Barn Brawl
Barn Brawl is a university project made with a team consisting of one engineer, 4 artists and 2 designers, focused on experimenting with augmented reality technology through a strategy game. As a team, we wanted to try our hand at creating a strategy game inspired by chess. The game is played using mobile phone devices which will position the game board in the room through the phones camera. The two players first take turns to place terrain blocks on their desired tiles,then they must use their three pawns to beat their opponents three pawns or destroy their base. Each pawn has a unique stat line which specialise them into a particular role with their strengths and weaknesses.
Team Size: 7
Project Duration: 3 weeks
Role(s): Game Designer & Team Lead
Project Type: Augmented Reality turn-based strategy game prototype
Tools: Unity, Figma
My Work
My main role in this project was designing the overall gameplay. I was responsible for conceptualizing, prototyping, testing and documenting the core gameplay with the aim to develop a strategic and tactical game mechanic.
Prototyping: I prototyped the game concept in Figma to be able to quickly test the game with the team. This allowed me to start adjusting and improving various aspects of the game such as the board size, pawn stats and terrain rules very early on in the project. The game concept made it easy to prototype using a tool such as Figma. I simply created a grid for the board and used different shapes to represent the different pawns. For testing, someone from the development team would join the Figma file online and we could play out a game by moving the pieces on the board.
Testing: With the other members of the development team, we used the Figma prototype to play the different iterations and variations of the game throughout the development process. This gave the whole team a clear idea of the concept but also allowed everyone to provide feedback on the direction of the game. Finding the right adjustments to make the game feel strategic and dynamic was a hard challenge because there were so few aspects of the gameplay to adjust. In the end, the changes that were made compared to the first iteration move the concept in the right direction but the gameplay still needs work.
Documentation: To make sure the concept and changes could be kept track of, I explained the concept of the gameplay in a document with the use of visual diagrams. This allowed our team's engineer to implement the mechanic without misunderstanding.
As a team, we faced some challenges throughout this project. On of those challenges was a communication issue due to a misunderstanding which lead to the game not having working multiplayer. Our engineer didn't have the skills necessary to implement multiplayer because, as an exchange student for that semester, they were no advised to take the Networking course for this project. Due to time constraints, we pivoted our concept from online multiplayer to passing the phone between each player's turn. What I learned from this experience is to have a good idea of what the team can and can't do to make sure that the concept is feasible with the available skills or make sure there is enough time to either learn these skills.
