The making of Journey across the sky

Hello everyone (if anyone actually does read the blogs outside of my TA and my professor) sorry for the lack posts recently, I've been kind of busy facing the evils known as university midterms while completing a few side quests (working at my job) so I sort of fell behind in my blogging (actually I'm really behind, I have about 6 or 7 that just need a few more things before I can post them, they all need either editing or a few more sentences or missing a picture or caption. I unfortunately just haven't had the time). So if any of you have read a few of my early blogs called The Making of Trials of Sensibility and Skulls (found Here) and Jane Austen, The Pirate Tales (found Here) I mentioned something that we are required to in Game Design and Production called Prototypes. We are given a topic and are required to create a game based on the topic and any specifications stated; This month's prototype is based off Vincent Van Gogh's painting, Starry Night (you can see it in the painting below):

Now if you don't know this painting, don't feel too bad, a lot of people who have never studied art history will not know much about it. I have an extensive knowledge of the painting because my art teacher in high school loved art history so we had a lot of classes about it (I had that teacher for 2 years in a row, those were always interesting classes). Now Van Gogh's painting is a very well-known painting and has been analyzed by many scholars and critics for the various themes and symbolism found within the painting (for more info on Starry Night check out these links Here and Here).

Now making a game based on this iconic painting was not an easy thing for a while we were confused on what we could do for this game and how to make a game based on Starry Night. Our most recent lecture helped us come up with a few ideas especially after our professor showed us some examples of art games (which to be honest confused the heck out of me since I couldn't figure out the for the life of me what the purpose of those games were). Although I couldn't understand  the purpose of the games they did help me think up an idea for our game. During some of our meeting we focused a lot on figuring out the atmosphere, themes and symbolism in the painting and researching them. We also researched a lot of other games that have the same atmosphere as Starry Night.

Our Initial Meeting

 

 For our Starry Night game we decided that we would make it sort if a discover game where the players must travel around the board in a non-linear movement (movement is abstract sort of like the actual painting) picking it up to learn facts about Starry Night. We later changed it a little bit to make it more interesting by adding questions and tasks to the cards. In order for this game to be properly played we realized that we were going to need a board that looked like the actual painting, and instead of printing a large picture of the painting (and wasting money on a board that wouldn't be very sturdy) we decided to do a recreation painting of Starry Night on foam board (we already had all the materials to do this). Now since I had one less exam than everyone else, and more painting experience than the rest of my group I was responsible for painting the board. Below you can see a series of pictures showing the development of our game board:

 

Changing Locations And Presenting The Partly Finished Board To The Group

 

Painting a recreation of the Starry Night was a little bit of a challenge since I have never tried to recreate a painting especially one as iconic as this one. The original painting was done in oil paint but i painted with acrylic instead since oil paint takes way too long to dry and I cannot get as nice of an effect with oil since it doesn't blend as easily. I started by applying a base coat of blue paint so that I could easily build up all of the different colors and shades of blue found in the painting. The swirls in the sky and the hills were the two  things that took me the longest to do since there are just so many colors layered in those parts in the painting, layering the colors and getting them to look right was the most challenging part. The moon/stars and the village are my favorite part of the painting since I feel they came out the best. Personally that giant tree that Van Gogh painted against the front of the painting's picture plane is the one thing that makes me so mad because I feel that it cuts off the flow of the painting and interferes with the movement in the painting (even though it has some symbolism and significance behind it). None the less recreating the Starry Night was an interesting and fun experience and I'm really glad my group to go with the idea that incorporated the painted board (the painting only took about 8 hours to do. It took a little longer than expected because the building I was painting in had some malfunction with the fire alarm system and it kept going off constantly, scaring the day lights out of me causing me to make a mistake which I had to go back and fix, along with starting to pack up my paints only for the alarm to stop for a bit then start up again later. I ended up moving to Evelyn's place to finish the painting).

