Liar's Dice iterations

Liar's Dice is a game i already loved because it appearance in the gambling tables on Red Dead Redemption.
The game uses dice and any amount of players with the minimum of 2.
Each player secretly rolls an amount of dice, usually 5 or 6, and then the players take it in time to make a guess/bluff at how many of a certain number on the table, for example if I am in a game with 3 others and i have 3 of a certain number i can make an educated guess as to how many are also on the table, depending on how dice are being used by each player.
At your turn you can challenge the previous guess or make one of your own but it has to be either more dice or same amount of dice but a higher number on the dice.
If your guess is challenged and is wrong the you lose a dice but if it is right them the person who challenged it will lose a dice.
The winner is the last person with dice.

The first iteration made was to help people who had lost most their dice before the others as it is a slippery slop when you start losing dice.
The new rule was so that if you got all the same numbers on your dice and that was the amount of dice you had then you got one of your lost dice back, but you couldn't get more than you started with. For example if i had 2 dice and both dice rolled and landed on 2s then i would gain a dice back.
This would help people who had only 2 dice left but might make it too hard to go out when only on 1 dice as there is a 1:6 chance of rolling a 1 and getting a dice back and of course someone might be very lucky and roll all 4s with 4 dice.

A idea i didn't get to try was for there to be 3 dice in the middle, you might be able to tell I am a fan of Texas hold'em poker.
I'm not sure if this would change after every bet because that would really spice things up.

 Also I thought of having a way top swap a single dice of your own choice with someone else's, of their choice. This could be very beneficial for your educated guesses and also bluffing, deciding what to let them know.
I have no ideas as to when they would be traded and rules for that though.

This was very fun and their is quite a lot of potential for other iterations too, in red dead redemption a player can, at any time, choose to declare a guess spot on and if this is so then everyone else loses a dice but if its wrong the player loses one.

hexagon board based shooter game

We started with a basic shooting game with cards and we had to choose one card to lay each turn and flip them at the same time.
The cards were move, move & turn, turn or shoot.
In this game you didn't need to face exactly where you wanted to move but you did always shoot that way.

With a board with no obstacles this became very boring but we just wanted to test the bare mechanics and not have too much skill added to change our opinion of the game.

The first problem we found was that because everyone turned their cards at the same time, people knew if they were about to be shot at and from where so, providing they where already planning to move, they could see where exactly to move to be safe.
We decided to make the cards be turned in order depending on what was layed, first was movement, then move and turn, then turn and finally shooting.
With the plain board not many people got shot at but this addition defiantly helped people get close to winning.

Secondly we doubled the movement because moving was taking too long to get across the board and trap people, we could have halved the size of the board but you need the size to make the tactical blocking (limiting where someone can safely move) possible and without that shooting people was hard.

We then added a move and shoot card to go after shooting, as people always avoided standing in front of the other players in case they chose to shoot, you could only move one spot then shoot but yet again this was abused because of it being last and the others couldn't dodge.

I thought about lots of different level layout and i will try to upload these at some point in the future.
I also toyed around with the idea of different spots for extra defence or some other additional powers like that but i was jumping ahead of my self and really wanted to make the game mechanics work before worrying if powers were over powered or unfair on others. The idea of having something to move to would have helped though as we always had people ganging up on others and the game needed for each player to be worrying about staying alive rather than vengeance and making alliances.

it was nice having this challenge because the place we started from with the mechanics wasn't very good and didn't work at all but this will probably happen a lot when I am developing games in the industry and trying to make other peoples games better.

battle ships iterations

After playing a basic game of battle ships i decided to change a rule to help speed things up as battle ships can take quite a while and an easy way to help was if you got a hit on a ship you could have another go.

hit = extra go:

this did speed things up defiantly because once you found a ship you could potentially destroy it straight away, providing you correctly guessed where it was facing, of course this didn't happen every time as you don't always hit it at one end and then work across the ship every time but it did happen once.
this also added a small element of strategy which could be exploited by hitting the ship once and then taking a random guess to find another ship and doing the same next time until the ship was destroyed and playing again as normal.
the only flaw i found was that it made the game even more one sided when a player wasn't doing so well but i guess that happens a lot in the game anyway, this added mechanic just speeds things up to get to a winner.


