What fonts to use for the name of the game, and in it?
I *love* this Hoefler & Frere-Jones’ typeface, Archer. Look at that ‘C’!
What a lovely game name/heading Archer Book would make: gorgeously classic-yet-futuristic. With Verlag Condensed as a complementary contrast for in-game body text.
So where have the devices come from? Who made them and why? Thinking on this, I came up with a backstory:
A set of devices has been sent back from the future, after the apocalypse, when people have forgotten about the time before, what the world contained, how things worked, and what it all meant. They yearn to know of the richness and diversity of their former world; they want to learn about the past — our present – in an organic but semi-systematic way.
So they created a game-in-a-box that we past people can enjoy playing and which streams its generative data back into the future, through a hub device that orchestrates and prevents random data entry. The more games are played, the more the future folk remember and understand.
There is an ulterior motive, but it is not evil: it is only to prevent the apocalypse. Yes, the future folk hold firmly to a fragile hope that if people in the past could understand things better – if they would only pay more attention to how meaning is made – then the apocalypse may never happen. The future folk must be subtle; they must not reveal the disaster ahead – the past people must not be afraid! So they operate under a guise of intriguing frivolity, and own only half their purpose.
And why did they choose to send the devices to the National Museum of Australia? Well, that will be the subject of a future post…
Very early on, our trusty developers had the idea to figure Sembl as a machine. Seeing as it’s an iPad app, we started to think about it as a handheld device, made of wood and metal, so *of course!* it wasn’t long before we started to draw on the wonderful steampunk zeitgeist for inspiration.
I wondered how faithful we could be to the figure of the device – how plausible (in a non-slavish way, of course) – so I started to sketch.
Above is a rough (and dodgy!) early sketch of the spine of the device, where teams will register to play. Below is me dreaming up how a node on the gameboard might change as it becomes available and then filled with an object.
These are early ideas; they may well be superseded by those of the visual designers… but drawing in this way helped me to think through the visual dynamics of gameplay and, yep, fed my already substantial enthusiasm for this project!