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.
Monday, 29 October 2012
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.
Tuesday, 16 October 2012
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.
Tuesday, 9 October 2012
The modern Card game from a Retro digital Game
Cardstroids
2-5 players
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.
Tuesday, 2 October 2012
The powder keg is about to blow!
Out comes another great board game from this crazy machine we call Justin, Tassos and I. Continuing to pump out board games every week, this week's board game does deliver more exciting and intense strategy that you have been seeing throughout the previous boards. With this new board we had to use the core dynamic of collection. With collection as a core dynamic, making a game solely based on collection is difficult to make fun without some other dynamics involved to spice up the game play.During our brainstorming session over skype during the weekend, many ideas were thrown around on what we were collecting and how we would collect them. Another big question we had to ask ourselves is how are the players going to interact. The biggest problem we faced in the whole process of developing this board and ended up being the final adjustment to the game was making it challenging for the players. We found that the players had it too easy and that they could finish the game rather quickly with little player interaction.
After all this we finally had an idea down on how the game was going to work out. The initial idea was to have a hex grid that players move around on and then we have these pickups that you collect and then you must eliminate your opponents being the last man standing. We had collecting involved but realized that it isn't the core dynamic but instead it was destruction. So later on we made the objective be to have collected a certain amount of these pickups to win. We came along a bunch of ideas for what these pick ups would be, speed boosts, steals, armor, damage, ranged, etc. which slowly worked out to only be attack, defense, and speed. For a long time we tried to implement a ranged attack but we found that it really put the game off. So we removed it and found there was an imbalance now having three pickups and four players. Then a brilliant idea came out of left field that was to not have different pick ups but the same pickup spread across the board and then the player can choose what they want it to be for the three.This added a whole new level of strategy!
 |
| This was the second last design of the board before there were less crystals in the game. |
Once we had finished polishing up all our ideas we made a small version and play tested it having an open board with 37 crystals on the board and a d6 for the dice. The match ended in 5 turns. We looked at the problems and realized that there were way too many crystals and it made players have no need to interact. The solution to that problem was simple, to reduce the amount of crystals so the players have to fight each other more to collect all 10 crystals they need. We also changed the dice to a d4. The number of crystals was then reduced to 24 and game play was not only longer, but way more strategic and intensely fun. This was game set and match for the mechanics in place for the game.
 |
| A smaller version of the game used to play test new mechanics. |
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