Painting the town red

摘要

ColourMaps enable designers to author location-based games by directly colouring over maps. This provides a simple, familiar and yet highly flexible approach to matching location-triggers to complex physical spaces. It also supports configuring and managing other aspects of a game, including setting start positions, filtering inaccurate position data, and underpinning orchestration tools. We describe the use and evolution of this approach to create four location-based games that have toured internationally over the past four years. From this, we draw out a general design for a ColourMap tool that includes concepts of multiple levels, multiple and specialized content layers within a level, and different options for triggering game events from user movements and other actions.