A Good Print-and-Play

 Hello, Dolly! - Deconstruction

Trent showed me the game "Hello, Dolly!" last class. "Hello, Dolly!" is a game about a sheep herder, although that may be hard to tell from the picture above. This game is one of the more abstract ones, but I tend to enjoy those more. Less set-up and rules, more deep gritty gameplay and strategizing! Not to mention significantly less cutting out of charts and pieces.

Anyway, the goal of the game is to get five sheep of your color off the board. The way to get the sheep off of the board is to surround the sheperd on three vertices with sheep. This is a little confusing until you know how the pieces all move. The white and black dice are the different color sheep, and the red die is the sheperd. We only used dice because that was what was available, but almost anything would work! As long as you can differentiate the pieces. For example, chess pawns and a bishop or some other piece would work well for this game, too.

The only operative action is this: Players move the sheep along the line until they hit another sheep, or the end of the board. A sheep can not be blocked off from moving in this way, however. The sheperd is then moved a number of spaces according to how far the sheep traveled. If the sheep traveled 5 vertices, the sheperd is moved 5 spaces. The sheperd is restricted to one-dimensional circular movement around the second hexagonal ring from the center (around the outskirts of the grey hexagon in the center). 

The resultant actions are the important things; a triangle of sheep is formed; a sheperd is landed in a triangle of sheep, resulting in the sheep being removed from play; a possible game-winning triangle is disbanded; one of a sheep's movement channels is blocked, limiting its movement opportunities, and thus, the sheperd's movement opportunities; and more, as you get deeper into the game.

The game takes place on a pointy star shape made up of a series of triangles. The sheep stay on the vertices, and the sheperd resides on the face of the triangle. The space is discrete, as the placement only matters vertex to vertex and face to face, two-dimensional (for the sheep) and one-dimensional (for the sheperd), and continuous. 

Besides this, the game is pretty simple. There isn't a lot of variance in the states and attributes of the objects, just where the sheep can go and if they are making a triangle or not. There isn't any sense of chance in this game. Everything can be pre-decided, there are no rolls (except maybe for who goes first). Despite the simplicity of the game (there is only 1 operative action), there is a lot of opportunity for strategy. Players must keep track of not only their own sheep, but also their opponent's sheep, and think about sabotaging their sheep triangles by perhaps cutting them off, or trying to speed past their triangle. 

Overall, this was a very fun game! I want to play it more, and I got a lot of inspiration from it. A very cute, easy to set-up, fun abstract game about sheep herding.

Print and Play Games

In preparation for our next project, we all got together and printed out a bunch of print-and-play games and played them. We had a lot of fun playing all these random games together and trying to figure out how they all work. 

Game 1: Farrapos
Here Leslie and I got together to play this Brazilian strategy war game about territory control. There was a minor struggle cutting out all of the pieces representing the soldiers (and stapling the two sides together because we didn't have any glue), but overall the set-up was not too bad. Just a lot of cutting.
I really admired the map and the art, though, it was very nice looking and well put together. As for the game mechanics, they were very complex. On a movement basis, the game was simple, but the battles were very convoluted. Each individual battle would take just a lot of arithmetic and chart reading, and that was all the game was made up of. It was a complicated system for a basic game, because boiled down, it was really just Risk set in Brazil. If the battles were faster, it could be a cool game about controlling territory. Oh, well.

Game 2: Boxing (I don't have the link to this game, but I'll update if I find it)

Jamisha and I played this fun boxing card game that Randy had printed out. The game seemed easy to put together, just cutting out some cards. The graphics were a little simplistic, but it worked well for what it was. The only important thing on the card was what it was. You would put down different attack or defense cards at the same time and calculate the damage done, and repeat it until someone's stamina reached 0. There was a little more to it, but basically that's how it worked.

It was a fun and fast game, and I'm sure there was a strategy to it that I didn't really get, because I lost twice!

Game 3: Get to the Choppa!

This was the last game I played, a multiplayer game with 4 people racing to the chopper against the deadly Predator. If one of us got to the chopper, even if the rest of us had died, the soldiers won. If we all died, the Predator would have won, obviously. It was fun and playable, but it seemed a little bit too simple (even if the instructions seemed to go out of their way to be complicated). There probably should have been another level of conflict or obstacle preventing the players from their destination, like cliffs or rocks or something, I'm not sure. Definitely playable in 20 minutes after you've figured out the rules! That takes some doing, though. 

Overall I had a lot of fun. I do think it requires some digging, but there must be some true hidden gems amongst all these hundreds of games.

Editing in Premier

Our recent class assignment has me really excited about editing. I've never really edited any videos together before, so when we got the assignment to put together a trailer for Assassin's Creed, I was really excited! I think I did well, and I kind of want to do more editing. Premiere was fun.

Concept Pitch

A week ago we had to propose a level idea for our "Computer Animation for Games" class (which is a bit of a misnomer but no one really minds). As a class we're going to be spending the next two months or so creating the assets for a level, including modular buildings and props and environmental pieces and things. We all had to submit our own ideas and everyone would have a vote.

My pitch (in brief) was for a Venetian style city that was in a great drought and was on the brink of a civil war. I wonder if my concept art would have benefited from some photobashing or a different color scheme.  I was excited about old Italian buildings and bridges and floating gondolas and cannons, but my idea didn't get picked. Now that I know more about modular building and Maya, and the idea we are currently working on doesn't seem to involve intensive modeling, I might try and play around with it still.