Ace Casino
Ace Casino was a murder mystery performance-based game designed and executed by a team of over 20 UChicago Game Design students. For this project, I was on the set design team tasked with turning an ordinary school classroom into a dark noir casino!
Starting Out
For the project we were allowed a single classroom to host the event, as a result, we had to make the most of our small space. To begin, me and another member studied the room surveying the space and taking numerous images from different angles with various lighting. From here, I also created numerous moodboards of various aesthetics we could go into for the casino and pitched this to the producers, I presented this information utilizing Miro to the rest of the set design team.
Finalizing the Set
After we settled on an overall aesthetic for the casino I drew up multiple possible floor plans on how we could rearrange the furniture in the space to better use the space for all the details we needed which included three casino games, a bar, and ample lounging space. Our room had a very long table that would be impossible to move, so I chose to work around this large table and utilize it for the majority of the casino games decorating them and placing the dealers on one side so the table did not seem out of place. I largely made do with all of the furniture already within the space and instead just rearranged the placement of things to better suit our needs. Through the use of mood lighting, numerous props, and clever furniture placement we were able to successfully turn a classroom into a casino.
Top: Initial base Layout of room as we first got it
Bottom: My finalized floorplan for the casino
Final Result
The final result of our set design can be seen in the game’s video documenting how the overall game went from start to finish!