Week 1 Update

Our idea initial idea for a toy was to create a 3D version of Monopoly where the player would be able to buy properties and increase their value by purchasing other properties that match horizontally or vertically. However, this idea was too similar to the original game Monopoly.

We took on the theme of food for our game, where the player would create a chain of restaurants and eventually be able to buy all components of the business. The other components included things like the farms where the food is grown. With our design, the player would buy the actual restaurants on the first level of the board, where everyone will start the game. As the players acquire more assets and money, they will eventually meet the requirements to go to the second level of the board where they can buy the other components of the business. With the theme of owning an entire company in mind, we had the idea that the pieces the player would chose from would be various logos that either parody existing chains or represent food of different cultures.

The game still felt too much like Monopoly, as it focused mainly on the business aspect of owning a company. As a result we decided to add a way for life decisions to be integrated in the game. These would include things like moving the location of your business in order to make a spouse happy. Whether or not you chose to move your business can result in different outcomes, such as divorce (which would cause the player to lose money) if you chose not to move your business. Other ideas for events include paying extra taxes and dealing with scandals surrounding your business. However, we do not want to make the game too complicated with these extra events so we are working on finding a way to easily implement these elements or changing the events to have consequences that are similar for any player to follow.

Figure 1: Rough sketch of week one design