Weekly Animations 4/1/2021 Harrison Klehm
Weekly Animations 2/11/2021
The story of Bang!
Bang! is a social deduction game mixed with elements of resource management (your health) as well as other abilities and weapons you have to keep track of. Bang! immerses the players into its world of a spaghetti western, by the theming of all the actions and cards that you partake in, as well as the characters that you become. All of the actions from the primary means of damage; the bang! card, to other utility cards such as the beer card add to the western world that you become a part of. The greatest element I believe however is the addition of characters and their unique abilities. Not only are there a lot of different characters you can play (adding replayablility to the game), but combined with their abilities the immersion these characters add greatly enhance the game. For example in the one game we played, one of the players was El Gringo. This character conjured a western world in my mind as I inserted each character into my imaginative story. In addition, El Gringo dying at the beginning conveniently played into my expectation of who El Gringo is, and overall it became hard not to become immersed in the world of the game.
The acts of the game were pretty straight forward, however act 2 of the game tended to last the longest with act 3 either lasting equally as long or very short. To start, act 1 would be the beginning of the game as each player grows accustomed to their individual roles and characters they were assigned. Then begins act 2 which would progress until one of the characters, or the sheriff in particular was brought to 1 health. This meant that act 3 could last a long time if the players couldnt finish off the player with one health, or it could last a couple minutes as all it takes is a bang! card to finish someone off. Add in beer which can save you at the last second, as well as miss cards that can save you from dying, act 2 and act 3 are in constant flux and can constantly shift back and forth.
The Story of Star Fluxx
The game starts pretty innocuously. There are five of us, each with a hand of three cards. There’s a draw pile in the middle, and the rules are simple. Draw a card, then play a card. With the first draw, we begin act one of our tale.
There’s not a lot of difficulty to playing Fluxx. It’s got one main rule: that the rules change depending on the cards at play. The goal of the game is also changed by the cards played. Each player takes a turn laying down cards, changing the game, changing the rules, and as we continue into act 2, things begin to heat up. Cards are exchanging hands, people get ever closer to completing the goal, only to have it ripped away as the goal changes, and still nobody knows when the game will end.
Act three comes almost before anyone even knows it. The end of the game, as eloquently put by Professor Ames, is only really visible to the one who sees victory in sight. At the end of our game, the goal was to get two of three different cards in play. One of those cards was slowly being rotated around the table, and I had the other in my hand. As the turn passed to me, I set the rule that would allow me to win, then played the card that would give me the victory, and after multiple rule changes like draw 4 cards or play 3, the game finally ended.
Star Fluxx is an interesting game where the rules are defined by the players, but even this game can be divided into a beginning, middle, and end, it’s just difficult to see where you are until it’s too late.
Harrison Klehm — Review 4
For my final web review, I chose to review another portfolio site that is built in the same style as mine.
https://www.christammar.com/projects
This is a very well designed portfolio site. It is similar to mine in regard to its minimalism. The layout is quite simple and easy to navigate, making it work very effectively as a portfolio. The layout focuses primarily on images and uses words only where necessary. The navigation is also well done, and extremely simple. There are only two buttons at the top, which are “Projects” and “Contact.” The colors are extremely simple and minimalistic, which lend to a modern design, which is good for a Graphic Designer’s portfolio. As for texture, due to the website’s simplistic nature, it is all kept very simple. It is mostly white pages with images and minimal text on it, all to keep a modern feel.
Like Steve Krug mentions in Don’t Make Me Think, non-essential information should be cut from a website. This portfolio website takes that to the extreme, in that text is extremely minimal. I think it is done sort of well, however many of the images are left without context and it may be rather confusing as to what each of them represents.
However, another topic to consider covered in Don’t Make Me Think would be how quickly a user can use a site without thinking. And one key feature this site lacks, in particular, would be titles for some of these sections. The images act as links in this site, and when you hover over them, they turn nearly fully white with an eye icon over them. This is what indicates to the viewer that the image is clickable. However, the images alone do not make it fully clear what each image is supposed to represent, especially that in the bottom right. Without any headings in the image or any words to match it whatsoever, the viewer can be lost in this type of website.
My website aims for clear navigation throughout the entire system of pages. I have it split into three sections instead of two, as to not let each section get too cluttered. I also make frequent use of headings as that is what website viewers typically look for when they are looking for something in particular. I also use images for navigation, but in the My Work section, where it is clear that those images are my illustrations due to the presence of other illustrations in the area.
