This is a continuation of discussion of Game Development which began HERE and discusses what board games and mechanics lead to the initial prototype that will be discussed in this post.

Please note some bug is stripping http: from the URLs on my images... I have asked for help in steemit.chat

STARWAYS - Board Game is conceived:

After playing many of the games mentioned in the previous blog I was inspired by the mechanics and came up with what I thought would be the greatest space exploration, trade, and stab your buddies in the back board game in existence.    

Actually, I did not think that.   I did think it had potential to be fun.    Other than some Pen and Paper systems, and some very basic board game ideas when I was really young I had not ventured into making my own board game.

By request from a comment on the previous blog I will go into some detail about how I prototyped this board game and crafted it.    (NOTE: I do not have a visual arts background)

I knew I wanted Hex Maps.    Hex maps are something I really liked.   I wanted players to come into the game at a newly discovered area and I wanted them to be able to explore.   The game would build the map as players played.

It would end up looking something like this...

I designed the hexes in Photoshop and I read a lot of online tutorials for Photoshop on making planets and other space like effects.    I was not artist, but I did want my prototype to be as visually pleasing as I myself could achieve.

As with anything the more practice you have in something the better you get.   This project is work from quite a number of years ago.

I printed out the hexes and fit as many as I could on a single sheet of paper.   Due to space needing a black background I used quite a bit of black toner.

• When I printed out a sheet I pasted that sheet on some thick black card stock I purchased from Hobby Lobby or Walmart (I know all components came from those two places).
• I glued the sheet to the card stock using sprayable glue.
• I then cut it out.
• Later on I decided to make them a little thicker and grip a little better so I glued a dense black foam that I found a sheet of to the bottom of each of the hexes.   This did indeed reduce how much they would slide around.

If you happen to want to make a board game don't jump straight to this part.   I didn't do so.   I designed the rules and the concept of the game in a design document before I ever began making a single piece.    Making pieces like this is time consuming, requires materials, and is difficult to make changes to after the fact.

If you are uncertain you should always begin with the most simple version of playing components you can think of to test your rules.    Do not focus on really nice looking pieces until after you are certain of your rules.

I went through several iterations on game art and design as we played.

Later iteration:

That iteration uses what I call placeholder art (the ship).  I did not make it, and it would need to be replaced if I ever actually went into production on the game.

The Action Cards and most other elements also went through iterations (versions):

Later iteration:

So what was the game about, what was the objective?

The game was definitely an economic centered game.   Your score was determined by the amount of wealth you amassed by the end of the game.   The player with the most wealth was the victor.   There were many different approaches to how this could be accomplished.  

The most profitable way could be by setting up routes...

The concept of routes was inspired by Ticket To Ride, and Settlers of Catan with a good measure of Tetris tossed in.    You had a certain amount of route pieces you could play.   You had to visit both ends of a route to activate it and they had to be on sectors.   This made the shapes matter.   The longer the piece the more valuable it was.   You could not overlap another route.

I ended up printing out a ton of cards, pieces, teams (up to 8 players), and I used a lot of colored beads and such for various tokens.

So what happpened?   Where is the game?

What happened is after several play testing runs and getting ideas and realizing how much work it is to remake physical components based upon ideas and feedback during testing it made sense for me to leverage my skills as a programmer and prototype it in a computer program first...

So taking this to the computer will be the next installment.