All game sketches, game mechanics, game visuals and game designs below are created by Aleksei Mikhailov and copyright protected.
Unauthorized coping, editing, printing, selling and redistribution is prohibited and punishable by the US and International laws. All rights reserved. © 2022
This was a fun free time project, where I challenged myself and applied my game design skills along with my UX design skills into a paper-based board game.
The main challenge was about how to overcome limitations of a paper-based game and make it re-playable and at the same time interesting.
Limitations for the board game were:
- The game and all rules should be printed/written only on one side of the paper
- The game should be a one player game
- Player is allowed to use only 2 six-sided dice to play the game
I started with an ideation process, trying to find a fun idea and in parallel creating a Game Design Document with all ideas, thoughts, sketches, game rules, characters, game goals, etc.
The game should have a clear goal, so the player could figure it out at a first glance without reading the instructions.
I settled on creating a game of chance with random variations to keep things interesting.
Sketching and ideation
After spending some time on brainstorming and discarding options that had problems and were uninspiring ("Zombie Maze", "Curling", "Land a Space Probe", "Dock a Boat", "Freestyle Bike") I came up with the game idea of pizza delivery for an UFO. I made a quick sketch of the game in Adobe XD.
One dice will be used as a player's figure, and the second dice will be used as a "randomizer" for number of steps and rolling a chance of actions success, for example, using a zip-line, climbing, etc.
I put game rules in the top left corner, so they will be the first thing the player would read. And in case if player will not look at the rules, I added icons that describe actions on the game field.
The game world that the player would be interacting with was a snowy mountain region, which was a beautiful, peaceful and at the same time dangerous and unforgiving setting.
The goal of the game was to climb the dangerous mountain path and deliver pizza to the aliens.
First sketch of the game
After reviewing the first iteration with other people, and analysis of their feedback, I made some changes to the game world and game rules:
- Added alternative path
- Made start and end points more clear
- Adjusted the difficulty of the game by adding "sliding back" mechanics.
- Added detailed game rules
- Improved visuals for the game world.
Second revision of the game
After testing the game mechanics, playing the game and receiving more feedback from the people I wanted to make more changes to the game. I started to ask myself what could be done to improve the game. Should I further adjust the difficulty, so the game will not end too quickly? Were my game rules balanced? How can I make the game more engaging?
I spend some time brainstorming all the possible changes and ideas, and came up with some adjustments:
- Added new "light" and "dark" mechanic to the game world, so the player would need to light matches in the dark caves
- Slightly changed the rope climbing and zip-line mechanics
- Updated game rules descriptions
Final game design
Overall it was a challenging, but a very fun experience for me, I enjoyed every step of the process from brainstorming the game ideas and writing a game design document to fine-tuning the game mechanics and rules on the later stages of development. In the future I would definitely love to try design and implement a digital game using my acquired knowledge and experience.
Royalty-free stock vector icons ID: 256592599 by popicon (https://www.shutterstock.com/).
SIL Open Font License, Austin Andrews (http://materialdesignicons.com/).
Icons made by Freepik (https://www.flaticon.com/authors/freepik).
SIL Open Font License, Austin Andrews (http://materialdesignicons.com/).
Icons made by Freepik (https://www.flaticon.com/authors/freepik).
Table mockup and dice images are from Unsplash (https://unsplash.com/).