Week 4 - Paper Prototypes

So we had to make two more games this past week, I feel like our design ideas just keep getting better and better. Didn’t get much photographic material this week but basically what we created was a game with a world war two theme that did not involve territorial gain. The game was called Race to Berlin. This game’s concept was mainly proposed by Yang and Chris….hold up. When I say Chris, I mean Shing… apparently my other group member’s name is also Chris. Anyways, the basic gameplay of the game was that you would roll a die to move spaces across the board. You would play on two separate teams. Each player would start with 20 resources, and as they moved across the board they would use them up. If they would run out of resources, they would skip a turn and roll a die giving more. Here’s what the game board looks like:

 

Now there are a few different spaces on the board that mean a few different things. There are trap cards and assist cards that can add a bit more action into the game. Basically the person to reach Berlin would win. I’m not too sure if we were even allowed to use that Nazi symbol, my entire group claimed we could though I was against it. Whatever.

Our second game was a simple collection game that pretty much just used different colour cards with symbols. I don’t have any pictures of the board or pieces right now but I’ll probably edit this post later with that. The player moved across the board by rolling a die once again, and they would be able to move all over the board with no set goal in mind. The objective of the game was to collect three cards of one symbol regardless of the color. The cards could only be collected by landing on specific spots. Edward and I created the cards that had the different symbols. There was, a triangle, square, circle, x (PlayStation fan boys clearly :P), and the four colors were red blue yellow and green. There was also a black card which served as a wildcard with a star on it. To obtain a wildcard, the player would have to have 3 cards of one color and trade them in after landing on the center space of the board.

Class began slowly as usual and I continued to work on a little project of my own for another class. We talked about battleship, and had to think of one design aspect to change… As usual I didn’t participate in class… maybe next time?

Christian Perera

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Week 3 - Designing Board Games Pt. II

Third week of the semester, already feels like we’ve done so much work. Last week I talked about how we were assigned to design two different board games. We actually ended up completing those, it was kinda fun, but was super stressful…and frustrating at times. The group consisted of my Game Development Workshop group with the exception of one member. 

The first game that our group designed is called flag assault. The idea basically came from the thought of ‘Capture the Flag’ mixed in with ‘Chinese Checkers’…with four players! Yang and I started the process on Wednesday night by visited the local Michael’s craft store. When we were there we picked up Bristol board, construction paper, wooden spools and mini dowels. The whole thing cost us like 25 dollars. We used a hexagonal tiled sheet as seen below:

This was composed of multiple tiled sheets by Chris and I in order to create the proper game board. We then coloured the four corners of the game board to represent the different colors of the players. Edward, Yang, Shing and I were coloring the wooden spools as shown below:

 This was a long, tedious and messy process because the markers were getting all over us. Ugh. After this, I created flags from the construction paper while Yang decorated the box that we posted our game layout on. This then created our final product shown earlier.

 

One down, one more to go… though this one didn’t need to be polished.

Designing Tile Conquest was not a long process at all, though we had some issues trying to put together the full gameplay rules. It once again used the hexagonal layout, and consisted of players taking over spots with a certain color. We used construction paper cut outs as our game pieces and the game was laid out like this:

This was all done on the Thursday. We presented both games in class today.

In class today, we were also asked to redesign Tic-Tac-Toe to work with 3 players. I thought this would actually be easy… I remembered a time in high school where a friend and I were bored in class and we ended up creating something called Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe… I remember we created a complex grid system where we would simply create as many sets of 3 that we could and just tally up the total amount by the time the grid ran out. This however only worked with 2 people… I think? We didn’t really try it out with anyone else, but I’m not too sure how we would implement the third person… I was thinking about it today in class. Of course one possible method would have been adding a third symbol…possibly a ‘+’? or maybe a simple ‘I’, either way, this could have worked on a large grid, although this would really change up tic-tac-toe.

I was also thinking of the Sudoku styled tic-tac-toe grid… The layout would look something like this:

Although I didn’t announce it to the class, I’m pretty sure a system could be developed so that one play would play against another in a starting grid, the winner would face a third player in the spot where he or she placed their winning mark. If the mark respective grid spot has already been played on, the third player would get to choose from the winners remaining positions where they would like to play. If all those positions are filled, then the winner would be able to choose any position on the board to play. If any player were to win 3 in a row on the larger grid, they would automatically win the entire game, if not, then the system would work in a tally system, where the player with the most wins overall would be declared the winner.

