Game Design week 14 homework
P-1:
The video game I will create a board game prototype fire emblem. The level I will be prototyping is the first level of the sacred stones. The prototype will recreate the battle as it is played in the actual game.
For this prototype the player must have 3 items to represent 2 bandits and a leader, and 2 items one to represent Erika and one to resent Seth. The player must also have two ten sided dice or a hundred sided die and some way of recording the hp of each of the 5 combatants.
Below is the map used for this game. light green represents open, dark green represents forest, while brown represents mountains and blue water. Blue circles represent set up points for the player, red circles represent set up points for the bandits. Place Erika on the lower blue circle and Seth on the higher blue circle. Place a bandit on each the forest and the red circle beside the forest. Place the bandit leader on the isolated red circle. Erika starts with 16 hp, Seth starts with 13 hp, the bandit lord starts with 24hp the bandits start with 22 hp.
The player and the AI take turns acting, in a turn a player can:
Move Erika and Seth:
Erika moves 5 squares over open terrain or forest, but each forest square costs 2 movement. Seth moves 8 squares and must also pay 2 to move over forest.
Attack with Erika and Seth:
If Erika and or Seth end up beside bandits they may attack. Use the chart below to determine their hit chance and damage:
Hit Chance Bandit Bandit Lord
Erika 100 100
Seth 100 100
Damage Bandit Bandit Lord
Erika 7 x2 10
Seth 18 x2 21 x2
If the bandit is in a forest tile, reduce the player’s hit chance by 5 and damage by 1. To determine if the player hits, roll the percentile dice (two ten sided dice, one representing the “tens” one representing the “ones”), if the roll is below or equal to the hit chance, the attack hits, reduce the bandit’s hp by the damage. If the bandit’s hp drops below 0 remove it. If the bandit is not dead after the attack (no matter if it hits or misses), he will attack back with a hit chance and damage as shown below, if this reduces the player below 0hp the player is removed. If the player has damage x2 they can attack again after the bandit, presuming they are still alive.
After the player is done moving and attacking the bandits move and attack according the following rules.
Bandits move 5 squares, paying double for forest. Bandits will always move towards the Erika or Seth, whichever is closer. If a bandit can move to a forest and attack Erika or Seth they will. The bandit leader will not move unless both bandits are dead.
Bandits attack the same way as Erika or Seth, using the hit chance and damage shown below. After a bandit attacks the player has a chance to attack back if he is still alive.
Hit Chance Erika Seth
Bandit 39 25
Bandit Lord 47 33
Damage Erika Seth
Bandit 9 2
Bandit Lord 10 2
The game ends when either Erika or the Bandit Lord is slain. If Erika is killed the player loses, if the bandit lord is slain the player wins.
P-2:
Game Development CCG
The premise behind this game is to create and control your own team of game developers and win as many contests with it as possible. Each player starts with their own customizable deck consisting of game developers, contests and special cards.
Game developer cards will display a name and the abilities of the developer rated A class to C class. For example: Paul, Programmer class A, Storyline design class B, Social skills class C. While a game developer card can have up to 3 skills, every developer possesses social skills to some extent. Other developer skills include: Graphics artist, Sound artist, Marketing skill and Researcher.
Contest cards are the goal of the game, Each contest card will specify requirements to win it and a fame value. Here are a couple examples of contest cards. Life Love game design contest, requires 1 Graphics artist class A, 1 sound artist class A, B or C, 1 programmer class A, B or C, 1 Marketer class A or B, 1 social class A, 2 social class A or B, Gives 1 fame. Each developer may contribute multiple skills to a contest, for example a developer with Social class B, Sound artist class B and Marketer class B could be the sound artist, marketer and one of the social developers for this contest. Game fair: this contest gives 2 fame to the player with the highest total social skill when this card is flipped. For purposes of this card A class counts as 4 social skill, B class counts as 2 and C class counts as 1.
Special cards grant a player a onetime effect that either helps them complete contests or prevents the other player from doing so. H1N1: any programmer from a different player goes into quarantine, remove it from the game. and Stroke of genius: all programmers, marketers, graphic artists, sound artists, and storyline design artists count as class A for one contest. Once a special card is used it is removed from the game.
