An Overdue Update?!?

It's been a week or 2 now since I've last updated this blog. I will start off the updates with where I last left off: the space invaders remake homework assignment. Below is a picture of the final game:

The original mechanics are all in the game, and all it is really missing are more polished assets/interfaces; but given the 1 week time frame I had to work on it, I figured it's more important to have all the original mechanics so that it can be played properly.

For the GDW game, I will talk about some of the game balancing:

Fairness: 'Endless' is asymmetrical since players control a different character. Although they have different abilities, we are working to balance out the numbers so that everybody has a fair shot at staying alive for a decent amount of time. For example, the medic may have higher health since it has a very weak attack, while an engineer may have lower health since he is able to produce turrets that can be used to attack and distract enemies in game.

Challenge: I think our game has some good challenges for players of all experience levels. Since the gameplay generally remains the same throughout, challenge is incorporated through faster spawning of enemies as well as stronger enemies.

Meaningful Choices: 'Endless' is a good game for implementing some good meaningful choices. In the game, the gold or money is shared between ALL team members. This means that the team has to effectively figure out who's weapons to upgrade and when to upgrade them. The team could try to max out attack upgrades for the sniper, but the other members would suffer as enemies get stronger and they are unable to hold out for themselves.

Skill vs. Chance: When enemies die in the game, they will drop a certain amount of gold (determined at random). To balance out the issue where the team kills a boss and gets 0 gold, each set of enemies will have a pre-defined max drop and min drop so that the team will still be able to get upgrades even if they are unlucky and get the minimum drop every time.

Heads vs. Hands: The game will require both, and the players must be quick in order to win. Initially, the players will have more time to figure out a strategy, but as the game progresses, they will have to think and act fast. For example, if a group member were to die in the middle of a wave what should the team do? Their chances of survival have just gone down so they need to think of a way to continue surviving.

Competition vs. Co-operation: There is a fair mix of both in the game. Since the gold is shared, the team must co-operate and decide who's weapons are important upgrades. Also, the game is designed so that as a single player you are almost destined to lose very quickly, and in order to get a higher score everybody must work together. There is also some competition amongst the team as they will want to be the last man standing.

Short vs. Long: We are currently working on balancing this out, as we feel that it is possible the game may be too long. If the players get too much time they will be able to formulate many meaningful strategies and keep the game going forever. We are trying to come up with different ways for the AI to behave so that once the team formulates a strategy, it will change to a new strategy and keep players thinking.

Rewards: Of course our game has rewards! Monsters will drop gold that is important for upgrading weapons. Points are also given so that they can be posted on a high score board. And of course there are rewards for working as a team (the medic will be able to heal injured players so that everybody can play longer)

Punishment: The game will punish players through the use of shorter playtime and terminated play. Basically if the player makes stupid choices they will die faster, and that results in the team being unable to play for a long period of time, thus ending the game early.

Freedom vs. Controlled Experience: The game is mostly a controlled experience. The only freedom the players have is to run around wherever they please (on the map). Other than that players are only trying to survive for as long as possible and there aren't any side distractions to keep them away from their main goal.

Simple vs. Complex: We are aiming to avoid innate complexity. We want the game to be elegant in that it is easy to pick up the controls and it is fun to play.

Detail vs. Imagination: The game takes place on top of a skyscraper on planet Earth. We aren't trying to create a brand new world. Besides that there aren't that many details and we leave the imagination of the player to do all the heavy lifting.

Magic: The Gathering Cards and Unity Assignment

For the past week I've been working on the two game design assignments, one of which is the make 3 'Magic: The Gathering' cards and make sure they are balanced. Here are the cards I did for that assignment:

The balancing for 'Radiated Slime':
Benefit: 3 attack + 1 defense + 1 color bonus = 5 points
Cost: 1 baseline + 2 colored mana + 2 non-colored mana = 5 points

Here are the numbers for 'The Hooded Figure' card:
Benefit: 6 attack + 5 defense = 11 points
Cost: 1 baseline + 2 colored mana + 7 non-colored mana + 1 5+ mana cost = 11 points

And here are the numbers for 'The Lone Wolf':
Benefit: 2 attack + 4 defense = 6 points
Cost: 1 baseline + 2 colored mana + 3 non-colored mana = 6 points

The cards are above; as you can see, there is nothing special. There aren't any special effects and it is just a simple description of the creature in the cards. Balancing them was fairly easy and I just followed the instructions from the lectures. Benefit points are power + toughness + any color bonuses. Cost points are basically baseline + colored mana + non colored mana + any bonuses.

