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Your fourth challenge, to be designed and tested over the weekend and playtested in class, is to convert a digital game to a board game, fitting it as closely as possible to the original.
“If you can’t design a non-digital game from a digital game…you don’t truly understand the nuances of the pure design underneath the art and…programming.” -Brathwaite & Schreiber
While you may take any digital game that interests you, I recommend working with a simpler game we have already looked at (such as Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Space Invaders, and Centipede) and convert that to a board game. These games are simple and easy to understand.
At the risk of making this process overly-complex, here are some good bits of advice:
Scale. Down.
You are NOT going to be able to take a massive game like World of Warcraft or Skyrim and build a board game version in one weekend. Unless you happen to be Howard Scott Warshaw.
I recommend taking a simple arcade-style or Atari VCS game and create a board game version of it. Atari has a bunch you can play online. These are small, simple systems, but are VERY tightly designed and so are easy to understand. Modern games usually are not, and so are not as good for beginning designers to study.
If you still feel you absolutely have to take a big, complex game, take only one mechanic from it. For instance, the basic combat system from World of Warcraft or the shop system in Skyrim. Pick 3 classes and stick with those.
Understand the system.
Play your source game for a long time to get familiar with how it works. Even if you’ve played it last month. Or last week. Because you haven’t been thinking about the system itself.
What are your verbs? What does the player do? How can you take those mechanics and convert them to a board game? Make a list. Understand the elements of the system and how they work together. And make a board game out of it.
Use the vast knowledge of the past for guidance.
Search for articles on the game, too. The designer may have talked about the process behind it, or someone may have analyzed it in detail. Don’t re-reinvent the wheel.
Use Brathwaite & Schreiber for inspiration.
The readings for Wednesday have a nice process for taking your digital game and making a board game out of it (pg 59-61). Put that chapter to good use!
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