Bollywood Dance Off

INTRODUCTION

In my Game Design Class we were given the task of taking  the Famous Dance "Chaiya Chaiya" in the Bollywood movie "Dil Se" and make it into a party Dancing game. This seemed like a daunting task at first but after watching multiple videos of different Bollywood dance scenes we quickly came up with the idea of Bollywood Dance off. 

DESCRIPTION

Bollywood Dance Off is a territorial acquisition game where dance crew's battle it out to try take over the board.  

RULES FOR BOLLYWOOD DANCE OFF

Players

There are 2 types of players in Bollywood Dance Off (BDO) the first player type is Dance Master the dance master is responsible  for choosing the dance clips, the winners of the dance battles, and sometimes what kind of battle will occur. There has to be at least 1 Dance Master and no more than 3. The second player type is Crew member everyone who is not a dance master is a a crew member all the crew member must split up in to 2 -3 Crew's.

Preparation and Turn phase 

To start each Crew receives a set of colored stickers and a player token. Then the Crew's pick a starting point which are designated with a red dot.The youngest crew goes first followed by the crew on their right. The Crews take turns placing a sticker on one territory at a time until the board is filled

Turn Phase

1.      Move: You can move one territory at a time if you land on a unoccupied territory you must place a marker to claim it

2.       Battle: If you are beside a territory occupied by the opposing crew  you can battle them for it.

Territories

Blue Territory = Dance Master’s Choice

White Territory = Free Style Battle

Green Territory = Solo Battle

Orange Territory = Crew Battle

Battling

A battle occurs when a player or crew challenges another player or crew to a dance off for his/her or their territory. The challenging crew or person goes first in every dance off, the winner of the dance off is decided by the Dance Master. There are 4 types of battles DM’s choice, Free Style, Solo, and Crew.

·         Dance Master’s Choice: This type of battle occurs when you dance off for a Blue Territory the Dance Master gets to select what  the dance off is a free style, solo battle , or crew battle.

·         Free Style Battle:  Occurs when you dance off for a white territory, This is battle can either be a solo or crew battle which is decided by the Dance Master in a free style battle there is no time to prepare each person or crew only gets the chance to watch the dance clip and then they must dance off.

·         Solo Battle: Occurs when you dance off for a green territory each crew selects one dancer to represent them and the dancers selected face off each receiving 30 seconds to prepare a dance after they watched the clip.

·         Crew Battle: Occurs when you dance off for an orange territory. Each crew gets 1 minute after the clip to prepare their dance.

   INSPIRATION 

     When we found out we had to do a party dance game  we sat down and thought about  what makes a good a good dancing game what we came up with is two things that drive dance which are pride and competition when people dance competitively they feel like they are the best or their team is the best so we tried to make so the players feel that same intensity as competitive dancers by competiting against other crews over territories.

         RELATION TO CHAIYA CHAIYA

       Our game relates to chaiya chaiya because we made it so the crew's dance off by try to replicate dance from Bollywood movies which are famous for big elaborate dance scenes. Bollywood is the largest film industry in the world and is in Mumbai India so we made the board the map of India and you dance off across India 

Farmer's Feud!

This final week of GDP we have been given the task of educating board game enthusiasts with the knowledge of locally grown fruits and vegetables in Canada in a fun manner for everyone. This was an interesting task at first glance and as we progressed through the development of the board we came up with a creative way to teach people about this topic while playing a game.

When we first started brainstorming ideas we wanted to focus specifically in Ontario and only popular fruits and vegetables that people commonly eat or see often. The main parts that a player will take away from this is what fruits and vegetables grow in Ontario and when they are in season over the course of the year. We wanted to teach the players specifically where in Ontario these fruits and vegetables grow in Ontario but when it came to the development phase we had a very big imbalance in the board so we had to reconfigure it to be more balanced.

The main concept of the board game is you are a farmer trying to collect fruits and vegetables in Ontario while there are other farmers trying to do the same thing. You battle it out to be the most productive and strategic farmer in all of Ontario. These are the rules and how to play for the game Farmer`s Feud.

