Sidewalk Fish
Sidewalk Fish is a board game where players try to rescue as many fish as possible from the flooded streets, with the tools as their disposal. The game is designed for children ages 6 and up to develop their motor skills.
It was developed from October 2022 to December 2022 with a team of 5 people.
I made several contributions, such as helping design the ruleset and the play space of the board. However, my primary role was to create the tools that would be used to pick up the fish. As stated before, the goal of the game is to develop the motor skills of children, and so I created the tools to be somewhat difficult to use. I created tools such as comically small shovels (in the form of ice cream spoons), broken tongs (chopsticks), a net with gaps (in the form of a slippery hair clamp), and a fishing rod (a sipping straw with some tape on the end).
Another small addition that I added near the end of development, to add some thematic flavor to the game, was to make the timer be a cyclone in a bottle. Correctly using the contraption means the other player has less time to complete their task. This makes the game more entertaining by giving the other player something to do to affect the outcome of the game while the player who has the active turn attempts to grab the fish.
This project was also a great experience for learning how to write good testing questions, as the quality of the questions and resulting responses improved over time. For instance, I would likely not use a 3 choice answer in the future, to prevent too many people picking the middle option when they shouldn’t happen.
This project was a really fun learning experience for me on how to design board games instead of electronic games, and perhaps there’s a chance I could keep developing this game into a public open source board game, with permission from my co-designers.