The role of system design This team is filled with designers. Narrative designer, puzzle designer, tech designer, visual designer, UX designer, (there has been level design needs called, and there IS a level designer, but no one has dared venture there since we have a lot of stuff already). Even before the semester started, there…

Exciting week for us! Aside from the first playtest, one ETC faculty Heather Kelley got us in contact with a puzzle designer who worked on Sifteo Cubes years ago, Scott Kim. SIfteo Cubes has been our design inspiration since the start, and we discovered that we wanted to have puzzle solving as a moment in…

Over the weekend, some team members read through Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud, and realized how in fact, finding the “idioms” for our form, is the crucial step to creation for our artform / medium. For us, we have been stuck defining the form, which was why our idioms does not ground us. In fact,…

It’s quarters week this week, a time when faculty walkaround project rooms to understand the initial explorations and subsequent development directions. Yet, what our medium looks like to us is still fuzzy (not vague, but too many directions), even with the overall structure being a linear narrative, and the technical gold spikes / storyboards for…

From last week, we thought we could start putting brainstorming ideas together with a narrative according to our game design document prototyping guideline of gameplay + narrative + art. However, the initial problem still came up – the chicken-and-egg problem. Since every direction is cool, and they will take away significant production time, how do…

Semester started! Over the break, individual team members made explorations on distinct functions. Some downloaded puzzles games like Burgle Bros for reference, many of us played Gorogoa, some researched networking capabilities of the phones, and some read about puzzle and system design. Goals In the first few meetings, we’ve aligned on our goals for the…

One day in October, James discovered the potential of creating a cross-screen experience from this ACM paper: Dynamic tiling display: building an interactive display surface using multiple mobile devices, and he thought, “such fun is having the phones connect physically as if no borders, we should make a game out of it!” Since then, the…