Digital Adaptation Senet

Group project - September 2024 until January 2025

View the steam page here

For this full semester project in collaboration with University Leiden we are tasked with making a digital version of an ancient Egyptian board game called Senet with focus on immersion made for both a museum context and a online multiplayer context.

 
Currently we are at the end of the project and about to release our game to the public. Publishing on Steam as wel as Itch.io. We have a total of 3 different scenes with each a unique variation of senet with an interactive tutorial and a full story with cutscenes connecting all scenes together in a coherent story

Since the rules of Senet aren’t known we needed to make choices on how our version would be played. You can read our standard rules here.

This was our MVP of the game.

A big challenge in this project was learning people the rules of senet quickly. For our museum context we want people With the current tutorial the players only understand the rules halfway through. This is one of the first tutorial versions:
We observerend that most testers didn't read the full instruction and if they did they quickly forgot what they read.
For the next iteration we want to try to focus on visualisation. We expect people will remember the rules better and makes the tutorial easier for a diverse range of languages.

We expanded on the game of senet with house rule variations. Each rule also played against a different opponent in Egypt, with each a different story.
Cones and Towers Rule:

One player controls the coned pieces another the tower pieces. Both have different rules. The Cones have the rule of throwing again at 4 and 5. The towers lose this ability, but can stand on top of each other creating a tower. Towers can't be attacked.

Vertical Attack
When throwing a 1 a player may attack an opponents pawn by swapping places with it downwards into the other ro


Some UI sketches I’ve done in the beginning of the project.
We had plans in the beginning of the project to have a 2d OpenWorld where you could walk around from level to level. We decided to cut this due to our possible scope for the project.