RULES/HOW TO PLAY

Game Bits

-board

-four player bits

-d6

-pen and paper for each player

-worth chart

Start Play

-everyone rolls once to see who starts and highest goes first then continues clockwise.

-choose any space on the board to place your player bit for the start of the game.

-gameplay starts in the month of January.

-starting player rolls die to see how far they can move for that turn and moves no more than the number on the die.

-player who starts checks to see which vegetables and fruits are in season and strategically moves across the board collecting as many points as possible for that turn. Each fruit and vegetable is worth a certain number of points based on their availability.

Continue Play

-next player also does the same thing as the first player.

- when other players are on the tile you want, you can contest them for it by covering the chart with all the stats and asking them a question based on that chart. They have 5 seconds to correctly answer the question the contester has made up. If the contested is right then the contester’s turn is over, else, the contester has a choice to steal a fruit or vegetable, or to move the contested to the opposite side of the board and move their bit to the tile the contested was on.

-if the player has successfully contested another player and still has available moves for their turn, they can choose to continue using them if they wish.

Finishing the Game

-if you decided to play a short game, first to 250 wins, medium game = 500 and long games equals 1000 points to win.

-first one to reach the set points wins the game.    

Storytelling in Games

In this weeks development of a board game we have entirely derailed from the actual construction and presentation of a board game to focus on the most memorable part in games, the story. Not only the story, but the story for a specific character within the game. This can either make or break a game from being the best developed game or being that game you dig for at the bottom of your collection to play. Lots of people base the games they choose to buy off of the story advertised. This is why it's so important to fully write out a detailed story from beginning to end for the players who are apart of the main focus of the game.

For the development of my character's story I have it organized in such a structure of an interview with the character I am developing the story for. For this interview I will be directing my questions to a person from France in the year of 1917. Let us begin the interview process!

Hello good sir, what is your name and some basic information about yourself?
Hello! My name is Armand Leveque and I am 23 years old. I am a young French farmer who is a devoted catholic. I am white with brown eyes and brown hair.
Where did you come from?
I came from the town of Strasbourg in France and lived on a farm owned by my family just outside of the town for several generations. I have family from England which I write to so I am fluent in English as well as French.  
Tell me more about your family.
Well, I still live with both of my parents and my three other brothers on the farm. Our father is old so we stay to help him manage the farm. My brothers are all younger and my mother is very young. She is also German which has caused some problems at the dinner table the past couple of years. Many of the people in the community suspect she is a spy since she is only my step mother. She has been in our family since 1914. Our real mother past away from giving birth to my youngest brother. I was only eight years old. My real mother was from England and that was where our family in England came from.
Was that the only difficulty growing up?
Trying to run a farm and a family in these times were very difficult. We had my uncle come from the city to help with the farm until my brothers became old enough to help to support the work on the farm.
How would one stereotype you at a glance?
I always get the stereotypical hard working farmer from my physical built body and the way I'm dressed always shows that I'm a farmer. The odd time I've been said to be a bouncer at the bars because I'm in such good shape. 
Do you have a romantic partner?
Sadly, I am without a significant other. I have no time to find someone with the work from the farm and my enlistment. My father had always told me that no one in this country will ever be someone for you. I always disagreed with that because I'd prefer to be with someone who is also from France. I actually have my eye on this one girl who is often at the market in town when my father sends me to get food we don't grow. 
Who is your best friend?
Since the enlistment I have one best friend who is my wing man Pierre Depaul. I met him three years ago but I feel I have known him my whole life. He told me he is from Marlenheim, just west of where I live. I would describe him as the procedural type, always following prototypical actions laid out for him. My friend would probably describe me as one who does crazy things that no one else would think to do. We balance each other out well. Both of us have the same inspiration. Rene Fonck is the greatest fighter pilot of France.
What is your economic status?
Being a farmer doesn't give you the riches of a king or queen but it provides us with what we need in life. I felt a large sense of pride in my country and I thought that if I enlisted I could provide my father with more money to afford better equipment for the farm. 
Would you steal to make your economic situation easier?
I may do crazy things but I am an honest man. I see lots of people at the market stealing and I think that I could do it too but it shows I'm someone who I'm not. Honesty is a virtue I keep strong in myself. It reflects in how my friends perceive me.
What is the one secret that no one must know about you?
I am confident to say that I am an open book with no secrets to hide. It's my way of keeping my word on being honest.
Are you afraid to die?
Fear of death? Ha! If anyone enlists with a fear of death they are making a huge mistake. Having a fear of death holds one back from their full potential. That's what differs Pierre and I. 
Thank you for your time here. You have a very exciting story!
Thank you for giving me time for your interview.
       

