So how do you build a game? How do you turn an idea, into a board game and then into a digital prototype? In this post we'll show you how the team worked on the prototyping of our game.
Needless to say, we've come a long way since the pen and paper games that we began with, and has taken a lot of hard work by talented people to get where we are today.
From the beginning, we knew this game would incorporate a regional focus on the development of England's agricultural and industrial sectors over the course of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Thus, the games user interface naturally started with a map of Britain. Because we only had data available for England and Wales, Alexis told us that the prototype would only be playable for these nations. Scotland and Ireland will have to wait!
We decided to have a tile map, allowing players to interact with regions and manage both population growth through migration and economic growth through the allocation of the population to different sectors of the economy. This is contextualised as managing migration and food exports, although this is still undergoing refinement.
On top of that, teachers insisted that their pupils needed to learn not only about geography but also chronology. We decided to include this aspect by means of a timeline, complete with a set system of historical event popups, which would help student memorise key facts and events.
This system of population investment is tied to calculations adapting the outputs of a region-tile's primary, secondary and tertiary sectors of production, alongside living standards, GDP, and population growth or decline. Its through these calculations that the player is informed of how these systems interacted with one another in a historical context.
How to make the clear on one small screen? The UI went through many (many, many) iterations. Nela, Alexis and the teachers offering feedback on each new proposal.
Furthermore, we decided that the game calculations had to be visualisable on a graph, which will document the players progress and choices, allowing them to look back, analyse their performance, and compare it to the historical record. This comes alongside having achieved a starting point for user experience (UX) design considerations.
Lastly, there remains the aesthetic and artistic direction of the game. This has come in the form of character illustrations, map textures, icon design, and colour palettes. Whilst we're not yet at the point where he have a definite look for our game and its inhabitants, we've made strides in establishing one.
