

Game Overview
For centuries, Alchemists have attempted to find the Philosopher’s Stone—a stone that will grant its user power unlike any known to mankind. Only your Master has known its existence, and he hid it in a room secured by enchantments before he was killed by you and your fellow apprentices. Fight to reach the room before they can.
Project
Board game design
Workshop
Game Jam
Game Jam
The three-week workshop introduced us to game design and mechanics with which our team was able to create "Alchement", a strategy game that uses tile-placement mechanism. We were introduced to "Screentop", a platform to host table-top board games, using which we created our final prototype.
Mentor
Shradha Jain
Team
Soumya Talwar
Shamanth Joshi
Chinmay Bhagat
Work
Our team worked on the board game through multiple iterations right from the idea of the game. We started ideating for the basic mechanism first before the narrative. This way we were able to playtest the mechanics to seek loopholes. The following button gives access to the entire journey of brainstorming, learning, and the making of our board game.
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Work
Working with a group means we need to share our knowledge and ideas so that we benefit from each other. We tried to draw on different strengths of the members to refine and produce our work. Prior to each day, we made sure we had an objective to work on and have clear goals for the day so as to make use of time. Coming to a resolution or resolving different opinions was a challenge, but we learned to take a common group opinion. We had newer ideas each day, so we had to set rules to stick to a plan and only grab ideas if it works well during playtest. For the game, I was able to contribute concept ideas, gameplay mechanics, and rules within the game. I got to work on the visual style and consistency of the artwork. Other involvements include:
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Refined the concept and ideas generated for the narrative and special tile cases such as ‘Evolve’, ‘Dark Arts’ and ‘Philosopher’s stone.
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Tried to generate excitement and enthusiasm among the teams to keep testing the gameplay as only when we play more do we find loopholes or inconsistencies within the rules we made.
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Improved the game's vision and overall player experience.
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Research on visual styles incorporated in tabletop games to understand how visual hierarchy, color representations, consistency, and fonts, etc. are used.
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Created variations for tiles, and other elements within the board.
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Performed as an enabler between art and game mechanics to ensure the game design fits within the parameters of the project.
© 2021 by Namita Thomas