Kicking this week off we completed a paper prototype of idea 2 from week 2.

The paper prototype had the player make a sequence of angles including obtuse, acute, right angled, and straight angles to defeat a single enemy who approached them in a turn based manner. The decision for turn based gameplay over real time gameplay was made because we wanted to encourage strategic thinking. We named this prototype Angle Ninja.

Meeting Jesse

We met Jesse on Tuesday who looked at each of ideas and gave us some advice.

During our meeting Jesse suggested the use of various lenses.

Jesse also commented that ‘spatialization’ was a good avenue to investigate for teaching angles. So considering his advice we adapted Angle Ninja. Instead of making gestures to create obtuse, acute, right angled, and straight angles to defeat a single enemy we would instead have multiple enemies which we would attack from a fixed position on the iPad.

The shift in design was due to wanting to focus on the fundamental lesson of teaching familiarity with angles rather than the more advanced one of the special properties of angles.

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Concepts Through Lenses

Using the Lens of Fantasy, and Help we brainstormed up a number of concepts for the game answering a number of fundamental questions such as:

• What fantasy does my world fulfill? Powerful
• What does my player fantasize about being? King, Adventurer
• Who is the player helping? A monkey, the kings subjects, garden gnomes

We then applied these concepts to the three paper prototypes we had.

Three to Two

At this point we had three prototypes, and a number of concepts:

1. Angle Ninja
2. Spaceship Angles
3. Abstract Glue Circle

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After some consideration we folded Spaceship Angles into Abstract Glue Circle because they essentially presented the same problem. Both prototypes boiled down to relative connect problems of selecting from a 360 degree and firing to the next node.

By the end we had two prototypes and two concepts:

• The first was Crayon King  (Angle Ninja V2 with a crayon art style where the player is the King defending his castle from incoming monsters)
• The second was an abstract game where we would fire balls from surface to surface.

We then considered each game in terms of transformation, and activity.

Angle Ninja V2 (AKA Crayon King)

• Transformation: Familiarity with 180 degrees, measurement, and estimation
• Activity: Correctly estimating the angle at which to fire at a fixed position

Abstract Glue Circle

• Transformation: Familiarity with 360 degrees, measurement and estimation
• Activity: Correctly estimating the angle at which to toss at a relative position/ Following his advice looked at each of our main ideas using various design lenses, in particular using the lens of spectation atmosphere and fantasy and help to help us come up with art concepts for the game.