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/