Design student discusses Magnetic Billiards: Blueprint

Press cutting added by Ste Pickford on Wed, 28 Mar 2012
Subject: Magnetic Billiards: Blueprint

Here's a nice little write up of Magnetic Billiards: Blueprint, by a game design student, talking about the way we used the physical shape of the iOS device to inspire some of the game mechanics in Magnetic Billiards.

He's talking about the iPad specifically, and how the game makes bouncing off the edge of the table - effectively the edge of the iPad screen - a part of the game's scoring system.

What's interesting is that we had the original ideas for Magnetic Billiards long before the iPad or iPhone existed, but one the things that inspired John was using a Palm Pilot / Pocket PC. The physicality of the device, with the touch screen and the screen being horizontal in the palm of your hand (when we only had desktop screens positioned vertically in front of us at the time), inspired in John the idea of making a game that felt like a physical thing in your hand, that you could poke and push, and view from different angles.

We'd kind of forgotten that original inspiration as we got on with making Magnetic Billiards: Blueprint on iOS, so it's good to see that somebody else spotted that core idea surviving into the release version even though we weren't consciously striving towards that concept any more.

» Read 'TAKING EVERYTHING INTO ACCOUNT – DESIGN PERSPECTIVE'

Tags: game design, student, indie, inspiration

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