This week was the first stage of the creation of my game. I dedicated this entire week to creating the rules for my game.I am really enjoying this project so far as I have a large background knowledge in board games and I am now actually being able to use it for something useful. 

  

 I wrote 1500 words of instructions to outline how to play. I took many ideas and some game mechanics from other games which I mashed into mine.I feel like I have created good core game mechanics and I am hoping to test it out next week. I have also looked into some of the piece and parts I will need to create an ecstatically pleasing board game and to be honest I am slightly worried. I will have to leave a large chunk of time to actually buy or create pieces for my board game. As buying pieces online would be optimal but I just don’t have the time. Overall this week was a step in the right direction and now since I have my instructions “done” I can get away from the tedious construction of them and actually starting the fun and more interesting revision.

This week was a productive week. We built a lot of individual pieces that need to be slapped on to the base of our machine. Gabi and Nash have the final blue print like 50% finished and are just waiting on the engineers to complete the machine so they can finish the print. Me and Anatolia continued to document the creation of our machine. 

I have been helping with a lot of the grunt work for the creation of our machine and I made a really vivid connection when I was gluing the popsicle sticks to the scale. I burnt my self and I had a Harry Potter moment when I remember burning my self for my year end grade 7 socials project.

Here are the two videos.

Ultimately I thought this was a “get stuff done week” and I thought we did that. If we continue down this path I see a successful final product. 

Casino Kings

 

This week was the planning and brainstorming ideas for my blue sky project. I had trouble coming up with an idea that was super original. So I went back and thought of something simple and put a twist on it. Create a board game, easy right. Well not so easy if someone has to understand it and play it in under an hour.

 

The game will be based on running the operations of Las Vegas. It will be a 3 to 4 player euro game. Your goal will be to have the most money at the end of the game.The game will end after 10 turns. I will follow the timeline of the city from 1900s to the 2010. You will create casinos and the casinos will specialize in certain areas and you have to capitalize on all the tourist and the revenue you bring in. Idea of the game is that you have to attract tourist and make them spend money.

I began to make progress on my project.

I created a timeline for when I want to get stuff done.

I started to look through some of the games I have and look at their best qualities.

http://youtu.be/D14Q5PQP5hw

Overall I thought I was a little slow this week but hope to pick it up this week and try to get an outline of how the game will play and look.

 

This is the third week review of our metaphor machine creations. This weeks energy was spent on the actually creation of some real objects. We have created a to scale blue print, started the actually creation of our machine and elaborated on our metaphors. 

The blue print was created by Gabi and Nash our two architects. The machine ended up being 24″ by 35″. They drew the ramps the scale and the bell to a 1 to 1 scale of what our machine will look like. They are kinda at a stall with drawing some of the objects, because we are kinda in flux deciding how some parts of the machine will work.   

  

The actually building of the machine is not going quite as well as I hoped it would. We are lacking the odd material here or there, so we will have to make sure we bring some more stuff so we can get stuff done! What we did get done I am happy with. We created the ramps for the machine and got the pulley system some what functional. 

  

The metaphor creation and elaboration on our script went great as we got a pretty cool sounding script. 

  

My only worry is that we won’t actually be able to use all the metaphors because we won’t be able to create all the machines.

Overall I thought this week was a little slow, but I am mostly happy with our progress. I hope next week we can put our nose to the grindstone and get some stuff done.  

This is the second week review of our metaphor machine creation. We mainly focused on the planing of our machine by laying out a blue print of our machine and creating some metaphors.  

Here is our blueprint. 

 

  The blue prints has all the basic machines we wish to add to the machine . It also shows the basic structure of how we want it to look and work. We plan to have a marble roll down a series of ramps activating different machines i.e Knocking of dominos/ Ringing a bell. I think the blue print and the idea for our machine is simpleish. The machine has simple machines such as pulleys and scales and I think we will be able to execute in the creation of our machine. 

We also worked on some metaphors.

  

I like the core ideas of the metaphors we came up with but, I think they are bland and I would like to elaborate on them when I get the chance to do so.

Overall I think it was another successful week and am looking forward to putting stuff together and creating the green mean machine.

The French Revolution affect on international society’s. 

