Bloom // Game Design

Hoy ahoy there friends! I’m writing this quite a while after finishing the project but finding the time to finish this blog is proving difficult as I’m knee deep in the next game I’m making. But I’ll try and finish this project blog off!

So making the pieces was one of the easier parts of this project. Taking advice from the friend who I was sending this game off to I decided to make the pieces out of fimo clay. Instead of taking a lot of time to learn how to whittle down and source wood pieces, it was far quicker and economical to make them from coloured clay. It also made the game super colourful which is positive!

I decided to abandon traditional colours like black and white or red and blue. I went for glittery purple and glittery gold, because they’re fabulous!

So the pieces were split into the circular pieces and capture markers. Designing these pieces also meant figuring out the optimal sizes of them in relation to the board. With the 20x20cm board design both the circular pieces and capture markers all needed to fit on the board together. From this, I calculated that the circular pieces needed to be 1.5cm in diameter and the capture markers needed to be no more than 3cm in length and 0.5cm in width. With these dimensions, if all the pieces were put on the board they would fit together nicely and not make the board too cluttered.

Making the circular pieces was easy but I needed a mold of some sort to make the capture markers rectangular. A plastic container did a good enough job but I’ll definitely look for alternate options next time as getting them out of the corner definitely mangled them a bit. However, to give the capture markers a bit of structural integrity I put a paper clip in the middle of about 2.5cm in length.

The only thing remaining was to place each piece of fimo in the oven at a low heat for about 20-25 minutes so it could harden. A final little bit of quality control was all that was needed to square off the edges and take out the worst of the imperfections.

And that’s pretty much it for the pieces. Fimo made the whole process cheap, easy and colourful. there were lots of imperfections which is definitely down to my inexperience and lack of skill in modeling and using fimo, but for a prototype is works really well.

Thanks for reading. I’ll be back hopefully soon with a rundown of how I went about creating the rulebook for Bloom!