Description: This post is meant to go over my first board game and the design process of said game
It’s been a while, but I’m finally done with my latest project: my first board game. It took a lot longer than I thought it would, but the important thing is that it’s done, and now I get to talk about it with all of you. I know it’s not a video game like I said, but trust me, a new game is coming sooner than you think. After finally finishing this thing, I thought I would talk about the design process behind this thing. So that way we can compare the design process behind the video games and board games.
Having to design a board game and a video game is (and I can not stress this enough) VERY DIFFERENT. To be fair both of my games so far had a framework to jump off of, unlike most game projects. My fighting game has a YouTube video and my board game is technically a copy of Trivial Pursuit. But both games needed to be changed around and modified to stand out as their creation, otherwise I’m just copying and pasting content.
The reason I say that designing board games and video games are very different from each other is the difficulty gap. Making a video game means that you have to work with the limitations of your code and software that you’re using, while with board games the only limitation is your mind. Designing the rules and art for Web Run was way easier than having to move a character’s hitbox back by a few pixels so that it wouldn’t crash the game. If you’re curious, here are some of the early designs for the board game.
I’ll share the zip file so you can see the real files later on in the blog post.
Now you may be asking why on earth would I want to make a board game of all things. Well, that’s actually because of this test known as the NOCTI. Here at DCTS, seniors have to take a test known as a NOCTI which is A. specific to a senior’s program of study. And B. determines whether or not the senior is ready to graduate this year. So with the help of my teacher (Mr.Choate who is probably reading this blog to grade me, so hi Mr. Choate if you’re reading this), we made a board game to help students study for this test.
We took the game of Trivial Pursuit and turned it into a game for students to play and study. Honestly working on this game was a great experience for designing games in the future. I hope I get to use the stuff that I learned from this project and implement it into my games in the future.
Anyway, I know that this was a short blog but that’s all the time I have for you today. As promised, here’s the board game zip if you want to print it out and try it yourself. But for now, that’s all from me. I’ll see you guys next time
