GAZE

Introduction

Gaze is a board game played using your phone’s camera. It’s a party game made for 3 to 5 players.

The game was developed during my first year of my game design master, under the theme « Boardgame with numeric components ».

The game is currently under development, and will be showcased at the Indiecade Europe 2017. You can follow the game development on facebook : https://www.facebook.com/Gazegame/

Pitch

Gaze is a speed and observation game. The players have to find the anamorphosis printed on the game board, and picture theme using their smartphones.

What’s an anamorphosis

A distorted projection or drawing which appears normal when viewed from a particular point.

A example from Felice Varini’s work

Game concept

Gaze is a party game based on observation, the game directly challenge the player’s mental mapping of the game board, by asking them to find anomrophosis as well as recomposing them, to then picture them using their smartphone camera.

The game needs 3 to 5 players to be played and an android phone compatible with the Gaze app for each player. Those players will need to find anamorphosis on the board in order to gain score, as the goal is to have the best score at the end of the game.

The board

The game-board is a 3D printed object that measure 30cm of width and length, for 18cm height.

Each lateral side of the game-board is painted in one of four colors. And of course, there is multiple anamorphosis printed on it. They are printed in black ink to contrast with the colorful aspect of the sides.

Game mechanics & elements

The camera

The camera is the main mechanic and the most important tool for the player. Thanks to it, players can picture anamorphosis they find, in order to know if they found the correct one or not.

The detection of the anamorphosis is done by using simple machine learning on the picture taken by the phone. Verifying the image and sending a feedback to the player, to let him know that he found his anamorphosis or not.

The anamorphosis

Tightly linked to the camera mechanic, the anamorphosis are the main attraction of the game. Scattered all over the game board, they are hollow shape, only composed of black lines.

Each anamorphosis is sorted in one the three difficulties : easy, medium and hard.

The scoring system

Each time a player validate an anamorphosis, he is granted with a number of score points, this number is given accordingly to the difficulties of the anamorphosis : 2 points for an easy one, 4 for a medium and 7 for a hard.

The first player to find four anamorphosis triggers the end of the game, at this moment, no matter if the other players have found all their anamorphosis or not, they can’t play anymore. The score of all players is calculated based on all anamorphosis they found. The one with the most score wins the game.

Exemple of a game

At the start of the game, each player are asked to choose an anamorphosis between 3, one of each difficulty. When selected, each player has to find his own chosen anamorphosis.

Once a player found his, the game will grant him score points accordingly to the annamorphosi’s difficulty, then he will be prompt to choose a new anamorphosis, the same way he did at the start.

This will repeat until one player finds 4 anamorphosis, at which point the game stops, and scores of all players are calculated. The player with the biggest score wins.

My roles

I’m working on the project as game designer and as level designer. My main task was to analyze the anamorphosis, rationalizing all the elements linked to them and on their impact on the difficulty. I also design and modeled the game board, then 3D printed it and put down all the anamorphosis.