Week 10 - Storytelling

Though I do have a hard time hearing things and paying attention in the class, one thing we talked about in games these days is like the storytelling aspect in video games. For our game Medium Rare we actually do not really have much of a story… This game seems more like one of those kill time on your phone games that people would buy on their iPhone for like two bucks. As an individual I am quite disappointed with this due to the fact because I am actually one of those gamers who are really into the story aspect of games. Though I wouldn’t say it’s the primary selling point for me in a game, it is one part that I really consider when buying a game. 

Working at Best Buy part time in the gaming department leaves me with a lot of time to read up on different games and get opinions from other gamers as well as give my own. Some of my favorite story based games were from the PlayStation 1 and 2 era. These would include the Final Fantasy series from the very first installment to the twelfth. The majority of these Squaresoft RPGs in fact did a very good job with storytelling in my opinion. I think the storytelling originally is what gave me the interest in video games in the first place. Even back in the day when I would play SNES games like Donkey Kong Country, I would be fully interested in the stories. Even something like Mortal Kombat which was purely a brutal fighting game, they had a lot of different character backgrounds and developments.

My point right now is that I think most of the games that have been developed for this current technological age are lacking in the storytelling aspect. A lot of games like Call of Duty and almost any Fighting game such as the recent Soul Calibur V and Streetfighter X Tekken, have extremely poor stories and mainly focus on the gameplay mechanics and online systems. Soul Calibur V was actually one of the more disappointing ones for me because they had introduced many new characters and removed many fan favorites, and they had not even provided arcade mode endings for each character explaining their introduction and outro to the game like the previous games had. 

A game like Streetfighter X Tekken is selling very well and to many is recognized as the best fighting game of the era, when in reality it is lacking many things, the story being one of them. The story does not actually make much sense and is of course very poorly planned out. For a crossover series there is actually no relevance to the two game worlds colliding at all. Upon watching the initial trailers for the game, many expected huge rivalries between popular characters like Kazuya Mishima and Ryu. 

On another note, you have a game like Mortal Kombat 9 released last year, which has provided amazing graphics, a well thought out story that almost felt like a movie and welcomed players of the previous titles as well as new fans. It also gave a good intro and outro to each character even being in a biography section. Below I’ve attached the trailer for Streetfighter X Tekken so you can see what I’m talking about in terms of what people like me expected.

That's it for today... more after tomorrows lecture. Sorry about the delay on these.

Week 9 - Medium Rare - the Board Game

It has been quite a while since I’ve updated you all on this log. Through the past three weeks I have been very busy with assignments and stuff. But here we are! One of our requirements for our game Medium Rare this semester is to create a paper prototype model of our game. Though this would normally be in our Project Oz Team Developer Diaries, I’ve decided to talk a little bit about it here, providing a bit of my own thoughts on the task.

If you haven’t a clue about our game Medium Rare here’s a link to our team blog if you’re interested in reading about it --> http://gdwteamprojectoz.blogspot.ca/

For our game Medium Rare we’ve decided to take a bit of a Monopoly approach to it, where you can travel across the board and collect and bank cows… Weird… I know, but it’ll make more sense when we have actual visuals. We’ve designed the game to be more luck oriented game. The game also has a bit of Pokemon influence you could say, because we have the players playing as our protagonist hero alien and an evil alien, both trying to collect cows (gotta catch em all!) The good alien players will pretty much act like Ash Ketchum in Pokemon and….”befriend” the cow rather than battling it like the evil aliens will. Similar to our paper boy game in the past I guess. We’ve also added the mechanics of the chance cards which will have various effects on players. There will also be cow cards that players will get once they wish to collect a cow. We’ve added the basic board game movement mechanisms into the game such as the Dice Roll and on the tiled board. The tiles would have different squares with different effects. 

Overall it is going quite well, we have already come a long way designing both the front and backs of our chance and cow cards which I will upload in a future post.

Week 8 - Solitaire & Vegetables

Multiplayer Solitaire? 

Solitaire is a game that was originally designed to be a single player game. I'm not too familiar with the game actually. The only time I ever really attempted to play it was back on my old Windows 98 computer when the only two games were Solitaire and Minesweeper. Anyways, the basic concept of the game is to sort the cards in descending order by suite and number. The player has a deck that they can reshuffle to find cards and then sort them into side piles that they can organize their numbers. In order to turn solitaire into a multiplayer game, one possible method would be to have two people race against each other to see who can complete it the fastest. This multiplayer method would be played by two people. This was my initial idea that I thought would be remarkable. Unfortunately I discovered that this game already existed in the form of Solitaire Showdown.

So in order to build upon that idea, I decided that adding a point system may make the game a bit more competitive. Basically how this would work is that the two players would share the zones where the cards must be sorted, and a player would receive a point for each card that they place. Seems a bit too easy? But in addition to this, I’ve added a rule that if any player places more than one card in a row, they will receive a bonus point. This will allow some players to gain an advantage.

A Veggie lover's version of 'President'

The given task is to design a type of game that can inform players about season vegetables. I have chosen to design a card style game; I’ve decided to call it “Vegeta”. The game will basically consist of cards with many different vegetables. On the card there will also be a number representing the actual calorie value of that particular vegetable. Though this was not a requirement for this task, it is an added bonus to those who wish to learn about the different vegetables. Each card will be categorized under a different color. The blue faced cards will represent vegetables in season during the winter, the orange cards will represent vegetables in season during fall, the yellow cards will represent vegetables in season during summer, and finally the green cards will represent vegetables in season during the spring. There are also red faced cards that represent a vegetable that is in season all year long. The cards can be seen below:

In addition to these cards, there will also be cards that a player can play to change the season, these will have purple faces. These cards will be explained later and can also be seen below:

The game can be played by 2 – 6 players. There will be a total of 10 cards per vegetable as well as 10 season cards. The gameplay will play similar to the card game “President”, players will start in the winter season representing the beginning month of the year, January. Players can decide however they wish to determine who will go first. The entire deck of cards will be dealt face down to all players. Once done, the players will get to look at their cards, and the first player will have to play a vegetable card from the winter season. The next player will have to play a winter card also with a calorie count that is higher than the previous card if they can. If they cannot, one alternative they can choose is to play a season card. The season card will allow that player to change the season to one of the two seasons that are displayed on the card. At this point, they cannot play another vegetable card.  Another alternative would be to play wild card. These can be played during any season. Once a person cannot play on the previous card, the previous player will win the round and can begin the next round with any season and card of their choice. This cycle will repeat until all players have zero cards left.

Vegetable Calorie References: http://caloriecount.about.com/calories-vegetables-ic1100

Vegetable Season Chart: http://www.foodland.gov.on.ca/english/availability.html