My website also uses quite a bit more words. Though I agree words should be kept minimal, I believe this website’s words are kept minimal to a fault. It feels like some important information is being left out. I am also unable to learn about the designer himself, as the website is primarily just images of his work, and very little about how it was made, or about him himself.
Jenna Hall Fairy Tale Info
Story: The Horse and the Stag by Aesops Fables
Domain name: thehorseandthestag
Host: wix.com , $14 a month plan would be the best, unlimited bandwith, 10GB storage, Free domain, remove ads, free site booster. With this site I don’t think you would need a email.
Thoughts on Interaction Design Responses
1.
Interaction Design, according to “Thoughts on Interaction Design,” is the creation of dialogue between user and product. “Elements of User Experience” gets a bit more poetic, and calls it a dance between the two of them. In any case, this “dialogue” or “dance” is a figurative description for interaction. Although this dialogue or dance is a 2-way interaction, designers need to plan the entire choreography beforehand. This means predicting user responses and designing accordingly. Unsurprisingly, then, Interaction Design borrows substantially from psychology. Beyond that, it also borrows from the fields of industrial design, engineering, art, and business strategy. Interaction Design obviously has plenty of similarities with a plethora of other types of design, however Interaction Design focuses on humanizing the end result and making it usable and intuitive. Some of the industry’s challenges can be viewed optimistically as opportunities. As new media pervades our culture and software development becomes outsourced, the job of the Interaction Designer becomes both more difficult and more sought after by companies. In a world full of variously sized rectangles that display pretty pictures, Interaction Design can serve as an improvement and differentiation.
2.
Ethnographic tools try to understand the what and why behind users’ actions. Ethnographic tools differ from traditional surveys or interviews in that they attempt to maintain the context of the actions – instead of asking the user in a controlled setting about their opinions on themselves, these tools try to understand these qualities in action. In the case of an online banking website, these tools can give the designer insight into how and why a user would use such a site. They might uncover useful information about which features are most helpful, which are in the way, and why a user usually logs on in the first place.
A design is finished when the designers are finished designing. Depending on the company and perspective, this could happen at a variety of points. For a particular designer, it could happen as soon as he throws it over the wall to the next group of designers, never to see it again. For a certain organization, design could be done when the product goes into manufacturing. For some products, design isn’t finished until it goes through several cycles of iterative development – and for other products, continued updates and support mean that design continues well after the product has been made commercially available. Success and purpose also depend on perspective. Some designs start out to fill a business purpose – the organization needs to make money or retaliate against a competitor, for example. Or, the design might have the purpose of providing the user some benefit. Maybe even both. The design is a success if it meets its purpose.
A product family I use is breakfast cereal, and a specific brand that I used to use regularly was Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Its branding affected me quite negatively when they released an ad campaign that not only personified the cereal, but characterized it as cannibalistic. Let this be a message to all advertisers of food: When I eat food, I don’t want to think about the prospect of eating a sentient being, as you have just advertised your food to be. Secondly, having your personified breakfast meal successfully recreate a miniature version of the Hunger Games in which the contestants eat each other does not make me want your product any more. In fact, it makes me want it quite less – less enough to the point where I haven’t bought the damn thing since your ad campaign was released. On another note, I do recall choosing several technological toys and devices as a child mainly based on their looks. This served as a good learning experience for me, as later in life I became much more concerned with functionality as opposed to aesthetics in technology.
Objectified Response
Objectified is a documentary that observes the relationships people have with manufactured objects, how they create them and the backgrounds of the people who design the objects. The documentary takes us through the steps of the designers and how they creatively try to re-invent their designs.
From the statements I wrote down, I think I agree with most of them, the biggest one being “good design is easy to use”. In my opinion, if something is designed to make you think too much or you can barely figure out, no one is going to want to use it. In the documentary another designer said, “design is to make people feel good”, and like I said before, if a design is hard to use, no one is going to use it if they can’t figure it out.
A statement that made me kind of change how I think about design is “design can have a different meaning in other countries or cultures”. I never really thought about factoring in other countries beliefs and I now realize that you must be cautious about that, especially if you’re designing for someone internationally.
I would define design as coming up with an idea to make something better, it changed after watching objectified because I realized how much time, effort and creative thinking you need to do.
