Dino Fighter

We had a small game jam in class for two hours, we were tasked with coming up with a concept (Dinosaurs arcade combat game) and create it in two hours. With the help of our talented tutor and his coding skills, we went about building a simple game from scratch. We divided the tasks amongst ourselves such as background artists, character artists, UI designers etc.

It was a very interesting process, working as a team quickly and effectively, trying to fill your role as best as possible within the team. It was also interesting the overall process of the game jam, whilst we had hundreds of cool ideas, we simply didn't have the time to implement them all, so we had to go through the process of cutting the game down to its simplest form, which was a fighting game with a backdrop and basic overlays.

I was tasked with creating the scenes between gameplay. 

I also decided to do a title screen and winner screen.  I was very pleased with the results, a mix of dinosaurs and street fighter, I think I got the feel of the game included in the design. The whole process was a unique experience, whilst stressful it was very fun and the final outcome was great!

Video -> Board Game

I have been tasked with 'converting' my favourite video game into a playable board game for my next project. I think the basic themes and mechanics of the game need to be closely carried over to keep the essence of the game in tact.

I am going to create a board game based around Halo 4 as it is the new release in my favourite game series. There is already a Halo Wars: Risk board game based on land capture that I am obviously going to avoid doing something similar as not to do a direct copy.

The game is a First Person Shooter, and has a wide variety of weapons and vehicles so I am definately going to incorporate them in some way. My initial thoughts is something top trumps inspired with different damage stats etc.

Da bomb

My most recent assignment is to create a number of puzzles based on the theme 'Da Bomb' .. Basically it must involve a timer, and a bomb of some kind to follow the theme correctly.

I started brainstorming a few ideas based around the idea of bomb defusal and working out a way to apply the concept to a paper based puzzle game. The first idea I came up with was a riddle / cryptic puzzle where a bomb with a series of wires of different length and colour attached; something similar to a hostage note. The cryptic puzzle would lead the player to cut the correct wire to defuse the bomb in X amount of time. I came up with riddles and drew out a basic concept of the game.

I then came up with a jigsaw puzzle style bomb game that at first had different parts of a bomb that the player would have to build in the time limit, but then I changed the concept completely and added a second layer of puzzles with a spot the difference challenge. The spot the difference would have a number of suspects and the player must find who the terrorist with the bomb is. So the puzzle would have two stages; jigsaw solving and spot the difference.

The idea I finally chose was a mathematic based puzzle, with a number of different coloured wires connected to a bomb. The bomb has a defusal device next to it with a three digit code. The wires have a starting value and the split off into various paths which pass through a number of boxes that contain mathematics such as '+2' or '-3'.

The player has to follow the wires and  work out the equation to see if it matches up with one of the digits from the device and then choose that as the wire to cut. A match from each colour wire must be found to solve the puzzle in the time limit.

Pirateer!

I finally decided on a name, a play on the word privateer

I felt that it had some relation to my game idea and theme, plus it sounds cool! I also wrote the game rules in a clear list, enjoy!

What's Mine is Yours

My second assignment in my game design class is to create a game of any kind within reason (card/board etc). Similar to the first one I created based on going from A to B, this game must also follow a theme.

The theme being 'What's mine is yours'

This is quite a broad and general central theme, as it could relate to scoring, counters, economy, or even gameplay. I chose to dive in with board games as I have already done one and I felt more confident in coming up with something that I could design on a visual board. Straight away I had the idea in my head that rather than having something along the lines of Monopoly where players fight for money and that would be fitting for the theme, I decided to go for the opposite of stealing... sharing.

I based my entire idea around the idea, and eventually decided that the sharing aspect would be the counter, there would be only ONE regardless of the number of players.

Once I had this idea in my head I came up with a few different game ideas such as a race to a point and be first to point X. But I couldn't think of something that would work with only one moving piece. Then I thought about a territory based game. Players would have to strategically move around a board to 'capture' territories and an end goal would eventually be reached.

This is what I came up with: 

Blue: Territory       Yellow: Chance     Red: Playable Space     Purple: Start

The basic rules to start with were: a regular D6 die, a single counter, and all four territories must be "captured". During playtesting I noticed the game was quite slow and players were getting bored, so I made some modifications to the board and the gameplay, I added more territories, I added some extra connections between the levels on the board, and I added teleporters, all by simply taping down coloured in squares on the fly to save time. I also updated my chance cards so there was a wider range of possible cards.

After the end of the day playtesting I had modified rules and a board that looked like this:

One of the common bits of feedback I got from play testing was an unclear understanding of the board, the fact that there was nothing differentiating the different blocks easily besides colours which can be forgotten for a second or two, I decided the board needed a bit more of a theme behind it. Something that would look less plain and allow players to instantly think "right thats a territory I want to go there" rather than thinking "is that a chance card? I can't remember"

So I made an excel document with different theme ideas, listing what each square could be to follow the theme

From this I had a clearer understanding of what possible themes I could try, it allowed me to easily plan out what the theme would look like and include. I decided to try Space as the first theme and this is what I created:

I then tried the pirate theme, I thought it would be pretty cool playing a board game as a pirate capturing desert islands

This is what I setlled on, it had the coolest backstory, it made the most sense gameplay wise, and it was visually clear! I haven't decided on a name yet though!

Core Mechanic

I found this article quite helpful when trying to better understand game mechanics and break down my two games for my essay

http://www.funstormgames.com/blog/2012/06/designing-around-a-core-mechanic/

It has nice visual diagrams which really easily explain the types of game mechanics there are and how they are layered onto each other!

Going from A to B

Today was really interesting, we had to come up with and design a game in 20 minutes as a pair, with the basic theme of "Going from A to B" it could be anything physical we could make such as card/board games.

After coming up with an initial idea (a board game with a single die) we play tested the game to see if it worked and came up with some basic rules, it was really difficult coming up with something and then defining rules within the allocated time but this is what we had at that point:

(Apologies for the camera picture - no scanner)

So the basic idea was this: players need to get from the edges (point A) to the center (point B) and had to do this by moving left or right to a different dot (door) to the one they started on.. it's a little confusing to explain!

After playing with other people who gave us feedback, we iterated on our initial design, adding dueling when two players encountered each other, redesigning the board for easier play and adding directional arrows (even rolls move right, odd move left) , we also added colours to each "base" to make it easier to recall where you started.

The final thing we added were things on the board such as 'Miss a Go' and 'Swap with green player' because people found that after getting near to the end it was easy to win, so these additions made it harder or gave it a mix up.

I'm quite proud of the point we got to considering we had around half an hour on it with our initial time and iterating. At one point because we were using Star Wars monopoly figures as counters we said the scenario was a drunken trip home from the star wars canteen!

Our next assignment is the same sort of thing but the theme is "Whats mine is yours". At first I thought about something along the lines of snap where stealing each others cards is the aim of the game, however something shared instead could be an interesting approach!