by Annie | Aug 23, 2010 | Illustration Station
Some ideas just have a way of sticking in your head after conception. Heading into a weekend of storyboarding, all I could think about were the balloon animals from my visual target project. The result: Bodybuilders. Balloon animals everywhere have been counting down to this moment. Tonight, Helium Stadium is packed to the brim, as it is host to the bodybuilding event of the Balloon Animal Olympics. Two contestants, one from the U.S. and one from Canada, will compete for the honor of world’s best balloon animal bodybuilder. Contestants will have 30 seconds to contort themselves into any form, and three judges will vote for the winner. Below are the panels from the storyboard....
by Annie | Aug 22, 2010 | Game Design
With all the illicit acts available to players within the realm of Grand Theft Auto, one young man has found a way to use the game to perform good deeds. If you have a second, this article is definitely worth reading: My Four-Year-Old Son Plays Grand Theft...
by Annie | Aug 19, 2010 | Game Design, Illustration Station
Have you ever wanted to shoot balloon animals? Well, in my latest game idea, that’s exactly what you get to do! Balloon animals have gotten loose, and you must shoot as many as you can before time runs out so they don’t take over the city. Take a...
by Annie | Aug 17, 2010 | Other
Here’s the final version of my visual storytelling project, a short film created to tell a story through images. It’s quite a bit different from the original preview I posted two weeks ago. I’ll let the images speak for...
by Annie | Aug 16, 2010 | Game Design
Not only is it hard to design a game, it’s hard to describe how to play it once it’s done. No one likes to read a novel when sitting down to play a game, so the rules have to be short yet comprehensive. I spent a good chunk of the weekend refining my board game and writing out the rules. Now, I may be able to spit out a blog post in a matter of minutes, but this was an entirely different beast. Organization is key in writing effective game rules. You have to lead players through the rules, objective, and examples in a logical order so they don’t have to read and reread the rules over and over. Recently, one of my classmates and I tried out a pirates game in which you steer ships through a grid to get to the treasure and return it to your home dock. Sounds pretty simple, right? We skimmed through the rules, set up the board, and started playing. Soon, we ran into a barrage of questions. Can we move diagonally? How many spaces do you have to move in one direction? How do you capture another ship? In the twenty or so minutes that we attempted to play the game, at least 15 were spent flipping through the pages of the rule book. Lots of text, lots of pictures, not much clarity. Ending the game prematurely was an easy choice. With that non-example in mind, I set out to write my game rules, making sure that important information like objective and board set-up was front and center, followed by concise...
