Project Success
Overall, I'm incredibly pleased with the final project from visuals to game design. The aim of my project was to create an engaging output to promote an Irish mythological story. Based on the testing that I carried out participants found the game to be an engaging experience and enjoyed that the story was tied into the game play. I think the gameplay and the deck it’s self is very successful as an output.
In terms of impact I can’t say how effective it would be on a larger scale, however the teachers in my family that I have shown the game to have expressed a lot of interest in having a deck for their classrooms.
What would I do differently?
In terms of the visual character illustrations of the project, I am concerned that they land slightly on the more childish looking side in comparison to what my target audience may be used to. I think the rest of the design of the deck definitely balances it well as they bring a slightly more mature aesthetic to the deck. If I was going to change anything about the deck I would try and spend more time refining the character illustrations to give a slightly more accurate aesthetic for my target audience.
Additionally, I think if I had more time with the project, I would design and include a small instructional booklet to go with the deck. I feel more information could be given on the backgrounds of the characters, and I would like to include sources on where to find out more about Irish mythology if you wanted to find out more after playing.
Process and Creative Growth
At the start of this project I was excited but apprehensive about working on a project for so long. In the past I've had projects that spanned only a few months and by the end I have been so sick of the project and just glad to finish it.
However, I found that I felt engaged with my topic and my output at all stages of the design process. In fact I found the only times that I didn't want to engage with my project was when I had other assignments that I had to work on that were more urgent.
I think this can be largely credited to 2 different factors. Firstly, the fact they we were able to select our own topics to focus on under the social design brief meant that I got to create and develop a project which I really care about and feel connected to. Secondly, the primary research that I conducted gave me a real grounding for my project in my own head. It brought a realism to the topic and gave me the confidence that this was actually an issue that needed to be tackled. This gave me the motivation to keep working on my project even when I was running on only little sleep and bourbon biscuits. The thought that the current generation of Irish children would not get the same experience and exposure to Irish mythological stories that brought me so much joy as a child, lit a fire in me that I don't think will ever go out.
Creative Practice
In terms of creative practice, this project forced me to push myself into doing something I wasn't necessarily comfortable with. Before this project, I had very little experience with illustrating and no experience with illustrating for children prior to starting the project. However I knew that I wanted the project to feature custom illustrations of the characters in the deck to allow for character recognition and add to the educational aspect of the cards for the story. This project forced me to push through the negative internal monologue and allowed me to discover a creative area which I love. Illustrating for children is maybe one of my most favourite parts of graphic design and I will definitely be exploring this area of design further in my future design work.
What's next?
Currently I don’t have plans for distribution of the deck and it is just a concept. However, there is the opportunity to produce the card decks for parents and teacher who want to include an interactive educational mythological game into their children’s lives. Due to the high cost of printing small runs of the decks, in order to do that I would need to create a Kickstarter or an alternative type of crowd funding to fund the project.
After seeing the effectiveness and engagement with my card deck I think there could definitely be scope to create a whole range of different Irish mythology based story decks. The only difficult part would be crafting the gameplay of the decks around different stories, however that could be overcome with. Considering the conversations I've had with family members that are teachers, I think there could be a real market for the production of these Irish mythology based decks.
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