After studying the Strawberry Thief pattern closely and doing some drawings, I've started to re-create the game digitally.
My idea is to make an extremely simple game that any of the museums visitors can pick up and play. Therefore, the game needs to be easy to understand, easy to control and have very short play sessions. Hopefully this small game will give people an idea of how art can be interpreted into games. Also, it should be simple enough for me to program the prototype myself!
In the game, you play as the bird from the pattern (the strawberry thief) and you have to collect as much ripe strawberries as possible and get the highest score. Rotten strawberries lose points, and spiky thistles damages you and makes you lose health. This early arcade-style game would be perfect for short play sessions in a museum and is hopefully simple enough for non gamers to understand.
I've began recreating the fabric's pattern in PhotoShop, omitting the birds and the strawberries for the games (as they will be separate to the background)
Due to the nature of the original pattern, this game will be very busy, in a visual sense. I've always like the idea of having simple gameplay with visually over the top graphics.
Here is a quick video of the game prototype that I showed at the V&A at Dundee Digital Mash. The poor quality of the screen recording coupled with the prototype graphics kind of makes it look like an Atari game! In this video, you can see that the player can control the 'strawberry thief' and collect the strawberries.