Embedded Files
Monday:
Monday:
The deadlines are becoming more and more worrying, in this morning's meeting we made it clear that we were cutting it close for the escape game. Our focus this week will be completing my booklet and starting the testing. I had to change some parts at the end of my outline for the story, notably the polar bear and arctic fox area, as the story seemed a bit forced, fortunately, we brainstormed some ideas, and I'll run through it with Igor ASAP.
Thankfully ive just finished up, and i hope this is it, chances are some things will have to change, but as long as no more pages have to be added i should be grand.
Now I will focus my attention on making the texts that the player will read on the page, this includes instructions for games and also narrative for the story. I will also shift a focus on making more games for the pages, hopefully completing the booklet by Friday
Tuesday:
Tuesday:
Today I started the InDesign booklet. for the most part, it's rather smooth sailing, I read the description of the page on my Excel, I write a short paragraph for the header and the story of the page (context) then I move to Illustrator if needed to make a rough version of the game I had planned for the page. getting used to the flow of work is taking a bit of getting used to, and for some pages, I don't have an idea for the game yet, so when they come up I tend to slow down quite a bit.
Pages 4 and 5 that I completed today
A tweet I made about translation
my biggest challenge at this stage is the translation and writing. essentially im fluent speaking in French but still struggle with the writing, i tend to say sentances the way you would in english and dont understand how accents work, so I tend to slow down when i need to translate and try to write it as correcetly as I can.
Wednesday:
Wednesday:
Pages 10 and 11 that I completed today
Essentially the same as Tuesday, except with more pages, I'm hoping to get it all done by Thursday so that way I can get the testing started and start reiterating the booklet. the sooner it gets tested, the faster I can improve it.
I usually start the day rather slow but then get into the pace and start lashing out the pages one by one after a couple of hours.
Thursday:
Thursday:
Today I went to the office an hour early to work on the booklet, my objective for the day is to print it and test it tomorrow, having 20 pages done out of 40, I have to do what I did in 2 days in one, thankfully I have some of the pages sketched out from previous weeks, as I had made some page mockups to test a bit. so all I did was work on it, make mini-games for pages and some narrative for the story.
What I found interesting was where I was being inspired for the mini-games. for one of the games i looked at the Donkey Kong arcade game, for another, I looked at a chapter from the original half-life. having a gaming background does help, but I believe focusing on early video games is a great source of inspiration for even board games. at the time they were extremely restricted, so their games are relatively simple compared to today.
for example, the original Donkey Kong arcade game in 1981 was a simple, go up, dodge obstacles, reach the top. so for the puzzle on the right here, you start at the bottom, your obstacles are questions based on some animals, and your objective is to reach the top. the twist is that there are two animals and you are an observer, so you are just "watching" them go up the "cliffs". It is a subtle similarity but I was staring at images of Donkey Kong for ages before coming up with this simple mini-game. below I've got a PDF detailing different ideas and thought processes for some of the games, including the one I just mentioned. its a bit difficult to read so I didn't spend to much time digitising it.
Game inspired by the original Donkey Kong
sketchBookForEscape.pdfat around 5 pm I finished my booklet on InDesign, all I had to do was print it and test it. It took around an hour to get it printed due to the fact I had never printed a book in this format, and after a few mishaps, I was done! Tomorrow is testing and reviewing.
Friday:
Friday:
When I wanted to start testing I realised something pretty important, I don't have any of the cards for the game, you see, I have 6 cards that will be used in the game, 3 cards that are the correct species but the wrong version, and 3 cards that I don't have at all. while making the game I used digital versions of the cards, so now I have to get a list of the cards, find them, print duplicates, and then I can start testing, a bit of an oversight, but it gave me the time and excuse to catch up on my Weekly Log :)
I got the missing cards printed and did a run-through of my booklet, making sure that each page was possible to complete. unfortunately, it wasn't smooth sailing, there were 1 or 2 pages that had no page transitions, aka I forgot to put them in, and then one of the cards didn't have the characteristics it said it did in the data base. but nothing a pen couldn't fix. i also noticed some lack of content for some of the cards, so I may revise some puzzles to use these cards more, my objective is that you read the description of every card at least once.
hours worked: 37
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