This Game is......Ingenious!

I've recently had the chance to play the board game 'Ingenious' in my game design class. 'Ingenious' is the English name for the game, however, we played the German version, which was called 'Einfach Genial'. (Everything is the same, just that the original instructions were most likely in German) Let me start by saying that although we had some trouble getting the scoring correct, the game was still very fun to play.

There were 4 of us playing and the game took about 45 minutes, which is not bad and fits perfectly with the time we were given in class to play the game. Personally, I think that if a game takes too long (example: Monopoly), everyone will eventually get bored and pissed off at each other for whatever reason.

The first thing that stands out about this game is the use of little colored cubes to keep track of score. That was quite unique and allowed everybody to see what everybody else's score was at any given time. Also, I liked the similarities it shared with the PC game 'Civilization', where everybody starts off with their own little 'island' and working on their own thing until they hit the turning point later in the game and start planning their strategy. Lastly, I liked the idea of being able to co-operate with each other. I'm not sure that was "allowed" in the instructions, but it was fun co-operating with another player and trying to stop the other 2 players from winning.

Of course, the downside to this co-operating allows for the possibility of a 3 vs. 1 situation if 3 players decide to gang up against one player, thus giving that player no hope of winning. Also, I disliked the idea that it is hard to redeem yourself in the late game, as the stronger player will be able to keep scoring the bonus moves and eventually get all their scores to 18 and automatically win. This leads to my last dislike about this game, the limited randomness. Besides drawing tiles, there really isn't anymore randomness in this game, meaning that more experienced players will almost always have the upper hand against less experienced players.

If I were to change the design of the game, one thing I would definitely do is add a timer rule. Although nobody in our group tried this, adding a timer would force everyone to make a move, and eliminates the possibility of purposely taking forever to make a move in the hopes of frustrating other players. Also, I would make the game a bit more random, most likely through drawing tiles. As an example, each player must empty their entire hand after each turn. I think this would make the game a bit more random and limits the advance planning a player can do. Finally, I think I would limit the amount of bonus moves allowed. It just doesn't feel right if a strong player has all their scores really high, and then they make 1 "super move" in which they place a tile, get the score to 18, get a bonus move, place next tile to get next score to 18, and repeat the process for all or a majority of their scores and allowing them an easy victory. To allow for more strategy, I think I would throw in a few 'single' tiles, allowing players to fill in the odd gaps and can potentially help in some situations.

Here is a picture of the game:

GDW Game Completed

Our GDW game is now done with and officially submitted. In my opinion the title is a bit misleading as I don't feel that we have much when compared with some of the other groups.

Unfortunately a lot of people in the group (myself included) weren't too interested in the game after the design was completely re-done by the game designer. It was originally supposed to be a more cartoony game but our designer didn't get into GDW3 so somebody else took over as the designer.

Also, although our group seemed big only so many of us were actually working on the game, and two programmers can only do so much.

That aside, I think it was a nice little demo we have. If anything this was a good learning experience. The game engine course felt like a "throw you into the ocean so you can learn how to swim" kinda course, hand having to dig around everywhere and try to follow some of the examples was a good way to learn how engines worked.

Hopefully whatever game we work on next semester will be a much more well planned out game and everyone will be interested in working on it.

Weekly Update

So for this past week I have been working on getting the game in release mode, particle systems, and joints in maya.

I have been able to get the game in release mode, so it is safe to say that we will be able to build our game in release mode for the final submission.

The particle systems however, is proving to be a bit troublesome and although the game is compiling and running without errors, nothing shows on the screen and I am working to solve that problem.

Up until recently, I didn't know that it was a requirement for the model to be in the final game, and now that I recently found out, I had to take some time out to fix up the model and work on the assignment. Here is a picture of what it looks like now:

I will be spending most of this next week working on the model in order to finish it in time for the assignment due date as well as in time to get it into the game.

Weekly Update

For the past week the group has made good progress. The reason for this was because the milestone was supposed to be due this week but was pushed back. The group had worked hard to put all the code together and create a prototype of the game for the GDW workshop.

I have been busy with getting 3D sound to work as well as getting a base set up for loading shaders into the game. I believe it will eventually make everybody's lives easier as they will just have to put the shader/sound into the game and don't have to worry about getting it set up properly before it will work with the game.

I will most likely be spending this week on creating all of the sound with another member of our group as the person in our sound department has decided to quit and not work on the sounds anymore. Hopefully we will be able to get all of the sounds recorded and put into the game for the actual milestone due next week.

Weekly Update

With assignments slowly creeping up on me and piling up I now have to try to make the most out of this week as I may not be able to spend as much time as I hope to on programming. For programming I've continued to work on the particle system and it is almost complete. I only recently got my hands on the psd files for the particles so I will now be working on a tga loader to load them in. Once that is done, it should only be a matter of tweaking the numbers in order to get the particles move properly and as desired.

On the business side of things, some other team members and I have managed to complete what is hopefully the last assignment for the course. Hopefully, we are correct and with business out of the way, I can spend that time focusing on programming the game.

Having had some small meetings with other members in the team, it seems everybody in each department is making good progress, although the amount of work required to finish the game is still significant with some members wondering whether or not the game will truly be "complete" within a few weeks. As for me, I don't think the game will truly appear "finished" in December. It will probably look like a game in it's beta phase and hopefully we will get to continue to work on this over the next semester and the final result will be a fun game.

Milestone 3

With milestone 3 due this week, it was a good opportunity to see just how well everything is going in the big picture. With the game being due in 3 weeks, it feels like development of the game is way behind schedule and still needs a lot of work. However, after having done professor Finney's exercise and having a discussion with him, it seems the team is doing fine and is on schedule.

All of the business stuff has been taken care of well ahead of time, so I can say that I am ahead of schedule there. For the programming side of things, I have been playing around with the FMOD files, trying to get them to play a few sounds while I wait for the sound department to start producing sounds. For the art side of things, although I have little involvement in that department, it seems they are making good progress. There are now models the programmers are able to use, although they aren't final yet and will continue to change in the coming weeks.

Weekly Blog Post

With a huge pile of work gone off of my desk, I've been able to spend more time working on our game this week. I was able to set up some of the basic stuff for our game and get it going. Unfortunately, I couldn't get my hands on some of the models so I had to quickly make a level in Maya. I decided to the base into a bowling game until I can get my hands on the models and be able to load them in and code them. Also, I've been able to get the Xbox 360 controller working, and I can now control the amount of vibration on each motor as well as allow the player to throw the ball down the lane using the D pad.

Here's a picture of the level I quickly made just to test out the controls and have the basics all set up. The ball was thrown down the lane using the Xbox 360 controller as input.

I will probably be working on getting FMOD to work next. That way, when all the sound files have been recorded, we can easily put them into the game without much hassle.