Nearly finalized idea!

Today, our team hashed out a new game idea - very simple and affordable. However, we had to decide whether it was fun enough and whether it was tiring.

We bought our materials - button lights - at the Reject Shop and headed to a back alley to test our new idea.

The whole surface of the light is a button. If you press it once, it lights up; if you press it again, it switches off. This made it ideal material for some kind of scoring system.

Here's how our game works:

The lights are mounted on a wall in a random fashion. (See pics in post below.) There are 2 players, and two types of lights. One is white and one is black.

An equal number of each light will be mounted on the wall. The aim of the game is to throw balls to hit and light up all the light buttons of your colour (either white or black) before the opponent does.

White player wins!

It may seem simple enough, but each player is allowed to hit his or her opponent's lights to switch them off. So you can choose to sabotage your opponent as well as trying to light up all your light buttons.

We thought of many variations of this game - we can have 2 teams, but one team aims to light up all the lights, while the other team aims to switch them all off.

You win when you light them all simultaneously/turn them all off at once.

However, we decided that this might take way too long - unless one player has a much better aim than the other. That wouldn't be as fun, would it?

Exertion factor:

A few of us played and it was mildly tiring as we had to bend over toretrieve the balls after they bounced off the walls.

We decided to try adding other factors to make us exert more energy while playing and Tata's idea about the slingshot kept bugging me, so we tried adding the element of elasticity to our game.

Tata and I strung up a long chain of rubber bands, designed to restrict a player's movement. We forced a very unwilling Ziyi to model them for us and try it out:

One end of the rubber band rope was anchored to the library door (we played very quietly) and the other was wrapped around his hand.

If you tugged too hard, you would be met with a counter-force pulling your hand back, forcing you to exert more energy to throw the balls.

However, we thought this would make running to retrieve the balls very hard as it limited the distance you could run.

So we asked him to loop the other end of the rope around his other hand and put it around his back like a coat.

Both his arms were pulled back, and you had to exert more energy to bend and throw the ball. It is very much similar to the door method, but allows more overall mobility.

Ziyi commented that he felt very silly= while wearing the contraption, so I thought why not make it even sillier?

It wasn't photographed, but Tata and I looped one end of the rope around each of our throwing hands and we mimed the ball-throwing action in opposite directions.

This resulted in much hilarity as we bounced back towards each other, and we couldn't stop laughing. We thought it would be good to mount the button lights on opposite walls and play in this manner - tying the opponents to each other, so they would have to fight and struggle to gain the upper hand.

You would also have to learn to compromise with your opponent...or strain your and your opponent's arm really hard while running to retrieve the fallen balls.

Not everyone was very enthusiastic about the idea, but we're going to try it out tomorrow. After all, being silly is part of the fun, right? :P

Problems encountered:

The adhesive was not strong enough. The light buttons can fall off the wall if hit too violently.

We attempted to pad the lights with bubble wrap, but it obscured the player's vision and looked clumsy and less attractive. Tomorrow we are going to try using jac paper - a very strong but temporary adhesive to mount the buttons on the wall.

Someone suggested imposing a penalty for knocking the lights off the wall, but it kind of ruined the mood when the light fell off the wall. So, we're going to find a more secure way to mount the buttons instead. Also, with the elastic in place, perhaps the player won't throw as forceful as he would unrestricted, so the lights probably won't suffer so much impact.

We'll have to wait til tomorrow to see. :)