The second assignment was to remake a game in Unity. I chose to do 'Space Invaders' for this one. Below is a picture of what I have now:

It's a bit different from the original Space Invaders where the enemies are lined up and slowly moving down on you, but this remake works in a similar way. There is only one enemy coming at you at a time (the red sphere) and as the player (purple square), you have to shoot bullets and try to destroy the enemies. The blue shields are there to protect you and occasionally a ufo like object will fly across the screen and if the player can shoot it down it will provide extra points.

GDW Update

Over the past two weeks, I continued to work on the level for the game, a prototype in Unity, as well as some balancing (done as part of homework in Unity). The map is now complete, and below are some images of the level:

This is the level (Version 3)

Top view of the version 3 level

This is version 2 of the level

I posted pictures previously of what the level looked like but the story was changed and the map had to be completely re-done. The story now takes place on top of a building. Version 2 of the map was my favourite as it seemed more appropriate for a roof top. Unfortunately, most of the team didn't like it too much so I had to add more clutter to the rooftop and remove the billboard.

Since I was the one that designed the map, I was also the one tasked with the task of turning this map into 0's and 1's and throwing them into a text file for the programmer. It was an extremely repetitive task and I messed up a few times at one point, but the text file map is now done and out of the way.

Some of the balancing I did was for the attack damage. I basically threw in a static enemy and played around with the values in the javascript file, tweaking variables such as enemy health, player attack strength, and player attack speed. After tweaking them for a few hours I believe I've found something reasonable, and it allows players to kill enemies easily early one (1 or 2 hits to kill) and the number of hits gradually increases as the level gets higher and higher. Hopefully this will save us some time later on when it is time to balance the game.

For this next week I am hoping to work on either modeling, creating the sound effects, or programming. There is still a lot of work to do, however, with piles of assignments and midterms slowly creeping up hopefully we can have something playable by mid February.

Numeric Relations in Games

In this blog post I will be discussing the game ‘Final Fantasy 13’, and discuss the relationships between the numbers in that game.

Let’s start the discussion by looking at the big picture. Final Fantasy 13 is a game with progression mechanics. Players kill monsters in the game world. These monsters drop items that can be sold for gold (or they can try to find gold in treasure chests). Players also gain ‘crystogen points (CP)’, which are similar to experience points in other games. These CP’s allow the player to upgrade their character by spending points to gain benefits such as stronger attacks, more health, new abilities, etc. On top of these resources, the player also gains technical points (TP), which are spent in battles and allows the player to use special spells. The simplest explanation for using TP points is as follows: the more TP points a player has accumulated before going into battle, the more choices they have when it comes to using spells. For example, with a full TP gauge, the player could choose to use 1 very powerful spell that depletes all or nearly all of the points, or they may choose to multiple weaker spells, which deplete less TP.

Final Fantasy 13 was a fun game overall; however, there are parts of the game that I did find frustrating. I’ve only played through the entire game once, which was a few years ago, but there was one main point about the game that had me frustrated that I still remember, which was the grinding that was required. Although the game did not specifically tell you to “go grinding”, you, the player would know you had to grind in order to progress. If you were unfortunate like me, you didn’t make all the best choices when it came to upgrading and suffered the consequences. This happens around 75% - 80% into the game’s storyline, and trying to progress is fairly difficult due to the sudden spike in enemy difficulty. With no other choice, players will be forced to grind in order to get enough CP to level up their characters to a reasonable level so that they stand a chance against the enemies in the next section. Although the area seems “huge”, if you were like me and spent several DAYS grinding enemies, that map eventually becomes small and boring. It is at this point that putting the game down is something that is not hard to do.

Let’s talk about the resources and their numerical relationships. Below, I have drawn a picture of the resources in the game and how they relate to each other.

My definition for resource comes from the book ‘Fundamentals of Game Design’, written by Ernest Adams, founder of the IGDA. This is the definition in the book:

Resources: Entities in the game world that may be created, destroyed, gained, lost, transferred from place to place or from player to player, or converted into other entities. Resources must be measured in numeric quantities. If an entity in a game never changes and cannot be traded, such as a hill in a war game, then the entity is not a resource.

Now that we’ve seen how the resources are related to each other, here are some of their relationships:

Gil and Potion: 50 Gil will buy you 1 potion, which gives 150 HP, a general case of the identity relationship and is linear. (50 to 150 linear relationship)

CP and ‘Level’: The more CP a player has, the more they can level up. Increasing CP-to-level relationship used so that more and more CP is required to gain a level, and also the game is too slow in the beginning for the player to try to camp and only kill weaker enemies.

