Final Physical Design
Original Rough Sketch
Initial Ideas
My original idea for this revolved entirely around something which I had seen on some of the example bagatelle designs we were shown, where the ball went around the entire board when it was originally shot out, and looped around and back up into the actual play space. Eventually, this evolved into the idea to turn the bagatelle into a racing-themed one, but I wasn’t able to find enough time to illustrate that.
Changes Made
At first, I really only had the looping mechanic down for the first couple of play tests, which was a little unfortunate, as I didn’t really have a way to “score”. So from then on I focused on thinking about how to approach scoring, but I realized I had an issue, since I could do something with adding pins to the board to act as scoring zones, but because the ball looped around and shot out from the bottom, instead of shooting up to drop from the top, it would be very hard to put those scoring zones in places where they were both out of the way and also able to be scored in. So instead, I decided to cut holes in the board. It sort of worked, but it didn’t really end up working or looking super great. However, it did create a pretty satisfying feeling when you did manage to sink a ball into the holes.
User Reactions
When we did the first play tests, I definitely didn’t have enough to show for with only having the looping mechanic, so I won’t touch on that play test as much. But for the ones that followed, I had managed to get the holes in the board, and “scoring” was somewhat implemented. Overall, most people did enjoy the looping mechanic and being able to absolutely pelt the ball around the board. There was also some feedback about how satisfying sinking the ball into the scoring holes was, but there was also a lot of feedback about how the game lacked any sort of theming or art to it, which is totally fair, since I didn’t manage to get any art onto the board unfortunately. Overall though, minus not really getting any art incorporated, I think I did a pretty decent job at making something that I have very little experience with making.