The French newly found ideologies were adopted by many nations and the new world such as abolishing the monarch and establishing liberalism. A direct example was Italy as the country was divided by economy, intellectual and physical barriers but, were abolished and the nation now had new found common nationality as Italians. The physical effects of the revolution was that Napoleon just captured lots of countries and elected himself leader or king and making the captured countries pay excessive tax to France. The revolution also created a new bound with the Americans as they both were major supporters of liberalism, legal justice and legal equality. This sprung the creation of the Statue of Liberty as a gift from France. 

Overall the French Revolution allowed other countries to see it is possible to develop better and new ideologies.

  

I am going to reflect on the work I have done to help complete metaphor machine with my partners Nash, Gabi, Michael, Anatolia and Zakaria.

  In the past week or so it has all been planing. First we had to select the revolution we were going to do and we selected the English Civil War. I thought this was an ok choose at first as we really wanted the French Revolution but, after we did some research I think we will be able to put together a good machine that makes sense. 

  

 Secondly we made a time line too our revolution and it turned out great. Gabi did the bulk of the writing as her printing is the neatest and we all brain stormed and researched ideas and facts to put on the timeline. The timeline was well organized, neat and displayed our facts throughly. The only thing we could of improved on was the big picture organization. We had took the 4 stages of Crane Britons Theory of Revolution and put it on the timeline. I think we could of done some colour organization of the series of events it would be more clear cut. 

  

 Finally we created a sketch of our machine it was pretty basic. I think the idea of our machine are very likely to change but, the idea of a marble/ball rolling down a ramp activating machines is a solid idea and I hope we can use it.

  

 Overall I thought we were productive at making a good plan and am exited to move on to the creation of the machine and its metaphors.           

Here is a video on patriotism and its effects.

http://youtu.be/yfkgk0Moh_0

I think this video answered a lot of question on pros and cons patriotism has.

I created this video in IMovie and basically did a voice recording of my script and put visuals behind it. I enjoyed this project and created a pretty good product. In conclusion I enjoyed making this video and patriotism has many positives to building a strong society.

Michael, Nash and I created a video on the Mexican American War. This video highlights the conflicts,why they happened and what happened in the war.

  

http://youtu.be/9bnffuyFpts

The creation of the video. The video started with two rough copies made separately by Michael and Nash on the war. Then we got put together in a group to create the ultimate video. We used Michael’s video as the base and added to it using some of Nash’s video scenes and making new ones. So I kinda hopped on the already moving train with Michael and Nash. 

The positives of the video was are animations, content and flow. Our animations were great as Michael and Nash are both very good at creating fluid animations. We had good scenes were baby’s popped up and demonstrated population growth and bullets moving to demonstrate gun shots. The content that the video had was on topic and allowed the viewer to understand what happened and why. The flow of are video was good as we moved in logical order from the start to the end of the war and inputting info at certain points so the viewer could understand why it’s is happening. Such as at the end when it says America won the war we explained why, because of there superior weapons and supply’s.

The things we could improve on for the video were audio and more but less. The audio was recorded mostly without a mic making background noise. There was also some mic pops when we recorded with the mic. The way we could improve on that is with preparation. Write down exactly what you are going to say and be prepared to make a perfect recording. This is important because you get flustered when you say the wrong thing. So you end up taking a recording that is ok instead of good because you just don’t want to do it again. The more is less idea is key for an engaging video. We could of condescend our content more and added cooler and more animations to make a better video.

Overall I liked and succeed at this project. My group created a good video that wasn’t perfect but pretty good. I learned a lot about explain everything and the subject I was researching.

Why did English Civil War battles look so basic?

 

The English Civil War battle tactics might seem basic and outright crazy. Marching up to the enemy in unmissable line of flesh. Well it actually wasn’t that dumb. If you split your forces it would mean you could deliver less fire power to a certain area. Think about it this way, if you have 100 soldiers and the enemy has a 100 soldiers and you split your forces into 10s and the enemy keeps his 100 together. You would end up fighting 10vs100 soldiers 10 times. More often then not the enemy with 100 soldiers you’d lose less then you with 10 soldiers. So it is important to keep your soldiers together to offer maximum fire power. Here is a video on the basics of English Civil War battle tactics.

https://youtu.be/HOX60Pr8vTg

This video was just to show a little bit more of a visual aspect to tactics.

I talked about flanking in the video and it was very effective tactic at allowing you to concentrate your fire power and leave the enemy scrabbling to reposition.

 

Overall I think the tactics were basic, but there wasn’t a better strategy that was available at the time.