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 collaborated with other team members to help design the rule set 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 that would require basic hand dexterity, to develop hand eye coordination.
I created game pieces and 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 and future projects. For instance, I learned to not use a 3 or odd numbered choice answer in the future. People will tend to choose the middle option if given an odd number of choices, and forcing people to pick a side if they have mixed or balanced feelings can give more nuanced feedback.
This was one of the first game projects that I made and showed to people for feedback. This project was a really fun learning experience for me on how to design board games instead of electronic games, but also how to present various designs and iterations of a project to testers and shareholders.