Cie’th Stone Missions and Rewards: The player only gets the set reward for the first time they complete the mission. Afterwards the rewards continue to go down in value. There is a decreasing value relationship between the two.

Time and HP: These two resources also have a decreasing relationship. The longer a player stands around thinking or doing nothing in a battle, the more opportunities an enemy has to attack the player and decrease their HP. 

Enemies and Drops: The relationship between the two could be described as linear. Rare drops, or items that are worth a lot of Gil if sold, are only dropped by bosses or enemies with huge amounts of HP and take a while to defeat (even then there is only a random chance the player may get a rare item). Lower level or common enemies only drop items that are worth little Gil.

There are definitely more relationships between resources in the game, however, to keep this post from getting too long I think the ones above demonstrate some of the key relationships in this game.

To conclude, my suggestions for improving this game would be to increase the amount of CP received in the mid game. This will allow players to level up a bit more and hopefully they won’t run into the same problem I did: under leveled characters vs. over powered enemies. Another suggestion would be to decrease the health on some of the bosses. The bosses are usually over powered and while I agree that it is important to have some challenges in the game to keep the game fun, I think the designers went a bit far with the numbers for the bosses and should tweak them a bit to improve it. My final suggestion is to change the relationship between the Cie’th Stone missions and rewards. Although the value of the rewards decreases, there is still a level of randomness to the rewards and therefore sometimes the value of a reward may be higher than that of the previous (although it generally goes down). I think it should be a strictly decreasing relationship so that players cannot spam the missions to get more and more Gil or items for easy work.

Rules vs Mechanics

In Raph's blog, he mentions that games have 3 types of games, constituative, operational, and implicit. 

Some of the arguments he makes in his blog post are:
- core precept are made out of games
- game grammer focuses on constituative rules
-"falling and dying" are seen as feedback from the game


Ralph discusses the differences between rules and mechanics and how they fit into the MDA model. I agree with his points about how rules and mechanics are not the same. Mechanics are built in functions that make up the game, while rules are there for restraining the player on what he can or can do.

GDW Update - 1

Time for a long overdue update on how I'm doing this semester for the game. I've switched from programming to working on art, modeling, design, and business stuff for the game this semester. I will also most likely be programming some of the raknet stuff for the game later on in the semester.

To try to help the group get off to a better start this year/semester, what I am doing now is doing a placeholder level. The other artist and I have been working hard to get some placeholder objects/levels in place so that the programmers will have something to work with while we model the actual stuff during the semester. This way, hopefully there will be no complaints and when the models are completed they can be smoothly and easily incorporated into the game with no trouble. Below are some pictures of what the placeholder level looks like right now:

Here is a screenshot of the level from perspective view

The same level from top view

A lot of the stuff isn't 100% finalized yet so they can still change. This should, however, be enough for the programmers to work with for now until the game is more planned out during this next week.

Some of the stuff that have been planned out:
Characters: We have planned 4 characters/classes: Assault, Sniper, Medic, and Engineer. To provide a rough idea, the assault character will be the most well balanced of the 4, the sniper will have high damage and accuracy but is slow, the medic is able to heal allies, and the engineer is able to place turrets that will fire at the enemy automatically.

Gameplay: The game will basically be similar to a 'horde mode' game, where hordes of enemies will come at the players until they die. There will endless waves of enemies, hence the game name 'Endless'.

Multiplayer: As part of the assignment, the game will allow for multiple players to play over a network. A maximum of 4 players is allowed with AI controlling the other un-chosen characters. There will also be a public and private chat option.

Obstacles: The obstacles will be destroyable. Depending on what the object is, it will have a set amount of HP and once there has been enough damage (whether from player or enemy), it will be destroyed and nobody will be able to hide in that area without being shot at.

Story: Basically, the year is 2050 and the game takes place on planet Earth. An evil corporation sees the human race as nothing more than a "disease" that will continue to pollute the world and bring it to its doom. In an effort to prevent this, the evil corporation is trying to take over the world and replace humans with robots. The player will play as part of a special task force the government has assembled in an attempt to infiltrate headquarters and steal highly sensitive information / bring down the corporation.

I will stop here for now for this post. For those interested, you can read more about the development of our game on this blog: http://www.slightlytoastedgames.blogspot.com This is our new team blog and will have posts from everybody in the group.

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: