“So Bram, how are you going to do this?”

I know it is a bit weird that I talk to myself, but I this is one of the ways for me to convert the abstract concept of “an education game” into a prototype; via questions.

By asking questions you are able to gain a lot of insight in essence and feeling of the problem you are trying to solve. The key is to ask the question not once, but hundred times and not only to yourself, but to almost every person you meet. Then after a while you will get lost and feel like you are drowning, since you will receive input from everybody (since (almost) everyone has an opinion about (almost) everything). At a certain moment though you will start to swim. You will be starting to see patterns and get a really good feeling for what will and what certainly will not work.

This all sound lovely, but how do you do it in practice?

Well you go back to the basics and start from zero. For me this meant that I had to go back to kindergarten. Since my first objective was to make a game board, otherwise I had nothing to play on. So every Thursday (now coined as “Game Day”) in last few weeks I have been cutting, pasting and drawing. All this just to get a gameboard? Yes, because there are a lot of things to think of that require your time and attention. Like “How big must the board be?”, “How do you show the different modules on you board?”, “How will the player interact with the board?” and “What materials (freely available) are there that I can use?” (again, a lot of question to yourself and others). After these small, but very essential steps (not only practical, but also mentally) I was very proud, since I had obtained my first real prototype! But then it was time to test it… During which it turned out that there were (still) a lot aspects I did not think about. Even really obvious things, like the game rules. But hey, at least it was a start!

With this starting point the real iterations could start. During each step something was adjusted, added or removed, to eventually be confirmed or rejected by a test. This process showed quite some similarities with a random or “drunk man’s” walk. However, after some time I was starting to see where the project was going. It really felt like it started to grow and develop in the direction where I wanted to. Which is kind of weird, since it was just a piece of cardboard with some weird drawings on it.

With the foundations being laid out, a more thorough investigation into the game mechanics and game rules was required. So I asked again:

“So Bram, how are you going to do this?”

Well, for some time now I wanted to build a model of my game. In other words, I was going to be real nerdy on this one. I divided my approach into two parts. The first part had to be a sort of market model, so that I could determine how much each modules should cost and what a player would be able to gain from it. I needed something visual and simple, such that I was able to model it rather quickly without any coding (yet). Hence I decided to used Excel (and I felt a bit like a Industrial Engineering and Management student), which worked perfectly. With the market model at hand I was ready for the next part. In which I wanted to simulate all the viable options to see how my game behaves from a more statistical point of view. For this I needed to do some coding and needed some something that had a bit more computational power, hence I used Python.

I just finished the coding and it looks like I am obtaining the data I need. I will be rounding up this step somewhere this week (after the exams) and hope to have the entire game mechanics ready in two to three weeks. Then a new phase of the project will start, I which I will transform the game to a digital platform. Which will surely will result in:

“So Bram, how are you going to do this?”

Thank you for reading and to be continued...