Developing Ideas Further

I need to develop some of the game ideas I posted earlier and think about their themes and stuff. There were a couple in particular that I wanted to explore more before I settled down on one.

Gladiators:

         Theme:

Fight for Your Freedom and Win the Crowd!

                      Build and Adapt your Gladiators!

         Setting:

                  Players play as the leader of a group of Roman Gladiators, slaves that fought for entertainment of the Roman people and for their freedom. Popular from around 1^st century BC to around 3^rd century BC, declining heavily in the 5^th century. Pick a leader from different backgrounds; pick your specialty, and your strategy! Every moment is life or death, people drop like flies and anything can happen in the chaos of the Colosseum! Win the crowd!! Win your freedom!! Win the fight!!

         Art Style:

              Maybe tf2 comic-style, kinda rough lineart. A really fun and light-hearted take on the violent and horrible Colosseum fights.

         Color Scheme:

-       http://paletton.com/#uid=20Z0u0kllll5vu7dqpJtggXKzcz (mostly monochromatic, with complement)

-       http://paletton.com/#uid=7151+0kn2ovhLqPkAp7prnkrdm5 (tetrad)

-       http://paletton.com/#uid=5020Y0k9SwEmTNRkUpes6l+mEfC (adjacent, yellow, red, purple)

         Gameplay Brainstorm:

                  - Pick 2 skills from a large set to have a different experience each time! (Nets, Spear like weapons, swords, shields, magic ???.)

                  - Recruit more gladiators from successful rounds

                  - Random draw cards = gifts from the crowd if they like you

                  - Several quick rounds

                  - New terrain each time to SPICE THINGS UP

Space Travel:

Theme:

                  Be the Fastest, Baddest, Raddest Space Hunter Ever

         Theme Paragraph:

              It is the year 2500, and space travel has just become feasible for the common person. Space has become the new frontier! “Space Cowboys” are now venturing out into the edges of the known universe and discovering new life forms! A bounty has put out to capture these species for research and documentation. The bounty-hunter space cowboys are the reckless, competitive adventurists of the future, searching for both fame and fortune! They will do anything to get to the bounty and, more importantly, before their competitor!

         Art Style:

              -cartoony fun: Space Dandy, Cowboy Bebop, Avatar (creature designs), Eve (space ships).

       Color Scheme:

-       http://paletton.com/#uid=54E0A0kkueFd6nafZi6oFb1tY6U (purples, reds, blues?)

-       http://paletton.com/#uid=34W1h0kjovl9uOVeSEinkrWrcng (fun unusual colors?)

-       http://paletton.com/#uid=73z2d0krBpMhzrXofwCJ-jdX3sR (I really don’t know aaa)

        Gameplay Brainstorm:

-       Players use space-ship tokens as their piece

-       Board is randomly generated by placing hexagonal pieces at random (kind of like settlers of catan)

-       Players try to find the fastest way to the planets, using some kind-of-correct spaceship physics

-       Random Event Cards that are Fun!

-       Players try to get in the way of others, steal bounties from others, etc.      

       

Fantasy Tavern:

       Theme:

                  Competition; be the best mixologist in all the land!

         Setting:

              You and 1-3 of your friends are the new bartenders at a tavern in Oakhorn Valley, a town in the Land of the Seven Lords. You want to be the best of the best at what you do, and that doesn’t withhold you from using some underhanded means. Do whatever you can to prevent your friends from completing their drinks! Only one person can be on top!!

       Art Style:

              Cartoony WoW maybe? LoL and DOTA style things where everything is pretty colorful and out-there.

       Color Scheme:

-       http://paletton.com/#uid=30W0u0kllllaFw0g0qFqFg0w0aF (very magic looking!)