The Finished Painting

 After we researched the painting we discussed some of the rules and the game mechanics in ur most recent meeting, where Clement quickly wrote up the rules before he had to leave for class, making sure he stayed on Sykpe in order to be kept updated on the progress of the game and discuss any rules or ideas he came up with in order for everyone to know what was going on.

 The rules for our game, Journey Across the Sky, are found below:

Journey Across the Sky

Objective

The objective of the game is to create the longest card set.

Rules

The game is played with a group of 3-4 friends.

Each turn you choose to go to any flag place and can pick up from that card pile. When you have 3 cards in your hand or more you can attempt to complete a card set.

A card set is completed by bringing up a past event that has happened with the whole group that relates to/includes all of the card names you have in your hand. At least 3 cards in your hand have to have actually been in/have happened in this “past event”.   This means you can try to include items/card names that didn’t actually happen in an attempt to fool your friends. 

They can call cheat liar or some variation of that.  If one person agrees with you but the others all call you a liar, the card set is completed and successful.  However since not everybody believes you, that card cannot go into reserve.  As long as you choose to hold on to this card set, you cannot continue your turn.  You may discard the entire card set (reshuffle) for another attempt at making a bigger card set.

 Only card sets that everybody agrees with can be placed into a reserve.  If everybody calls you a liar reshuffle the cards into their respective piles and try again.

A reserve is a placeholder for the card set.  Only one card set per person can be recorded on the reserve.  This allows you to guarantee at least a certain amount of cards in a set that will be used to determine the winner.

At the time that another card set is completed and passes the requirement to be able to be put into the reserve, they can swap out the current card set in the reserve for the one they have just completed.

If you obtain a fill in the blank card but do not have a reserve, reshuffle it back into the pile you got it from, otherwise if you answer the fill in the blank card properly you can add it to the reserve card set.

Ending the game

The game can end in two predetermined ways.  Either by obtaining the card set amount said at the start of the game, or by the amount of rounds determined at the start of the game.  One round is when either all players have at least 5 cards, has tried completing a set or a mixture of both.

The List of Our Starry Night Moments in Other Games

To see our list on Starry Night moments click on the following link to view the document (Blogger is being silly and is interfering with copying into this post):

Starry Nights Moments

During this meeting Keerthana and Zee, with some help from everyone else, where making and finishing up the cards needed for our game. These cards included facts about the painting, and questions that players must answer. Evelyn began doing some more research on the game in order to help with the progress of the game cards and to start compiling the list of games that included moments that matched the atmosphere and themes of Starry Night. Below you will find the some examples of the list of game moments we compiled as well as numerous pictures of us doing the cards and research:

 Example of Our Cards

 While Zee, Keerthana and Evelyn where doing that Chrystal was making the flag markers that go on the board to indicate where you must go to pick up the cards, while I worked on making the bases for the flags (originally we were just going to shove the flags into the board but with the amount of paint layered on top we wouldn't have been able to do that, not only that but i really didn't want to damage the painting after I finished it). While cutting out the bases from the same type of foam board as the game board Chrystal and I also cut out the bases for the character pieces, which we decided to make stars (so the players are different colored stars moving around the starry Night) that would sit on the bases.

 Since the game board looked weird with unfinished sides we decided to cover the back of the board with the same type of paper that we used to cover the flag and player bases. We glue gunned the bases and the back and sides of the board to the paper covering up all the undesired exposed areas and trimmed the excess paper off. We had to be super careful when we did it because there was a potential risk of either cutting or burning ourselves, neither a pleasant experience (I would know). After finishing the cards Keerthana came to assist us with this task while Zee went to print them.

 After finishing all the pieces, the board, the cards, our list of moments and rules we realized we had yet to name the board, we utilized Sykpe to come up with a name, which Clement came up with along numerous others (they were really good names too I really liked them). Below you will be able to find screenshots of our Sykpe conversations:

 MY THOUGHTS:

This was an interesting challenge which taught us that games do not always have to be necessarily fun. Art games are interesting and invoke thoughts and emotions when played which we did our best to do in our game, Journey Across the Shy. I'm interested to see what everyone else did for their Starry Night game.