Dan Zen – Board of Games Interface

After a running the Itching campaign, the Dan Zen Board of Games was launched. All the games were made free and people could donate to see the World’s Tallest Hat.

The board metaphor provided a front cover (see samples here) and then a main menu with each game represented as a square on the game board. There was one person who at a quick glance perhaps thought the site was a game on its own as opposed to multiple games but this feedback was not taken seriously.

Many of Dan Zen games could be board games with the addition of computing power and omniavailability.

Early JavaScript was used to change a message image as the different game squares were rolled over. Secondary pages provided common top navigation with cross promotional links. Ads from the Blah Blah network, now UGO were served to some success.

As features were added, the Teleporter squares were added or taken away to keep a balance. The board eventually was becoming too large and a redesign led to The Pagoda of Games.

It should be noted that the original hopes for the Board interface was a motion graphics site where the visitor’s mouse would part clouds to reveal a map below. The map would be quite large and have pictorial representations of the games, hidden Easter eggs, etc. Unfortunately, Flash 3 did not have the power to do this and the experiments led to the scope interface for UTOPIA which was then reduced to a custom cursor for visualization reasons.