I am here, in the rural and still wild north woods, connected to the world, with the most modern of technology and what amazes me most is the northern light. I look up from my computer screen and see pristine waters, blue skies white clouds and limitless shades of green all playing in the amazing northern light which artists have been kidnapped by for centuries, and I say take me too.
But not yet…
My assignment for the Fab Four Design Team was to do graphics for our game Inflation Blaster.
Two of the controls I have been working on are the game timer, a monthly "clock" that will count down through a year in the life of the federal budget. A year will be the length of the game play, though we haven't decided how long in minutes the game will be.
The second control I've been creating is the budget "thermometer" which will allow the player to gauge how well they are doing managing the US budget. The player will start with 1 trillion dollars and either spend and or create revenue as the game progresses through the months. Spend too much and you end up with no money spend money you don't have by either printing more, borrowing money or or taxing more and inflation kicks in and lowers the value of each dollar.
To design the clocks and the thermometers I used Freehand FX. It's an old version of a vector based drawing program that was created by Macromedia and was part of their suite of apps which included Flash. Adobe bought Macromedia, kept Flash and killed Freehand, replacing it with their own vector based program, Illustrator, a program which I don't have, therefore the use of Freehand. I think Freehand gives you more control of the artwork you can get with Flash. So far, for this game I have created 18 original drawings, 13 clocks, and 5 thermometers. complete with text, transparencies and drop shadows, each of the clock and thermometer pieces are various colors, each different to alert the player as they near the end of the game or begin running out of money.
These will be saved in the library as instances to be called to the game as the play progresses. the clocks in a sequential basis over a fixed amount of game play time, and the thermometer stages in various order, depending up the decisions made by the player.
I started with these two because they are the two devices that will determine game length and scoring. I think the other decisions about the game will be easier to visualize and organize if we have the scoring and timing mechanisms in place.
Here are two samples of the clock, one the beginning one is how the clock will look at the beginning of the game, (in January) the second nearing the end of the game (approaching December).
The next two images are thermometers, the first is what the player will see when the game starts—it represents a starting budget of 1 trillion dollars and the second will be what the player sees when spending decisions reduce the balance enough to get below 250 billion dollars.
Check back as the game design progresses.
Tonight, we search for MOOSE!