I did try the complete opposite too because after all destroying the ships doesn't take too long, its finding the ships that does.

miss= extra go
as soon as i suggested this change i saw the flaw, the person going first could be there forever so I made a 3 guess limit.
this did speed things up but as each guess is so strategic it made the game even more boring for the first few turns and by the end it was just a bit ridiculous and unfair if one player was doing very well, but how do we level the playing field in a complete chance game?




another idea was if you ship got sunk you got the opportunity to shoot a area of effect bomb type weapon on a spot which also hit he other spots which surrounded it, like how minesweeper works.

I also had the idea to be able to move one of your ships a single spot instead of shooting, but not moving onto spots where the enemy has already shot at, this probably wouldn't have worked too well as shooting is essential to finding and sinking the enemy ships. This might have worked in conjunction with the 3 shot each turn rules by maybe making it 2 shots each turn but you can move one spot and shoot once if you wanted to.
this would have been very handy in the later part of the game because you can normally figure out where there longer ships are by looking at the spaces that haven't been hit and seeing where it could fit.


Like always my most ambitious idea is always my first and this really wouldn't work without a lot of work, my idea was to have both teams of ships on the same board and the explosion of your own ship could hep find the enemy ships, this is where the idea for the bomb weapon evolved from.
this would not work at all unless both player drew their ships onto a bit of paper and then a referee was to take both and make master map and then he/she told players if they had it.
Another way for this to work was if one team was ships and the others were submarines. the ships could shoot bomb type weapons and the submarines could shoot missiles that followed a line forward in a chosen direction from the submarine until it hit. This idea was defiantly too ambitious and would not work as the ships would avoid their own spaces thus telling the submarines where they were and the submarines would be forced to reveal their own spaces because of where the missile starts.
this could maybe be fixed by adding a referee and numbering each submarine and saying if it is shooting north, east, south or west but what if the ships where directly on top of the submarines? and the ships would still have the same problem of having to avoid their own ships and after a while would always show where they are.

Bibliography task

Bibliography task.

Books

1. Raph Koster, Theory of Fun for Game Design, 1st ed. (PARAGLYPH PRESS, 2005). 
2. Steve Ince, Writing for Video Games (London: A & C Black, 2006).
 

Articles

 
1. DYLAN LOEB McCLAIN, “Winning Over New Fans By Speeding Up the Game.,” New York Times (2010): 24. 
2. ADAM LIPTAK, “Law Blocking Sale Of Violent Video Games To Minors Is Debated.,” New York Times (November 3, 2010): 16. 
   

Book contributions

1. Jeff VanderMeer, The Thackery T. Lambshead pocket guide to eccentric & discredited diseases, 83rd edition, 1st ed. (San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2003). 
2. Paul Kincaid and British Science Fiction Association.;Mexicon., British science fiction and fantasy : twenty years and two surveys (Staffordshire [England]: Odd Two Out on behalf of British Science Fiction Association, 2010). 

Please let me know if any of these are wrong as I did not change anything but I was useing the Harvard reference adapted for Leeds Met.

thanks for reading and i hope you are as intriged as iam by The Thackery T. Lambshead pocket guide to eccentric & discredited diseases.

Retro Games

We have been looking at pre-1985 'retro' games and trying to decide which one to base an essay on.

It did take me quite a while to decide which to choose as each of my favorites,space invaders, snake, asteroids, pacman, all showed key features of the mechanics and tools I have been learning about to design games.

I have decided to do Asteroids as I feel I could write the most about it and it is, to me, the most unique but that could just be because of borrowed and improved mechanics from other games
As well as looking at it as either paidea or ludus I am trying to break it down with my ever building vocabulary, •movement impetus, tension, threat, tempo, intention, perceivable consequence, story, interface, rules, goals, entities, entity manipulation.

I feel this will be really fun and rewarding but at the moment seems quite daunting but I have already started a bit of it and is going smoothly so far.

Design Tools

Space of Possibility and Pacing in Casual Game Design - A PopCap Case Study by Marcos Venturelli

This article only really mentions 'Paceing' as a tool for designing games but within pace there is four core concepts to make it work well, these are Movement Impetus, Tension, Threat and Tempo.
Unfortunately he mostly quotes Davies' descriptions and adds a little extended bit of information on each but doesn't go into detail on the actual application of adding them to a game.
I did find this article very droll but here are descriptions of each of the concepts mentioned.