Review Three: Local Restaurants
In this review I was be going over two different websites that are run by local businesses in the Washington county area. These websites being Sarris Candies, (located at https://www.sarriscandies.com/) and a local Chinese restaurant that I enjoy called Wong’s Wok. (located at http://www.wongswokwashpa.com/)
These websites differ greatly, but I want to describe both before I make comparisons.
Sarris Candies is a restaurant / confectionery located in Canonsburg. When you access the website, you are greeted by images of sweets and candies with links to their special catalogs. When you click on specific chocolates, you are taken to that product’s page and from here you can choose to select the quantity that you specify. Overall it’s a clean website and looks very professional for a local business.
The other website is a local Chinese restaurant in my area that I really enjoy called Wong’s Wok. The website is rather basic and plain, stating the address and an option to see the menu in an online .pdf format. It doesn’t have much, but it shows the menu for ordering with a number to call, so what more could you want from a local takeout restaurant?
Comparing them, it is clear that Sarris’s is much more balanced and professional. As such, their website is nicer to look at and has more features than Wong’s Wok. It is unfair to judge both businesses as they sell a different product and one is much more popular than the other, but both websites serve their purposes well for their respective owners.
I hope you take the time to visit both locations!
Review 3
For this review, I am going to compare the two websites: Six Penn Kitchen and No. 9 Park. The two websites are very different in their own ways. Six Penn Kitchen is a local restaurant in the Pittsburgh area, it is a single page website (http://sixpennkitchen.com/index.aspx). The website is simple, it is more of a visual site. There is no navigation to the website. The website is very balanced, the colors they chose makes the content pop out to the user. Also, the light grey lines are settle enough that it separates the content but also makes it look like it all goes together. The colors ties in together with the images, they chose to put on the website, which makes it aesthetically pleasing. The layout is very simple and there is no complexity to it. One thing that seems out of place is the logo, it is confusing because they have their name at the center of the page and their logo on the far left corner, both could be the site id. No.9 Park (http://www.no9park.com) is a restaurant located in Boston, they have a navigation bar. Their navigation is very clear, they have a down arrow to direct you to go down to reveal more content. It also tells the user how to use the site. They have only one site id that makes it clear to the user that they are on No.9 Park, unlike Six Penn. Their navigation bar is clear and it is visible, so if there is something that I wanted to look at, I could easily locate it. They also have a bar on the far right that indicates where I am at on the site. The website is broken down with large landscape images and short paragraphs of text for each image. Their layout is consistent and every style is carried throughout the website. No.9 Park emphasizes their main content by making the text pop with white text over the images and solid dark colors.
Six Penn Kitchen does a really good job implementing Krug’s five important “things” by putting very little text on the home page, to showcase their dishes and have the customers want to seek more if they are interested in trying out the restaurant. In the book, Krug also stated that putting more into a to make the page shorter helps with people being able to see the content so that they do not have to scroll anywhere. Six Penn does a really good job implementing this on their homepage. No.9 Park, on the other hand, makes you scroll up and down to see the content. Which makes it hard for the user to skim through the website. It makes the user slow down, and that is not how you really use a website. This makes the website harder to navigate around because you can only scroll. However, both of the websites have a clear hierarchy. You can tell what’s the most important content on the website and what is secondary. Even though Six Penn Kitchen does not have much on their site, they omitted any needless words to help the users skim through the site without thinking too much about it.
In my opinion, I thin No.9 Park draws more attention to me than Six Penn Kitchen because it has more content to explore. When you land on No.9 Park, you land on the home page with an arrow that tells you to scroll down so you can read more about their “Chef Barbara Lynch’s Flagship Restaurant in Boston’s Beacon Hill.” They also have a very clear navigation menu, so if you want to know about something then you just press on it. It is also easy to navigate from one page to the other. In addition, it is very easy for me to locate the home page because you just click on the site id and (poof!) it takes you back to the homepage. They also have more clickable links that Six Penn Kitchen.
Week 6 – Game Design
Prototype Playtest: Destination Stranded!
The playtest went very well because I received a lot of good feedback on the game rules and concept. The game card types seemed to work well but the duration of the game was too long due to the difficulty of finding the cards needed to win. This will be solved by either introducing a cooperative element, less matching needed, or having duplicates of those cards.