Remixing & Modifying

We had a week off from making board games so this week we're doubling up on our production of games. This week we have been asked to complete the assignment individually rather than working in teams and it seems to be that way for the remainder of the games (other than the final prototype). Huge Pixel Gaming will be missed. Anyways, onto the topic at hand, for this week there were two games that needed to be completed, one is a modified version of Tic-tac-toe and the other is a remixed version of one of the games made in the Game Design and Production class.

The goal for the mod is to create a game that is no longer solely skill based but instead has the element of luck in it. There must also be an attraction for an adult audience. The core element of what makes Tic-tac-toe has to remain in the game. So, having to line up what you play down to win must stay present in the game.

The objective for the remix is to redesign the entire game to be completely based on skill or completely based on luck. So for example, the game Snakes and Ladders is a game solely based on luck since all you do is roll a die and do what the die says. There is no skill involved whatsoever and theoretically could be played alone because of that fact.

Now to discuss the actual matter of the two games! First i will go over Tic-tac-toe and how i decide to add the element of luck into the game completely based on skill and how it becomes entertaining and enjoyable for adults. So I'm not going to go over the general rules of the game since this is a universally known game across the globe but what I shall talk about is the rule set I am deciding to add into the game.

-The first rule is to keep all the generic rules the same such as how play works, the winning condition, the board size of the game.
-The next rule is to now add a d6 or a coin into the mix. What you do with this lucky die or coin you have added to the game is roll or flip it
- and if the result is odd or heads, the side pieces rotate counterclockwise to the next space,
- and if the result is even or tails, the corner pieces rotate clockwise to the next space. Now, you roll or flip every time you finish putting a piece down and move all pieces accordingly.

This makes the game full of chance and luck with very little skill remaining. The way how it does that is it doesn't matter where you place a piece because it will most likely be changed to a new space without your control. You sit there placing pieces down and hope you get lucky. During the play test I have seen players shaking the die in their handing saying, "Pleeeeeasseeeeee don't land on an even!" with so much anticipation because if their piece moves from the blocking of the opponent then the other player has the win. To make this game more appealing to an older audience, the element of the game added was that each piece you play down was a small glass and then at the end of the match the glasses are filled with alcohol and the losing player must drink all the glasses. If it results in a draw then the players must drink the opposing players glasses. This adds mature audience entertainment and creates higher competition between the two players. That is my modified version of Tic-tac-toe to give the game more luck and adult audiences more incentive to play this game.

The next topic is remixing a previous game designed in our class and flipping the games core skill/luck. The game I'm choosing is one of my own games. It's actually my first game which is entirely based on luck. This game is, "Raider's of the King Cobra's Crown". Yes, this old yet amazingly intense game was just a matter of rolling the dice and placing the piece according to the rules. Now, what I'm going to do to this lovely, little, simple game is completely change the dynamic so the game is entirely based on pure skill. The new rules added are:
-Each player is given 4 spaces they can move in total for their turn.
-You don't have to move 4 spaces but you can't move pass 4 per turn.
-Players can now move backwards and forwards
Adding these three small rules change everything for this game. It gives players more freedom to do what they want rather than being stuck in a loop from back luck or being jealous of those who are experiencing good luck in the game. All of the other rules must still be in affect except for rolling a die to see how many moves you make each turn. However, you still need a die for the boulder as the rules for that have not changed. This will cause players to play strategically as they have multiple goals to achieve in order to win such as:
-collect the three items on the board
-be the first one to the end
-not get squished by the boulder
Also with the new ability to plan your move you can cause even more fun with affecting other players since it wasn't off of pure luck that what you did happened to someone but instead entirely your fault. This is because the rule still stands where if you move onto another player's tile they currently occupy you push yourself ahead and them back.
After play testing the game, I found this made the game more entertaining! It really surprised me because I thought that I already had a winning formula to a great game and that any sort of twist would set off a major imbalance and have everything no longer fun and intense as it once was.  