Movement Impetus: 'Movement Impetus, is the will or desire of a player to move forward through a level' [Davies 2009] is a quote Venturelli uses to start off his description of movement impetus but goes on to mention it is also about making 'advancement decisions', basically just the player actually choosing to continue playing the game.

Tension: This is the more atmospheric and personal version of threat. It can be altered by the music and the graphics but its more about the players personal feelings that they will fail.

Threat: This is the power struggle of the player vs the actual game mechanics and having to pull every trick out of the bag to beat it but also it relates to each life you have and the 'threat' that you will have to start the level over again. This goes hand in hand with tension as the threat alters the tension in every way, no threat = no tension, but tension does not really affect the threat.

Tempo: This is 'intensity' of the game and how quick the decision making in the game should be, Venturelli mentions this affects the fun of the game. I don't think this is always the case.

Formal Abstract Design Tools, a Gamasutra feature by Doug Church

Church has a different way of looking at 'Design Tools' for computer games, which he calls 'FADT' Formal Abstract Design Tools.

These are Intention, Perceivable Consequence and Story.

Intention: 'Making an implementable plan of one's own creation in response to the current situation in the game world and one's understanding of the game play options' as Church puts it.
Basically its the choices that the player makes when playing the game, i think this covers both Movement Impetus and also Tempo mentioned by Venturelli, as if you choose to carry on moving on with the game the tempo is also affected.

Perceivable Consequence: 'A clear reaction from the game world to the action of the player' is the main quote to sum up Church's view.
I think this covers both what Venturelli calls Tension and Threat but it could also affect Tempo as more time would be needed to decide how to take a big boss down if you really think he can kill you in one hit.
In an ideal world I think that everything in a game should affect the player but should also let the player affect the game world.

Story: 'The narrative thread, whether designer-driven or player-driven, that binds events together and drives the player forward toward completion of the game.' This is the only direct quote to use for Church's view but he also mention a lot about the player-driven side of it, for example in sports games and not just designer-driven stories in the very linear ludus style games, for example sometimes if i get an easy win on a fighting game i set myself of finishing it in a very stylish or spectacular way and that's where the 'Story' for me starts and not at the beginning of the fight.
I would say that Church's view of story would include everything the Venturelli considers as Pace. as movement impetus, tension, threat and tempo all are needed to make the story and indeed a game worth bothering with, at least in my opinion

Iterations to 15 min game

We have been looking at what exactly iterations are but also making iterations to our games we made in the first week during a '15 minute game' exercise
My game is a basic race to the end game where the player rolls two dice and chooses which to use to help them selves move forward and which to hinder the opponent by blasting them in a random direction, this direction was dictated by a six sided dice with two sides saying left, two saying right, one backwards and one forwards (so theres a chance that you will accidentally help someone).

The first problem that was very apparent was the track. it was straight and then a 90 degree turn to the left then straight again to the end, the problem was that whoever got blasted left the most one and this was not meant to help them.
I changed it so that where the original track ended there was a right turn and then straight to the end, so on the off chance someone stayed in the middle then they would win and racing up the edges would be equally slow.
After testing this I found it did help alot.

My game still had alot of problems that I was itching to tweak though, especially the dice that decided what direction the 'attacks' sent you in, when i saw people play it without my help there was much debate if forward, right, back and left was always the same like north, east, south and west or if it was relative to the way your car was facing.
I had the thought of using a 4 sided dice and reincorporating a compass on the track with the relative numbers to show which direction the car should move in.
This seemed to help a lot but a new problem arised... what happens when the car hits the side of the track?

I had an idea for the care to move backwards one space for every space that it should move off the track, for example if i was two spaces away from the right wall and got hit for five right then i would move two spaces to the wall and then backwards three.

I didn't  have enough time to play test this iteration because of helping others with there problems but I found that did help alot in thinking outside the box. The simplest changes can change the way you play the game for the better or  worse but when the game was formed in your imagination its hard to see what really needs to be changed, a fresh set of minds helping you and playing the game through does help so much.