It’s a quick idea… I haven’t really polished out the details but I think it would be cool. Even worse, I think someone just said something similar in class today. But I’m pretty sure it’s not the same concept. I guess every idea is derived from something right?

Well that’s it for today… I wish the internet wasn’t so crappy in the room! If anyone’s actually following this blog, let me know what you think about the tic-tac-toe idea.

Christian Perera

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Week 2 - Designing Board Games

Second week of Game Design, the presentation of my previous assignment on Zombie Fluxx went quite well. I didn’t really get to do any sort of discussion… I’ve just signed up for Twitter and I’m still new to this whole blogging thing. So I’ll probably be able to do them next time if the chance presents itself.

This week in class we actually got to play a game on paper with numbers. It is something that’s quiiiiite familiar, and I’m a little ashamed that it fooled me. We were given a sheet of paper and had to match up with a partner. My partner was a guy named Ryan…I think? Let’s just call him that… and he actually beat me in the game. The game started with us writing the numbers 1 to 9 on the sheet of paper… At first Ryan and I had had initially written the numbers down like this:  

1 2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9

We would then select a number each and who ever had a set of 3 numbers that added up to 15 would win. The entire time I did notice something familiar but did not really clue in to it...The game’s round ended in a draw. The second round was different, I didn’t have any view of Ryan’s sheet nor did I know whether it mattered so I just selected numbers randomly due to being bored. Ryan however knew what he was doing and beat me. After the round he showed me his sheet and he had arranged the numbers in a grid like this:

Look familiar? It’s tic-tac-toe!

Anyways, following that, we were then given our homework assignments for the week… we have to make TWO board games. One we were given time in class to create. We grouped together in a team of six. Five of us were all in the same Game Development Workshop group so we were able to work together ok. We were given certain criteria to meet when designing this game. The materials we were given were a sheet of paper with a hexagon grid, these little plastic circle pieces of different colours, and those attachable erasers that you put on pencils. We used these in order to create a sort of strategy game. You’ll see what it is next time probably…

The second game we have to create is something that involves taking over territories and stuff… kinda like Risk I guess? I’ve never played Risk… I’m more of a Monopoly guy though… Ugh. Well either way, we’ve gotta get them done by next Monday’s tutorial session…I’m extremely thankful that I signed up for that 12:30pm slot… even though I barely made it last time. I guess we’ll see what happens.

Christian Perera

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Week 1 - Zombie Fluxx?? wtf?

A new semester has started already, which means it’s time to get back to work… The second week has started and I’m on the busiest day, Monday. Today is all about Game Design class. I have to present to the TA my experience on the card game we explored last week in class, Zombie Fluxx!

 

Since this is my first blog I might as well talk about it...

At first, I wasn’t really down to play this game. I waited in the line after selecting my group to pick the game and by the time I got to the front I was stuck with it. I found the game to be really fun…and that’s not only because I won! Yes…This is a big deal to me because usually when I play board games with my friends back home I lose. But anyways, it started off with the six of us scrambling through the cards and rule sheet to see what it was about. I was a little annoyed cause I had no clue what was going on and the sheet wasn’t really that descriptive. 

My group elected me the dealer of the cards so i went ahead and dealt the cards, and had also gone first. This game was pretty cool because it had many different kinds of cards. The first one was the ‘Creeper Card’ that I drew, which was actually a Zombie… I wasn’t too sure what to do but we soon got the hang of the game. Each person had their own zombie area. There were also Goal cards which set the conditions to winning the game…and there was a lot! The goal could have changed at any time, which I really liked. Only one could be in play… which made it tough. There were also ‘Keeper Cards’ and ‘Action Cards’ which were items to help the player out and interact with others.

 

I won the game by having the condition of having more than one Zombie and possessing a Keeper Card of a Brain and a Baseball Bat… pretty random… but either way. I won. 

I hated the fact that it took forever to be my turn, one thing I would change (if I could) would be the amount of goal cards. I would definitely reduce the amount so the game would go by a little bit faster without getting bored. I also really wished I played with only 4 people instead. It was cool trying out a new game. Can’t wait to make my own…

Christian Perera

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