Hatshepsut's Journey: Wall Tiles Design & Form

The Tomb

Hatshepsut's Tomb: The Setting for the Wall Tiles

The effect we want to create for the room is to completely transport the player to Ancient Egypt, so that when they enter, they are awed by the large ancient paintings and the many Egyptian relics around the room. Along the main wall they will see a painting of Anubis preparing an Egyptian for the afterlife. This painting along with the Pharaoh’s spirit beckoning from the sarcophagus - “Find the spell to eternal life” - will clue players into the theme and that the hieroglyphics around the room and on the sarcophagus are key to ‘finding the spell’.

Elements on the Walls

1. Tiles (Cartouches & Hieroglyphics): The tiles are the ‘live’ or playable elements on the room (See below for design of Tile itself). Each cartouche will have 3 hieroglyphic symbols on them. There will also be 3 of every cartouche, with no one cartouche (containing the same symbols) on the same wall. The same rule will be applied for single hieroglyphics, so that multiple players are needed around the room to press the right tile at the same time.

2. Murals: these are simply for effect. The walls will be covered by sandpaper and/or textured paint in order to get colors outside of brown. Murals will also cover the other two walls not shown in this view.

3. Rock climbing elements: these are placed at various spots so that players can climb up to press the correct tiles.

4. Shelves & Jars: These will be bolted to the wall, and jars bolted to the shelves. Players can stand on these in lieu of rock climbing elements to also reach the tiles.

5. Wall Protrusions: The protrusions are placed to make climbing the walls more fun. These can be created by dry wall (same material as the outer walls).

Wall Tiles

Look and Scale

The Tile is the only playable element on the walls. The effect we are going for is to have the tile blend into the murals on the wall as much as possible, while being able to clearly see the hieroglyphics in order to match symbols to those being lit on the sarcophagus. The tile shown on the left is a Cartouche tile (combination of 3 symbols in teh second level of the game). It will be 6x3x1 inches, made of sandpaper and conductive material.

Materials

The effect seen below of a Cartouche tile is created by:

1. Layer of brown sandpaper with hieroglyphic symbols cut out of the middle.

2. Layer of conductive material, in dark brown of gray color, that will lie flat on the walls of the rooms. (The conductive material will be connected to the wiring for the room - see Vance Soares’s page for the mechanical assembly of the tile).



When placed together it will produce the look of a tile with a dark gray symbols etched into them. In Concept Exploration we created the tile with sandpaper. We may play around with textured paint during implementation (on top of sandpaper or another cardboard material) to see if it creates a better effect.