Game play:
To start the game both players draw 5 cards from their deck, the first player does not pick up a card on his first turn. Turns then commence as follows:
Step 1: draw card. One card is drawn from a player’s deck face up, if it is a contest it is placed in the middle of the table until one player wins it. If it is a developer or special card it is added to the player’s hand. If a player cannot draw a card due to him running out of deck, he loses.
Step 2: play cards. A player now plays any cards from his hand. If a player plays a developer and he already has 4 developers on his team he must replace one of them. If a player plays a contest card it is placed in the middle of the table until someone wins it.
Step 3: complete contests. If a player meets the requirements for any of the contest cards on the table, he may complete them and earn the fame described on the card. When a player reaches 10 fame he wins.
Deck building guidelines: A deck must consist of 30 to 40 cards, with a maximum of 1 copy of each programmer and a maximum of 10 special cards, of which no more than 3 copies of any card can be used.
P-5:
UOIT life 101
This board game was designed to simulate life as a UOIT student. The point of the game is to go to as many classes as possible, while fitting in as much social time as possible. To qualify to get to the next class, a student must first eat, sleep and do homework. To play this game you must have a six sided die, a deck of cards, a small object to represent each player, the game board and some way of recording how much social time, eat sleep and homework each player has.
The game board:
All players start at class, players take turns in a clockwise order. On a player’s turn they roll a die and may move that number of squares, however if a player lands on a big square, he automatically ends his movement. Players may move diagonally, but must follow the 1way arrows as shown on the game board.
When a player lands on the homework square, he has completed his homework, a player must complete their homework before going to class.
When a player lands on the eat square, he has eaten, a player must eat before going to class.
When a player lands on the sleep square he misses his next turn, but has slept. A player must sleep before going to class.
When a player lands on the transit square he draws 4 cards, these allow him to chose to move a number of squares instead of rolling on a future turn as detailed below: diamonds allow a player to move 1 or 2 instead of rolling, player’s choice, clubs allows the player to move 3 or 4 without rolling, hearts allows the player to move 5 or 6, spades 7 or 8.
Squares marked S represents some social time the player has fit in, increase their social score by 1 for each square marked s they land on.
Class is the start and end point of the game, if a player lands on the class square and has done his homework, eaten and slept he gains 3 social score and must eat, sleep and do his homework again before going to class a second time. The second time a player lands on the class square and meets the requirements, he gains 4 social score and the game immediately ends. At this point the player with the highest social score wins the game.
Part 2
Passage is a 2d game that avoids using words while describing the life of a man. Despite the simple 2d graphics, and controls only for movement, not even allowing the player to jump, or even switch place with a character that they can pick up on their journey, the game hides many deeper meanings. If a player chooses to he can walk from left to right, meet the love of his life grow old and eventually die. However even this has more meaning then it first appears. While the player moves forward farther than he has progressed yet he gains score, to represent the value of living life in general.
When the character is young the right side of the screen is hazy, this represents how at the beginning of your life you don’t know what is in store for you. As you progress through life this haziness shrinks and eventually disappears, representing growing insight into the future as you progress through life however once you reach about the halfway point in your life the past begins to be hazy too showing that you’re forgetting things that you once knew. As you walk through life you not only progress from left to right on the background representing the world, you also progress through the screen representing your life. This gives the player an idea of when they will die because it’s pretty near to the opposite side of the screen, but since the actual point is just inside the boundary it is hard to tell exactly when death will occur. This is because people do not know exactly when their life will end.
If a player decides not to walk the beaten path (go across the top), they can make their life more complicated by going downwards where they encounter many obstacles, but also can find treasure chests. As a player goes deeper they encounter more obstacles but also more treasure chests, this represents choosing a more difficult path in life offering greater reward. While most of the treasure chests are genuine shown by a blue shine when it opens and a large increase of score, some of them are empty representing sudden negative surprises that can happen when someone chooses the riskier path in life.
