Monthly Archives: January 2022

Avoid and collect game

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Aim

Design goal: Design a vertical platform jumping game.

Player’s goal: Go to the top.

I just wanted to get familiar with unity and implement some retro gameplay in this brief, nothing special other than that.

Prototype

Critical reflection

This brief was inspired by Pac-Man and I wanted to use this project as an exercise in traditional video games. If I go further into production, I would add a point system, a health system at the system level, moving platforms, trap platforms, disposable platforms, etc. at the level level, adding movement, attack behaviour to enemies at the mechanic level, etc. to explore a higher level of playability.

Resource:

Unity platform resource.

Game for a space

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Aims

I know that the brief’s rational mentions doing a prototype of the actual space, but when I saw the title, one of my favourite science fiction short stories just came across my mind, and I had a strong desire to use it as inspiration for a parkour game about a space miner who tries to escape a giant smooth concave mirror in space. It seems this one combined the brief of this one with escape game and unity engine game?

Sketches

Design detail

Background:
 The protagonist is a space miner whose daily job is to travel in space to explore other planets for new energy sources. When he arrives on a strange planet, he falls into a deep pit in the shape of a concave mirror, thousands of kilometres in diameter, made of unusually smooth material and with zero friction, he was only accompanied only by his toolkit and other strange objects that have fallen in by accident too.
Mechanics: 
 The movement can be only generated by friction, and friction can only be generated by the interaction between players and items.
 The player has to use his interaction with the toolkit to generate friction to move, and then gradually meet other objects and can use their physical properties to move in various ways, with the player's speed gradually increasing as the game progresses. 
Camera: 
2.5d
 Highlight ideas: 
Smooth mirrors reflecting the galaxies of the universe! Perhaps these virtual stars could be designed as bonus props with varying attributes, such as some stars that briefly speed up the protagonist and others that restore stamina levels (it makes sense to see beautiful stars that restore the player's stamina levels! This would require a health system)

Critical reflection

I have so many ideas for this game, but I’m currently stuck at a very frustrating stage: I can’t imagine how to make an interesting level out of such a big, empty, deep pit, and it’s also under the situation of my intention to make the player accelerate along with the game process (I wanted to make the player feel the excitement of survival in such way, so the overall emotional curve will be an upward trend). In this regard, I focused on the interaction: the player will learn the tutorial by interacting with the toolkit at the first time to get into the mechanics, and then gradually progress to various other objects that accidentally fall into the pit, and to interact with virtual star mirrors.
However, there is still a lack of structured level design, which really requires an urgent update….

Inspiration

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Men_and_the_Mirror

Twine or bitsy game

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Aims

Use the bitsy tool to create clips of the parade in paprika, combined with appropriate gameplay.

Inspiration

Bitsy’s features may seem simple, but it is unexpectedly suited for expressing emotional themes. “https://hangedman.itch.io/sonder” uses simple 2-frame animation to create an excellent musical atmosphere, “https://linda-nd.itch.io/day-in-the- life” provides a deep sense of immersion with minimal silhouettes and a cinematic camera feel, which got me thinking what should drive my bitsy game?
Then I thought of my favourite animated film “paprika” ——A clip that the bad guys invade the real world through dreams, driving people into various moving objects and acting crazy. I intended to combine the feeling this gave me with the gameplay of maze to create a psychedelic game.
I have written dozens of games that can be created with this tool and will continue to make them later, bitsy is so good for expressing improvised ideas.

Prototype

Critical reflection

I tried to use flickering animations to create a sense of atmosphere for the procession and used flickering obstacles to create difficulty for the maze. Despite the small size of the game, I still get tired of creating dialogue, drawing artwork and designing levels at the same time, probably because I didn’t plan the full game content in advance. I will to take another look at the game during next iterations from a holistic perspective, and aim to improve the narrative and art presentation.

A game with only 18 cards

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Aims

Design goal: to create a card game with clear rules and some gameplay, taking into account details such as the number of players and the number of cards held per person if there are only 18 cards.

Player goal: to eliminate other players (collect the maximum number of cards or make others lose cards) in order to win.
Experience objective: to experience a certain level of danger at all times during the game, both in situations where the player can threaten other players and in situations where the player can be threatened by other players.

Prototype

Both the shapes of the two prototypes are in regular squad.

Prototype 1: Assimilation

1. Framework: 3x6
2. Cards: blackx9, whitex9
3. Mechanics: 
Cards of one colour will assimilate cards of another colour that are adjacent to them horizontally or vertically, which means Every time a card is flipped, the adjacent card with opposite color will be flipped as well
4. Game flow:
 a. Both players need to choose their colours.
 b. Fist scissors to decide who turns over the cards first.
 c. Play continues until there is only one colour on the table and the player whose colour is represented wins.

Prototype 2: Restriction

1. Cards:Ax6, Bx6, Cx6
2. Rules:
 a. A restrains B, B restrains C, C restrains A
 b. Two identical cards can cancel the restraint of the previous level
 c. The restrained player will be captured 
 d. Up to three players, those without cards will be eliminated

Critical Reflection

For prototype 2:

If two same cards can cancel out the previous player ‘s attack, in this condition, player 1 shows c and player 2 shows b to restraint, and player 1 held a “c”. if this player want to defend the attack, does c in the card pool count as one of the combo? If not, there will always be a lag in the previous player’s defence against the next player’s attack. It requires further playtest.