Game Review
Bang! has an American wild west theme in which players are on unknown teams and must find out who the other players are. The game rules seemed rather easy to learn but many player actions seemed random and not as caused as it would seem. The players had to eliminate other players not on their team without causing other players to notice their motives. I think this could be a gateway game because of its easy to learn ruleset and replayability.
Week 5? Games and review
Cantan was a really fun game. I really liked the idea of each time you play the game, there is a different playground to play on. I learned that I like trading and collecting games, making sure that you have more paths, settlements, and roads to get to other environments to collect more cards and make more things. Splendor went quicker than Cantan, but I also enjoyed that game. Again, you needed to trade and spend money to collect more items.
Building Games:
Ingredients:
-cook/trade
-Thanksgiving
Art thieves
- Get the most expensive art
- trade/money
- work
5 Building Game Ideas
Desmond Rossignoli
- Warped Space – I am not sure how this game is to be played, but I envision players placing new tiles and expanding the board. Tiles would come in shapes that tesselate (such as triangles, diamonds, and rectangles), and would have grids on them which the player could move along. The grid squares would be varied in size, and proportioned 1:4:16. This would allow players to move quickly on some areas of the board, and quite slow in other areas.
- Obstacle Source – Players will increase their stats (jumping, running, climbing, dodging, etcetera) while collecting obstacles. Players may play obstacles in front of each other, ideally building up an obstacle course in front of each player. At the end of the game, the players run their courses simultaneously, and the first to the end is the winner.
- Demonlords – A new layer of hell is being developed, and God has appointed some new Demon Lords to take charge. As the new layer of hell begins to expand, players will take over swathes of land, build up various torture rooms within their territory, and populate their rooms with sinners as they begin to flow in.
- I Want to be the Dungeon Master – Ever play a round of Dungeons & Dragons where everyone wants to be the Dungeon Master? I know your pain, which is why in this game, each player plays as a dungeon master, competing for various tiles to add to their dungeon, placing treasure and monsters as they go. In phase 2, each player randomly gets assigned a dungeon other than their own, which they must survive and loot.
- Sanitation Frustration – A cooperative game where pollution gets placed on an ever-growing map, and players must work together to fix the environment.
Week 4 Board Game Reflection
Desmond Rossignoli
Of the two games brought in today, my group only had the opportunity to play Nano-bots (because of interviews). Fortunately, RMU’s Tabletop Club will be purchasing Carcassone and its expansions soon, which will give me the opportunity to experience it in the future.
Nano-bots was frustrating to play but in a good way. Not only were moves extremely strategic, but they also provoked loud debates between players, advising alternate moves (which might be more advantageous). I enjoyed this atmosphere a lot, as it introduced a cooperative element into an otherwise competitive game.
The third act came very late in the game, as it took a while for any of the players to get a firm lead. If I had to guess, I would say that the mechanics of this game were developed (mostly) before a theme was concocted.
Death Sentence Rules
Death Sentence – Desmond Rossignoli
Materials Included:
6 Play Mats
120 Noun Cards + 5 Blank Nouns
120 Verb Cards + 5 Blank Verbs
48 Adverb Cards + 2 Blank Adverbs
48 Adjective Cards + 2 Blank Adjectives
48 Location Cards + 2 Blank Locations
Set-up:
1. Shuffle all of the cards into one deck
2. Each player starts with a play mat in front of them
3. Deal 5 cards to each player
4. The player who read a novel for leisure most recently begins, and play proceeds clockwise.
On Your Turn:
1. Draw 1 card
2. Place 1 card from your hand to the corresponding space on your mat
3. Trade 1 of your cards with a random card from one of your opponents
End of Game:
After the 10th round, the game is over, and points are tallied.
1. Earn 1 point for each card present in a complete sentence
2. Each player chooses their favorite sentence which they did not write, and awards 1 pt to that player (this step is skipped in a 2-player game)
3. The players vote together for their favorite sentence, and award it 2 points
4. In the event of a tie, the person with the most verbs/nouns in their hand is the winner. If there is still a tie, the player who was last in the turn order (between the tied opponents) is the winner.
Prototype Play Mat Format:
[Verb] and [Verb][Adj] by [Noun]
[Adv][Verb] in [Location]
[Adv][Verb] by [Noun]
Killed by [Noun] in [Location]
Death by [Adj][Noun]
[Verb] by [Noun]