Art Game - Colored

Brandon Drenikow, Justin Challenger, James Kumchy, Anastasios Stamadianos, Chris Kishek

Name: Coloured

Number of Players: 4 players

Length of Play: 15 min

The Starry Night is a painting by Vincent Van Gogh depicting the town of Saint Remy from his view in the asylum he admitted himself to. In the painting a tree in the shape of a shadow flame stands in the foreground with the town in the mid ground and background. The night sky depicts many stars and swirls with a twist on the Ursa Major constellation. Many feelings can be felt from art, things that we felt while looking at the painting were anticipation, distortion, calm, and a sense of surrealism. These feelings were then analyzed in a few games we considered art games and then decided to look at how the games evoked the emotions. We decided to take what caused these emotions and incorporate them into our game.

This was all the design work for our first idea.

Huge Pixel had lots of ideas for what to do for our game. Our original game was that we wanted to have a board made out of four paintings or pictures that you would collect by walking around a board with game bits and a spinner. The goal would be to collect these pieces of the paintings and after everyone has worked together to collect these pieces they would work together some more to put these pictures together to form one big painting. The idea of working together would invoke emotions along with the actual paintings. However, we didn’t feel that this game invoked enough emotions and feelings as well as creativity or imagination so we decided to change it up slightly and make it more simple and abstract. This idea of turning it into something abstract came from the other art games we saw in class. They were very basic and had the player have to think and create an idea for themselves which made more emotions in each player.

 

Starry Night Game Moments

Coloured is an art game which focusses on the feelings you get from colours and piecing them together with other colours to create a puzzle from the inside out. The colours can mean anything to you happy, sad, fear, envy, it doesn’t matter, what matters is that you are building a puzzle out of colours that represent the emotions you get from the colour and that you are building it with other people. You can put love with fear because it’s connected that you wouldn’t want love because you are scared of being hurt. You could be happy and sad at the same time. All the emotions are connected and that is what the game is about, making a puzzle out of feelings and spending time with people while you do it.

When we play tested the game we found that players started playing colors reflecting their current emotion. Even when the players didn’t know what colors went with which emotions, they still played a lot of red and black at the beginning of the game.

The game is fairly open in regards to rules; essentially each person is given 16 tiles each, and simply connects their piece to other player’s pieces. Move the turn clockwise around the group each person placing 1 piece down. The game continues in a circle until all the pieces are placed. 

Liar's Revitalizing Blog

Name: Liar’s Revitalizing Dice

Players: 2+

Duration of play: 10min-1h

This week we had a little different type of board game to make because we didn’t actually make a completely original game. Instead this week we had to make modifications to an already existing game known as Liar’s Dice. This game involves every player having 5 dice and a cup to cover they’re dice. The idea of the game is to be the most deceptive. This is because your goal of the game is to state how many of a certain dice are in play. You don’t have to be honest but if someone thinks you’re lying they can call you out on it.

These are many core mechanics that cause the game to be the game that it is. When we were told to modify the rules to eliminate the positive feedback loop we wanted to make sure that these were still in the game. There were some mods we did make and they successfully eliminated this loop that means there is a time when one player gets an excessive lead making it look impossible for another to catch up. These mods are highlighted in our set of rules below.

Setup:

-          Give each player 5 dice and one cup.

Gameplay

 These rules are taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar%27s_dice#Common_hand, as Liar’s Dice is not a game we made. Not that we took the “spot-on” rule from the “variations” subheading.