-       http://paletton.com/#uid=35y0u0kpPntgCvfltqVt9jd-Ze0 (more magic looking)

       Gameplay Brainstorm:

-       Draw a card that says what actions you need to do the drink are

-       Have to memorize it, have a time-limit to complete the actions, have some gameplay changes like “close your eyes” or “only one arm” or something, also everybody else is trying to stop you

-       Player with most points gets some kind of badge/crown/mark of victory

-       Card directions get more and more complicated as the game goes on

Board Game Brain Storm

We're starting up our actual board game project now, so we had to storm up a large number of ideas really fast and see what sticks. Here are some of the ones I've come up with, some more developed than others. I've broken them down into three categories: Mechanics, Story, and Aesthetics. This is so that the different ideas could be matched up together to form a more complete idea! Such as a mechanic and a story coming together, or a mechanic and aesthetic.


1. (Mechanic) Darkness and Light, place down pieces of either one and try to hold as much territory as possible.
The pieces would have different characteristics, such as:

• dark tiles will bridge with other dark tiles
• light will convert some adjacent tiles
• dark tiles may cast a shadow of some length
• and other cool ideas

2. (Mechanic) A racing game on a circular track, where players are going opposite directions, racing to meet the other person. Not sure how players would move yet.

3. (Story) Opposing gladiator or gladiator teams fight for victory

• different attack types?
• gathering items/an inventory?
• winning the support of the crowd?

4. (Story) Outlaw and Sheriff

• The outlaw tries to escape (while committing other evil deeds?) by expanding the map and outpacing the sheriff
• Sheriff tries to capture outlaw by blocking him off with obstacles, riding on a horse, hiring mercenaries, not sure

5. (Story) Catch the Goat

• A runaway goat runs around the board constantly, bouncing off the edges of the space, going crazy
• Players try to capture the goat by maneuvering themselves so that they land on top of his space
• More than one goat?

6. (Mechanic) City-building

• Players build cities simultaneously, try to build the "Best City"
• Trading, armies, banking, spying, simplified into 20 minute system
• Different ideologies give different benefits?

7. (Story/Aesthetic) Form the Best Bike Gang

• Most Bikers
• Most intimidating
• Most loved
• Most territory
• Cards? Board game? Tile placing?

8. (Mechanic) Divide Up Space

• Randomly generated space with different amount of "points in it"
• Players divide the space up 3 times
• After this, when players divide the space, they claim one half of it, other is split between players?
• Different types of "points"

9. (Mechanic) Gain public appeal. Somehow.

• Washed-out celebrities
• Politicians
• Rival Music Bands

10. (Aesthetic/Story) Bird migration!

• Attack ENEMY BIRDS

11. (Aesthetic/Story) Space Travel recently invented, travel through space finding and documenting NEW ALIEN SPECIES

• find fastest way to new planets (perhaps research space travel/gravity effects etc. to determine gameplay)
• avoid obstacles like asteroids, other players, space pirates
• randomly generated map with different planet placement and obstacle placement each time
• cute character cards

12. (Mechanic) Tower War type game

• Strategize between building defenses, building army, building mines
• Simple enough to play in 20 minutes, or multiple rounds under 20 minutes
• Players build maze defenses? Make navigating to base hard?

13. (Story) Tunneling Ferrets

• Build really deep to avoid something. Maybe lava is falling into the tunnel so you have to go keep digging.
• Mess up opponents by collapsing their tunnel somehow
• Marker that denotes where lava/predators/plague is (where players have to stay beyond)

14. (Aesthetic) Fantasy tavern, probably plays like Tapper

15. (Story) Disease Spreading

• Everyone is a disease, compete to be dominant disease?
• One person is a disease, everyone tries to find out who it is?
• One person is infected, tries to infect others, who then also try to infect others? (Like that "Get to the chopper!' game, but captured people also start chasing)

16. (Aesthetic) PUNKS

17. (Mechanic) Memory game

• There's always card flipping
• Remembering some kind of order ... 

18. (Mechanic) War/battle game where the pieces have a Rock-Paper-Scissors relationship to each other

• Will there be a strategy? Or would it just be random?
• There would have to be nested mechanics to make it more interesting

19. (Story) Road-trip, have the best road trip

• Longest road trip
• See the most shows/monuments
• Other goals that would add points to your "best road trip" claim
• Card Drawn random events
• Different map options

20. (Aesthetic) Underwater CAVES

(I will add some pictures to this blog post soon)

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.