The pitch day is coming and I have nothing else decent in mind. I got disappointed in my ideas so far, that’s why the best can do now is to continue the most developed concept – the origami craft game.
I tried to use a more familiar approach and to start with a setting or a story, which can give me hints on gameplay. I thought about a famous russian tale “An old man Mazai and hares”, where this old man was saving hares in spring, when nearby river flooded surroundings.
Hares can be origami units and the game is based on collecting as many hares as possible without drowning the boat. This could have worked as a concept, but I didn’t like that the craft technique doesn’t correspond with the setting. There’s no correlation between japanese origami and russian fairy tale. So I put this idea on hold.
Then I came back to the birds idea and tried to get it further.
Here I was thinking about sectors, one per each player, where somehow players must get to the center. (Actually even the next day after drawing that I can’t already recollect clearly, what I meant on these scheme) But the most important outcome here is that I understood that the process of creating origami doesn’t play any role here. Origami figures can be substituted with classic figurines and nothing would change. So I need to think about how to make the folding process be significant for the game. And this scheme was transformed into this:
So now it’s a duel game, where the agility in folding origami birds lets you claim more positions and move to the top faster. This is something we can work with already.
I tried to play more with narrative and to use a story about koi fish becoming a dragon.
But this required change in the core of the game which is “create as many as you can”, which contrantradicts the story a little bit. Or I just liked the bird story better, because it just gives a slight context, but is mainly about mechanics.
But still I didn’t abandon the app idea and still want to implement it somehow. What I’m thinking about is that the app being functional can take up the role of marking available positions and setting time to fold birds and claim the positions. But I have some serious fears about implementing that. Because ideally it should be augmented reality, where player can see highlited positions via phone camera. But I’ve never worked with that. That can be substituted with the 3d version of the physical tree, which can be rotated 360 degrees to reveal all posiible position. But again I’m not sure if my skills will be enough to make that. And my aim to make digital element blended with the gameplay works against me as falure to make the app means falue of the whole game. So I hope to resolve this issue during the pitch and get some advice. But for now my pitch page looks like this, which I find quite satisfactory, taking into account my previous problems with ideas.