but never had the ability to put it to paper until now. A series of Halloween inspired pinups of a witch, vampire, and a zombie. I plan to upload these to redbubble and society6 for people to purchase some unique merchandise for this Halloween season.

What I Have Learned in Game Art

Being in the Game Art Major for 2 years now I have collected a vast amount of understanding about the career path I have chosen to take. Much more compared to when I first walked into Ringling. Yes, When I was a freshman I had some form of understanding of what I would need to accomplish by senior year. I would have to learn how to comprehend color, value, and perspective to best illustrate my concepts, model characters, objects, environments, animate motion, and much more to complete my senior thesis. However, this sophomore year within the first month of being in class I have discovered there is much more to it.

A couple of the biggest things in sophomore year that I have learned is how much thinking and planning that goes into a game, even in it's raw stages. Sometimes to best illustrate your concept you have to get inspiration from the world around you, which requires an understanding of what you want and how to get resources of it. While I knew good communication and body language would be a positive asset in such a communication based work field, I never considered how vital it would be. If I was still a soft spoken student with a meek body language, I would not have made it through freshman year. Additionally there is so much organization into the game's levels, it obstacles, it's rules, it's end goal, and how it makes the player feel. The end goal of a game company is to make a game that the player would walk away from with satisfaction of completion, but it is not always obvious what will make the player feel satisfied. Sometimes that idea is a shot in the dark, and it is up to the game company to come up with the best guess.

I came up with 30 rough concepts of board games I could try and create for a project in my class. I managed to come up with a more refined definition for 2 different games. "Don't Wake Mommy" and "Cubicle Carnage", the other ideas had some spark to them, but sadly there was not enough where I could get behind it and make something great out of it.

In "Don't Wake Mommy" There can be 2-6 players (kids) on the board. The board layout itself does not have a final goal, it loops around continuously. Each player's goal is to get "candy" by landing on blue spaces on the board. The one who reaches 30 candies first wins. However, if a player lands on a red tile, they have woken up mommy and you have to lose candies. Each kid has a unique attribute, for example one kid may have the ability to "tattle" or swap places with someone if they are caught on a red tile. Another may have an ability to "bribe a sibling" and give a sibling 5 candies to take a punishment for them. The result of gaining or losing candies is predicted by drawing a card the same color as the tile you land on. Some cards may gain 3-6 candies, help a friend gain candies, lose 3-6 candies or have someone lose candies with you.

The alternative "Cubicle Carnage" is a card based game. The story is that the 2nd Amendment has been tossed to the wind, the right to bear arms is obsolete, and guns have been destroyed, holding one is illegal. You are working in your office, and a zombie outbreak threatens everyone. You have to use cards, that are objects within your office to create a weapon. For example: a rubber band card, a ruler card, and a pencil card can create a pencil crossbow. At the beginning of each round all of the players draw 7 cards. If they can make a weapon from the list they survive the round, if they cannot make a weapon with the supplies they have they have to pull a card from the fate pile. There is a 60% chance your survive, and a 40% chance you get bitten and lose a life. There are two ways of winning, you survive without losing all 3 lives, or you pull the "boss room key" card in the deck. The boss key card basically gives the player access to the boss' office, who has a secret stash of weapons that ultimately would give the player who draws it victory.

Don't Starve Trailer, one of my personal favorites.