If a player goes down instead of across the top they have an option not to meet the love of their life and walk their own road. This allows them to work their way around more obstacles in the riskier life style, but is thoroughly unrewarding on the top path. If they chose to meet the love of their life the player must work with her around obstacles and can never leave her alone. She can prevent him from getting by some places and sometimes can stand between him and opening a treasure chest. However as long as he has her the player’s score for progressing through life is doubled. Rewards for chests are the same for single as married however.
Saturday, April 17, 2010
Friday, March 5, 2010
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Homework excersises
Unreal Tournament for the elderly
There are a number of changes that would have to be made for unreal tournament that could improve the experience for players age 85+. First off, elderly players often have problems with their senses (sight and hearing especially). To adjust for this, unreal tournament could increase the font size of all its typing, make sounds louder and more prominent and make its colour palate more vivid to give people with poor eyesight more of a fighting chance in the game. An auto-targeting feature could also be implemented, for those elderly which still have trouble seeing. Since elderly often like to listen to the news and classical music, allowing the player to have the radio playing in the background would be a welcome feature.
Pac-1
The two games I chose were Citadels, a card based game by Bruno Faidutti and Cathedral a board game by Robert P. Moore. Both these games detail the construction of a medieval city in completely different ways. I will be talking about how to adapt citadels to a computer game. Citadels is a multiplayer game best with 5 to 8 people in which the game play is based around one of 8 or 9 roles that the players will chose at the beginning of each turn (there are optional roles that can be substituted for these or increase it to 9 role cards). These roles range from the assassin, a player who can choose another player to lose their turn, but doesn’t always hit who they wanted to, to the king, a player who can gather taxes from their own city and gets first choice in roles next turn.
The role selection mechanism is interesting and different from digital games. To select a role, first the cards are shuffled and a number of roles are discarded so that there will be one more role then players to draw the roles, these discards are all face up except one. The king then picks his role and passes the rest of the cards to the left, that player picks his and passes the cards on etc. The last player will have a choice of 2 roles, picks one and discards the last role face down. This system lets every player have a good guess at what each other player chose for their role when they were picking their own role, but they never know for sure what was picked by each player. Guessing which role the others took is very important to game play as many role cards must announce another role to attack before they get to see which role each person took. This would be hard to implement in a real time computer game, but could be implemented by periodically allowing the players to chose a role from whichever roles are left (every game week), which displays the order people chose their roles and all face-up discards. This would have a fairly steep learning curve for a digital game, but could be explained in a tutorial. Pausing the game while players select their role would allow them to give it sufficient thought.
The actual building of the city is fairly strait forward, each turn a player can take money or building cards, then spend their money building a building (if they can and want to). Each building card has a cost written on it. Some buildings have special abilities while others provide income with specific roles. Once a player has 8 buildings the game is over and whoever has the city that costs the most wins (with a couple bonuses for such things as having a full 8 buildings). This can be easily implemented into a computer game, as it would be well represented by a standard real time strategy.
Cathedral is a 2 player game with a very different feel. In this game, each player has a set of buildings identical to the other, and they take turns placing these buildings into a chess-like board. The player who can place the most buildings being the winner. The primary mechanic in this game is that if you surround an area with your buildings and the edge of the board, you claim that area and the other player cannot play in it. This turns the game into a vicious game of trying to balance claiming territory and preventing the other player from doing so.
Pac-2
Richard H. Berg is a board game designer with over a hundred titles behind him. He took university courses in history and law, which later show up as influencing many of his games. His games tend to be complex and recreate historical scenarios, often with quite a bit of research behind each game.
He started designing board games in 1975, one of his earliest titles Terrible Swift Sword: The Three Days of Gettysburg (TSS) released in 1976. This was a massive game for 2 to 12 players, consisting of two thousand counters and took an estimated 50 hours to play the entire game, although it had various shorter scenarios that would be faster and smaller. An example of a later game by him is medieval published in 2003, a relatively simple game playable in two hours for 3-5 players. He mentioned that euro games, like all popular game trends, influenced his design, and this is a good example of him making a shorter, simpler game with non-standard game mechanics, the hallmark of the euro game movement.
In Richard’s later years he joined the online community to communicate with play testers, game distribution and feedback from the actual players. Although this provided him with extra resources, it appears that is hasn’t changed his outlook on how he views board games very much.
