How Fingerknots came to be

Posted by Michael Dales on 2010-12-07 14:29:56

Our new iPad game, Fingerknots, has been a fun little project to work on, and as such I thought it'd be good to share some of the process by which it came to be!

It all started when Laura and I attended BoardGameCamp in October, a fun unconference focussed on boardgaming. As part of this year's event, they held a GameHack to design a boardgame, aimed at 7 to 12 year olds, for the back of a christmas chocolate selection box. The rules were you had to design a game that could fit on the back of a cardboard box and require no extra pieces, oh, and be fun to play. Laura and I set to this, and after an hour or so we'd come up with our entry, Festive Fingers:

Festive Fingers has an 8x8 board of tiles, with 4 different pictures on tiles, and 4 different background colours. To add a random element we used some of our cardboard budget to let people cut out dice which would pick a colour and shape for players to place a finger on. Players take it in turns to throw the pair of dice and place and hold a finger on a matching tile, trying to stretch where they can, and if they're cunning trying to block other players. A fun game, and when play tested at the end of the day, seemed to be enjoyed by those that played it.

Although we didn't win the competition, we had great fun entering, and we were left with a game design that fit nicely onto a flat surface of not dissimilar dimensions to the iPad I was toting around that day...

So the day after BoardGameCamp I sat in my study, fired up XCode, and had a working prototype running in an hour or so. On of the advantages of moving it to the iPad, is that it's a bit more flexible than a bit of cardboard (you'd hope I guess, as it costs a little bit more ;). Not only could I do away with the dice and have the iPad generate selections for the players, but I could also regenerate the board for each game. All in all it was quite a nice fit.

Still, a demo is just a demo, and to take it to a finished product, it needs to look the part. At this point I'd typically talk to a graphic designer to get the app to look the part and help guide the UI a little. But given the genesis of the project, it seemed more fitting to go for someone who knew how to draw things to appeal to children rather than someone specialised in iOS apps. After a short search I was fortunate to happen across Mike Smith, who's a children's book illustrator, who's style I felt was right for the project.

Working with Mike turned out to be a good call - he came up with an excellent design that really captured the fact that this was a children's boardgame first, and an iPad app second. Once the design work was starting to come in, it was time to finish of the demo I'd created and turn it into an actual product. Although Festive Fingers, now Fingerknots thanks to a suggestion from Mike, has a fairly simply set of rules, it's got a lot of annoying corner cases that come up when you have a computer do the arbitration rather than the players.

But in just over a month Fingerknots was able to go from a cardboard mock-up to a beautifully crafted submitted app, and even better is that in the conversion from analog to digital, it's not lost any of the fun - those who tested the iPad app still had smiles on their faces just like those who played the original cardboard demo, which at the end of the day has to be the most important bit!

I think the moral here is that had Laura and I sat down to design an iPad game, this is not where we'd have ended up. Only thanks to the weird constraints we faced when designing the game did we come up with the concept. Indeed, having a blank piece of paper to start with is always scary, and it's only by constraining ourselves in a particular way we came up with our design. So perhaps for your next project don't think what can you do with all the features of your target platform (be it technology, cardboard, or other) but try and constrain it to the point you only have a couple of variables to play with, and see where it takes you. It'll seem more difficult at first, but I suspect the output will come much quicker.

A huge thanks to Laura, with whom the original game was designed, James Wallis and everyone else at BoardGameCamp for running the competition, to Mike for the artwork, to Sophie Sampson who helped with making my instructions readable, and to everyone who play-tested the app!