We went to Emerson’s place with a cardboard suitcase, a pegboard, and several wooden platform-building pieces and simple machine miniatures. We made prototypes of his favorite characters with found materials from TLTL. Magnets are essential to our design as it created a magical playing experience. It allowed Emerson to control his favorite characters and bubbles as if they were automatically moving.

Once Emerson saw the materials we brought, he knew exactly what to do with them. He had a lot of interesting ideas on the scrap pieces that we found from the laser-cut recycle bin. “This can be a cage, like a prison” or “This piece can be like a hammer that falls from the sky.”

 

He thought of more items to add in the game and gave us his list.