1.       Choose a player to bid first.

2.       Each player rolls their dice in their cup, and then peeks to see what they have.

3.       The first player makes a bid on all the dice on the board. This bid is in the form of “X amount of dice showing Y”. Note that they can falsify this bid, thus “bluffing”.

4.       Rotating clockwise, each player must increase the bid so that the total value of the dice exceeds the last bid. That is to say, 4 instances of a dice showing 3 give a total of 12, so the next bid must exceed this.

Continuing Play

1.       At any time, any player can call the current bid to be false. At this point, each player reveals their dice and the bid is verified. If there is the bid’s number of dice on the board or more, the bid is true and the accusing player loses a die. However, if the number of relevant dice on the board is less, than the accuser is correct and the last bidder loses a die.

2.       A player may also call a bid “spot-on”; that is to say, if there is that exact amount of relevant dice on the board, then every player loses a die apart from the accuser.

3.       If all of a player’s dice form a sequence – 1,2,3,4 with 4 dice, for example—then they obtain an additional die at the end of the round. (Justin Challenger, 100454022)

4.       If all of the player’s dice match, then they obtain an additional die at the end of the round. Or, if you have one die left and you roll a 6, then you obtain and additional die at the end of the round. (Brandon Drenikow, 100456599)

5.       The player with the most dice must roll in view of all players the number of dice between them and the player with the next highest amount of dice. (Anastasios Stamadianos 100454700)

6.       If a player loses all their dice, they are out of the game.

7.       The last person with dice wins.

During the development of effective mods that would eliminate the positive feedback loop, we came up with some honorable mentions:

-Instead of having all of the same numbers it was originally all sixes but that was near impossible until you had only one dice left.
-Playing a round blind. This meant to roll your dice and not look at them for the whole round. This wasn’t implemented because we couldn’t think of a good reward for doing that in which it eliminated the positive feedback loop.
-if you are in danger of losing a die, you can choose any one of your dice to hopefully change the previous outcome so the other person loses a die, however, if it's still wrong then you lose two dice. This was an interesting mod but we see how it would affect the positive feedback loop.

The modern Card game from a Retro digital Game

Cardstroids
2-5 players

30 min-1 hour

Happy Thanksgiving! This is our retro game from the Atari system that we made over the thanksgiving break. We had to make a card game from a number of different games made for the Atari system. Our Huge Pixel Gaming group decided to make a card game from the old classic, Asteroids. This game had great mechanics and gameplay which was very addictive for all its players as it ate many quarters back in its’ day. However, this game was only a one player game and that became our first problem we needed to overcome.

What we right away came up with is have attack and defense and have a player be the ship and another player be the asteroid. This gave us a base mechanic and the ability to play with more than just one player. We wanted to give this more though. Design block had a beat for the weekend right up until Monday night when a great idea came out involving a good old game we as kids use to play called ‘007’. This classic hand gesture game was also fast and addicting to play. So we managed to merge the game Asteroids and 007 into a great, fast paced, and addicting card game.

Here’s how it plays out, first a player nominates themselves to be the ship and all the other players are asteroids. The players have three options, charge attack, activate shields, and attack just like in the kids game but with an Asteroids twist. How we incorporated more players is we made all other players asteroids and the ship would get one extra move equivalent to the amount of other players. So simply the game was 1 vs x amount of players. The players will always start off charging their attack because they start with zero attack and from there comes a game of prediction as to what your opponent plays. The ship plays one card for each respective asteroid. The ship has three lives in total so when he gets attacked he loses one life. If he loses all three then the ship player rotates clockwise around the table. Asteroids don’t die so the game becomes a survival game. Whoever survives the most rounds as the ship wins. The point to attacking asteroids is to remove their charge so that player can survive more rounds.

This was the core dynamic and set of mechanics we decided to use as our final. There were other versions where there is a deck and players draw cards to see what their options are. The problems with that was the players would run out of charges and not be able to continue the game. We tried splitting the decks but that showed the other players what your options were and reduced the prediction aspect of the game.