Translating Affordances- Gold Miner
To interpret interface of digital device, I have thought of many games, including Boxit, Rhythm games and some skills of heroes in Moba games.
Finally, I chose one of my favorite games during my childhood — Gold Miner, because it is easy to relate to the physical world. The miner on the top of the screen needs to pull up gold and diamond in pig’s mouth in limited time. When every game level is finished, the amount of value should meet the demand.
The first problem I have to fix is that in the game, the pliers at the bottom of the rope could automatically pick up stones and gold, but in the physical world, we should force it with the lever. Also in the real world, rope would not drop down with certain direction, so I use stick to keep directions instead. To interpret this with mechanism, I first thought of something like chopstick to pick. However, it turns out that this method could be difficult. Then I cut a hole on the cardboard, with which the stick could pull up the bulk made by cardboard by force of friction.
This method has two problems: 1. I could not make the appearance of the stick look more like pliers more. 2. The fault tolerance rate of picking bulks is too low. In the video game, when pliers approaching bulks, the gold or stone could be picked.
To improve further, I used magnet to pull ironies inside bulks.
To design the pliers, I need to arrange the position of the magnet to make it close to bulks. I tried to package it with cardboard shaped like pliers, but I could not fix the magnet and stick in this way. It could be more simple just to cover the magnet with a 2D shape, and clue the stick on it.
For the gold and stones, I just found some irony stuff around y table and fix them inside the cardboard. Since we just had Mid-Autumn Festival in China, I got many cardboard which were packages of moon-cake. I picked some golden and red cardboard to make diamond and gold, the other grey side could mimic stone material. Also, in the game here are some pigs running. I found a rubber pig and tried to put a binder clip inside it. Unfortunately, the rubber is too thick that magnet could not attract the binder clip inside any more. So I just hole the pig’s ear with a long tail clip.
To put bulks at different places on the facade and make them easy to pull by magnet, I cut some platform and insert them through the big box. Also I drew a gold miner on the top to visualize the game.
The last step is to put bulks on platforms and insert the stick by the hole on the top. The pig could run in the scene by the cut line on the bottom of the scene.
It is really an interesting practice. Before I decided to make this, many crazy ideas crossed my mind. During the process, I also realized how video games could break through the physical limitation to design and how they refer to the real world.