I botched my timing on some other projects this week, so I wasn’t able to make tangible progress – but aside from the trial and error that comes with laser cutting, I think I’m still on a good path – I don’t think I have more significant technical challenges left to face.
Materials
The main thing I’ve been contemplating this week has been the magnets to attach the layers of my box together. I’ve had reasonable success with the magnetic tape I’ve shown in class, but it adds too much thickness to each layer – so I’m aiming to press fit thin magnets into each layer, so the layers are as flush with each other as possible.
My perfect magnet is small so they don’t take up much space on the layer’s surface, and just strong enough to keep the layers together – but not so strong that the magnets rip each other out of each layer. The trouble is that all the small magnets I can find are too strong (i.e. rare earth), and all the weaker magnets are too big (> 1/2″ wide). There are few happy mediums!
In the meantime, I think I will settle for some larger ceramic magnets. For this project I value the weakness of the magnets much more than the width – I don’t want the layers to feel very tightly pinched together.
Aside from the magnets, I also need to grab some stiffer paper that will hold in the moving parts. I will probably just go to Michaels later this week and grab both items, unless anyone has another recommendation for cheap magnets they’d like to share.
Theme
I’ve finally settled on a theme, this week too: one of my favorite games, INSIDE. I watched some of my MQP partners play through it recently, as we gathered some comparable works for our own project, and was inspired by how all the components of each level come together and are reused in different ways.
To apply this to my box, I will make a few movable layers capturing key parts/mechanics of the game, and more static layers with various elements that appear throughout (machinery, ladders, lab monitors, water tanks, etc.). I think being able to swap and reorder these will let the user make some interesting-looking scenarios that never happened in the game, but feel perfectly in place.