Inspiration

Conway’s Game of Life

Uno

Name my features-No components game

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Rational

In September, I gave my nephew, who had just turned three months old, a bed bell that consisted of five Muppet calves that, once switched on, the group of calves would turn to music. I had only given him this toy because I wanted him to find something in constant motion to exercise his attention span. Surprisingly, my sister called me one day and told me that the baby’s preference for toys had changed very quickly and that he would not be interested in any other toys for a few days, but on the contrary, this bed bell had become his best friend, he would talk to them, make soft coaxing noises, and sometimes it was as if he was arguing with them, which was very funny. So I wondered if this behavior and physical play were both part of an early form of play behaviour?

I read several papers on this subject and found that many scholars had summarised and categorized the differences between children’s play behaviors at different stages of life, and found that by the age of three months babies were beginning to be able to swing their hands at objects or reach out to grab hanging objects.

Personal Aims

Design goal: Try to design a social game that brings people closer through physical reactions.

Mind Flow

My investigation then extended to the relationship between physical play and oral narrative (both of which require a focus on the player’s abilities and the human body itself) and I found that No components games are biased towards oral narrative, there are rules, but there is no fictional world. So rule, here it is.

I also have found many examples of drinking games, party games, and children’s games. For example party games related to talking: daft definition, Say The Same Thing.

And then I began to design my first no components game, I named it “Over-enthusiastic”:

 1. The scope of the phrase is limited to the character name( with a limited length).
 2. One person rolls the point and says the name of the character corresponding to the point.
 3. The other person tells the origin of the character's name, if it is right, he/she will win the right to roll, and if it is wrong, the other party will get the right to roll.

This game is a kind of game to prolong, and a game for online chat that allows two people to quickly get to know each other’s preference.

As well, I tried my second one “Name my features”:

 1.First draw up a theme, such as a favourite colour, and then start the game after everyone has spoken in turn.
 2.1 Say the numbers 1-9 at the same time and the person who says the same number says the other person's favourite colour.
 2.2 Start with a number at random and say the numbers in order. The person who has said the Multiplier of the start number, will be required to say the favourite colour of the beginner.

Critical Reflection

After the playtest, both prototypes have corresponding problems that need to be solved.
For “Over-enthusiastic”, the roll point in the key mechanism would require dice, violating the requirement of no component, and if using rock-paper-scissors as rules instead, it would correspondingly limit the number of words in the phrase to 2, 5, and 10.
For “Name my features”, the test result was a little more stable, but the different branches also create different problems. If the “2.1” rule is followed, and there are more than 2 participants, then there will be a situation where more than one person saying the same number at the same time, which makes the game more difficult and confusing. If the “2.2” rule is followed, subsequent players can keep the game going by always remembering the color that the first player said, making the game less difficult and less fun.

Resource List

Age Determination Guidelines: Relating Children’s Ages to Toy Characteristics and Play Behavior

Chief Zodiac-A race game without dice

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Personal aims

Player’s goal:

Reach the finish point, which is the center of the map.

My design goal:

Create a game that spreads the responsibility of randomness and movement over the other board game components, which are, role cards and terrain cards.

Experience goal:

Combined with the ranking of the twelve animals in the Chinese Zodiac story (a unique Chinese way of indicating the time of birth, equivalent to the twelve signs of the zodiac in the West) (the rat, the ox, the tiger, the rabbit, the dragon, the snake, the horse, the goat, the monkey, the rooster, the dog and the pig), players can randomly select animals to experience the story in which the gods held the animals race competition to determine their ranking.

Thought about randomness

The biggest problem with board games without dice is the lack of randomness. When discussing this brief with a friend, he brought up an interesting question: if all the elements that affect movement in a board game are called dice, is the removal of dice intended to remove randomness, or is it just a matter of giving dice a different form?
If the dynamics of a video game are enforced by the player, then the dynamics of a board game are largely enforced by the dice. What is infinite in a video game, with keystroke-controlled displacement, becomes a finite number of action points in a board game, and this finite number of action points is determined by the dice in a traditional board game. so if I take away the object that has the task of generating randomness, I need to put that responsibility on other tabletop game components, such as characters and maps.

Imagine a situation where a character’s ability can determine how it moves, and terrain can determine whether the character can move.
Different roles have different movement abilities (some are fast, some are slow), but there is a corresponding system of restraints, which can be either numerical restraints or restraints between the character’s attributes and the terrain.
1. Numerical restraint: Fast movers have a low stamina value, slow movers have a high stamina value
2. Attribute restraint: Terrain cards can be divided into three types: land, sea, and air, and if the character is a rat, he can move on the road, but not in the sea or air.

Early-stage prototype

Cards:

  1. Role cards:
The rat, the ox, the tiger, the rabbit, the dragon, the snake, the horse, the goat, the monkey, the rooster, the dog and the pig.

2. Terrain cards:  

        a. Land: Plain, thorns, forests;

        b. Beneath the surface: River, Swamp, rock;

        c. Air : cloudy, normal.

 

Critical reflection

I refer to the traditional tabletop game variety of dice-determined movement distances as movement distance randomness based on the same map, so in this proposition, I try to achieve double randomness (different characters have different displacement abilities and terrain restrictions) for random characters based on a random map (the map consists of a patchwork of different hexagonal map tiles).

After playtesting, I realized that the sky card needs further consideration, as only the dragon can fly among the characters and is one of the fastest moving characters, although with the addition of the cloudy card for it, does the grid occupied by the cloudy card have any other effect on the other animals in the actual playthrough?

After that, I also came up with a mountain-style map design, similar to the Zuma game, but with height on the elevation as well. This type of level requires players to start at the same starting point and progress from the outermost circle of the level towards the middle, the first player who managed to reach the end of the middle wins. This type of map incorporates a layer height mechanic, meaning that it may go through several layers from the start to the end, and certain characters, such as rabbits, can move across the layers, but it will require more corresponding restrictions to keep the game fair.