What a busy summer at the Tiltfactor Laboratory! As we have been preparing for GenCon and working on our games, we also spent some time at the AVA Gallery in Lebanon, NH hosting a Gamecrafting Workshop for local youth.
We had a wonderful week getting to know our campers and helping them design games! On Monday, campers played games such as Awkward Moment™ and Battleship to learn about games and what makes a game fun. On Tuesday, campers incorporated the game design ideas they learned from Dr. Flanagan and the Tilt staff to create the first prototypes of their games.
The campers’ ideas were awesome! From board games to card games to tabletop mini-golf, the prototypes produced on Tuesday were creative and unique. Campers played their games in small groups and collected feedback about their ideas so that they were ready to refine their designs the next day.
Campers made two more versions of their games, with feedback from other campers and from Tilt staff to guide them in the revision stages. By the end of Thursday afternoon, the game design process was complete; each camper had a game to play for Friday. Max and I spraymounted the paper boards onto foam and typed the rules that campers made for their games to add a special touch to the games.
Campers, parents, and siblings enjoyed playing the finished games on Friday and eagerly chatted about the gamecrafting process and about taking the games home to play at the end of the day. We hope that everyone had a great time at the workshop; we sure did! We would like to thank the AVA Gallery for the support and to especially thank the campers for their enthusiasm and their hard work that made the week so special!