References (for Richard Burg):
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgamedesigner/135/richard-h-berg
http://www.thedicetower.com/interviews/int042.htm
http://www.wargameacademy.org/TSS/
There are a number of changes that would have to be made for unreal tournament that could improve the experience for players age 85+. First off, elderly players often have problems with their senses (sight and hearing especially). To adjust for this, unreal tournament could increase the font size of all its typing, make sounds louder and more prominent and make its colour palate more vivid to give people with poor eyesight more of a fighting chance in the game. An auto-targeting feature could also be implemented, for those elderly which still have trouble seeing. Since elderly often like to listen to the news and classical music, allowing the player to have the radio playing in the background would be a welcome feature.
Pac-1
The two games I chose were Citadels, a card based game by Bruno Faidutti and Cathedral a board game by Robert P. Moore. Both these games detail the construction of a medieval city in completely different ways. I will be talking about how to adapt citadels to a computer game. Citadels is a multiplayer game best with 5 to 8 people in which the game play is based around one of 8 or 9 roles that the players will chose at the beginning of each turn (there are optional roles that can be substituted for these or increase it to 9 role cards). These roles range from the assassin, a player who can choose another player to lose their turn, but doesn’t always hit who they wanted to, to the king, a player who can gather taxes from their own city and gets first choice in roles next turn.
The role selection mechanism is interesting and different from digital games. To select a role, first the cards are shuffled and a number of roles are discarded so that there will be one more role then players to draw the roles, these discards are all face up except one. The king then picks his role and passes the rest of the cards to the left, that player picks his and passes the cards on etc. The last player will have a choice of 2 roles, picks one and discards the last role face down. This system lets every player have a good guess at what each other player chose for their role when they were picking their own role, but they never know for sure what was picked by each player. Guessing which role the others took is very important to game play as many role cards must announce another role to attack before they get to see which role each person took. This would be hard to implement in a real time computer game, but could be implemented by periodically allowing the players to chose a role from whichever roles are left (every game week), which displays the order people chose their roles and all face-up discards. This would have a fairly steep learning curve for a digital game, but could be explained in a tutorial. Pausing the game while players select their role would allow them to give it sufficient thought.
The actual building of the city is fairly strait forward, each turn a player can take money or building cards, then spend their money building a building (if they can and want to). Each building card has a cost written on it. Some buildings have special abilities while others provide income with specific roles. Once a player has 8 buildings the game is over and whoever has the city that costs the most wins (with a couple bonuses for such things as having a full 8 buildings). This can be easily implemented into a computer game, as it would be well represented by a standard real time strategy.
Cathedral is a 2 player game with a very different feel. In this game, each player has a set of buildings identical to the other, and they take turns placing these buildings into a chess-like board. The player who can place the most buildings being the winner. The primary mechanic in this game is that if you surround an area with your buildings and the edge of the board, you claim that area and the other player cannot play in it. This turns the game into a vicious game of trying to balance claiming territory and preventing the other player from doing so.
Pac-2
Richard H. Berg is a board game designer with over a hundred titles behind him. He took university courses in history and law, which later show up as influencing many of his games. His games tend to be complex and recreate historical scenarios, often with quite a bit of research behind each game.
He started designing board games in 1975, one of his earliest titles Terrible Swift Sword: The Three Days of Gettysburg (TSS) released in 1976. This was a massive game for 2 to 12 players, consisting of two thousand counters and took an estimated 50 hours to play the entire game, although it had various shorter scenarios that would be faster and smaller. An example of a later game by him is medieval published in 2003, a relatively simple game playable in two hours for 3-5 players. He mentioned that euro games, like all popular game trends, influenced his design, and this is a good example of him making a shorter, simpler game with non-standard game mechanics, the hallmark of the euro game movement.
In Richard’s later years he joined the online community to communicate with play testers, game distribution and feedback from the actual players. Although this provided him with extra resources, it appears that is hasn’t changed his outlook on how he views board games very much.
References (for Richard Burg):
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgamedesigner/135/richard-h-berg
http://www.thedicetower.com/interviews/int042.htm
http://www.wargameacademy.org/TSS/
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
