One of our modules in second year was Generic Production. With the freedom to independently create our entire brief for the year we were required to work in groups, and were graded on each of our presentations to a small collective of lecturers. The first presentation was pitching our individual ideas to the whole class, the second was once we had formed groups with the other students we wanted to work with or ideas we liked we had to further develop the idea and present the newly modified brief. We then had the rest of the year to produce our product, with a final presentation at the end of the year.
I worked with four other Graphic Design students and we created a board game. Originally inspired by the likes of the console game Grand Theft Auto with it’s missions and open world, and monopoly, giving players the opportunity to buy and sell whilst moving around the board.
We decided that the genre of Steampunk would be a brilliant style making the board game unique. Steampunk is becoming more and more popular but is still relatively unknown when considering mainstream popular culture. Whilst there are Steampunk board games that exist, they are aimed at a smaller market place, and we wanted a game that could be enjoyed by a bigger audience. Steampunk gave us a great platform to get inspiration, and develop ideas for characters, areas, missions and artwork.
The gameplay has a relatively simple objective; to survive. Unlike Monopoly where money is what defines the players status, it is health that is the driving force in Rapture. In this steampunk world that we created, Health can be bought, sold and traded gained or lost in missions, and is represented by Health Cards of different values, much like a currency. Once a character has lost all of their health, they are essentially dead and out of the game. As the player moves around the board there are five areas that make up the map of Rapture Island, each with their own unique Area cards to land on.
As we had been newly introduced to 3D printing technology we had our dice, safe houses and character counters printed and hand painted. This gave the game a much more personal and higher quality feel to it, especially the dice, rather than the standard black and white ones.
Here are some images of the Safe Houses and Character Counters:
Straight from the 3D printers
All five after being hand painted
We obtained some “leather” textured brown paper, and one of the other group members skillfully covered a box and hand drew a variation of the logo on the front.
Because this project has the potential to sell and is essentially ‘shelf ready’, we wanted to consider marketing. One member of the team is a very skilled web designer so one of his jobs was to create a site for Rapture. It has information on the game itself, a small section about our team that created it, and links to our Raptures socials.
Please visit www.raptureisland.co.uk to see it for yourself!
We also managed to get over 80 likes on Facebook and 35 likes on Twitter!
This was a really fun project, and it has given me hope in group work again! I’m happy to have experienced first hand how amazing and fun a group project can be when everyone is equally as motivated and pulls their weight. I have been told my individual grade for this module, but I won’t post it yet, as the Board of Studies was only last week, and the external verifiers can either move the grades up or down if they don’t think we were graded properly by the lecturers. We collect our grades on the 10th of July, so fingers crossed it either remains the same or goes up!
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