Game over man...game over

As you may have noticed there have been some changes around here, and they have been made for good reason. I have finished (for the most part) my second year of university at UOIT.

4 months of relaxation and full time work are ahead, i may be posting less as i will be busy over the summer, but I have found the light and have left the black...and yet i shall return soon enough

PART 2: ART GAME CRITIQUE

The path is a short horror game from Tale of Tales. Although I wouldn’t categorize it as “short” as the path never ends. The game gives the player one instruction; go to your grandmother’s house…and try and stay on the path.

The player can choose one of 6 girls to play, differing in age and style. Each girl has a different experience in the forest, and can interact with a set amount of items.

The player has complete freedom to go wherever they wish, but they quickly learn that if you go into the forest to explore, you will get lost. When out in the forest the player can find items/occurrences that trigger memories, they can also find flowers that are scattered all over the forest.

After finding a couple of items in the forest, the player is given a hint to where the wolf is. The wolf is some form of outside influence on the girl, which differs depending on which girl was chosen. A very nice cut scene is played once the player interacts with the wolf, and brings the player back to the path right in front of the grandmother’s house, left to walk home in the rain.

The main influence in making this game is the story of red riding hood. The story of a little girl making the decision whether or not to stay on the path on the way to her grandmother’s house, and the wolf she encounters.

This game has a lot of suspense, and it is meant to scare you. When playing through the game (in the dark, on my own, late at night) the sound effects will shock you, the strange images that come up on the screen confuse you. And overall you end up feeling like something is watching or following you throughout the entire game.

The game did its job well, they wanted to scare people, while also showing the players the stories they wanted to convey. They did this perfectly (if you play all the way through) with the progression of the girls in their age and the different “wolves” that they come in contact with. The best example of this is the first wolf. The player at a point in the game encounters a massive wolf that’s flying through the forest and the player must “catch a ride” so to speak. But the main thing was how sudden and unsuspected the wolf’s arrival is, it causes so much surprise in the player.

The controls are even worked into how the story is told. Specifically when you try to run, or move faster than just a slow walk, the screen will pull up and away from the character, sometimes even blocking your entire view of what’s below. This has two effects; first it forces the player to stop and smell the roses, and take their time when going through the forest, and second it causes the player to run in circles and get lost, as they can never see what’s in front of them.

Overall the path is an amazing game that makes you feel fear, makes you want to explore, and sometimes scares the crap out of you. From the very well done sound effects and music, to the cut scenes in the grandmother’s house and with the wolves, this game tells a very old story on a level that most would have never thought of.

PART 1: PROTOTYPING

Business Card Game: Busy-ness:

Design a collectible card game for business cards to facilitate social interaction

Most collectable card games involve some sort of monster battle and trading system. The game that I have come up with takes that into account.

Busy-ness would involve each player collecting a set of business cards; the business cards themselves would be based off of existing companies and ranked according to the position in the company and the type of company that the person belongs to.

The main goal for players in this game is to collect all of the highest level employees that they can, and therefore gaining power over other players. (Much like the Pokémon card game, this game has no ending)

There are two main strategies to playing the collecting game. Players can either fight for their jobs, or switch who they work for.

Fighting for their jobs would be a player vs. player experience each player can chose only 5 employees from their portfolio, each employee would go up against an employee from the other player. Who wins each battle will depend on the ranking of the employee, and the company that would have the advantage in the situation. The player who wins the most battles gets to keep whatever employees they defeated as well as the ones that they played with.

Changing who they work for is the simple idea of trading cards with another player. There are rules however; employees from different company types can only be traded at the same ranking, employees from the same type of company can be traded as much as wanted, but work on the simple fact that the trade must even out (the total value of each player’s trade must be the same)

Overall I think that the cards could, instead of being purchased or made up to be fake, be real business cards that people have collected over the years of their lives. This would lead to a game mostly played by the working ages after high school. Still being a fun game, but relating specifically to the situation of the city life/business work lifestyle.

Linear Algebra Game: Down Sizing

Design and prototype a simple mini-game to teach linear algebra concepts.

Linear algebra concepts are hard to teach via the everyday methods. There is no hands-on feeling with dealing with math like this, and hence causes a lot of students to fail at working with linear algebra problems in the future.

Dot product is one concept in particular that I thought could be made into a game, and perhaps teach students in a more hands on way, how to use this method.

My concept is Down Sizing, a puzzle game much like the stacking flash games you see all over games sites on the internet. The player would stack 6 towers, each comprising of skyscraper pieces that are shaped differently. After the player is finished stacking the towers, each towers number would be calculated, by how many blocks fell off and how many still stood on the tower. With these numbers the company that the player works for will inform them that some changes have to be made, and all of the buildings they have made, will be moving into one skyscraper. The player then receives a chart of the company’s calculations as a dot product equation.

Eg:

Tower downsizing results 1 2 -3 -2 5 3

These towers must converge, and some changes will take place as follows:

1 x -2 + 2 x 5 + -3 x 3 = -1

Your building does not have the resources to hold its current size, The top floor of your highest building must be removed

After receiving the message the player would then control a wrecking ball and have to remove only the number of levels calculated by the player in the note.

I believe this would be a good teaching tool as it would get the player to calculate the dot product in order to figure out how many levels must be removed; of course the numbers would get larger as the player progresses through the game.

UOIT game: Degreedom
Design and build a prototype board game around the UOIT theme

The game I decided to build is called Degreedom. It is be a turn based strategy game where up to four players battle it out to get to the ladder to their degree and/or career.

Players move across a board that is split up into 4 sections, and each section with 2 stages.These sections and stages represent the average number of years and semesters a student must go through to achieve their degree. The board is filled with roadblocks, tests, and decision points to change the way a player must strategize to get through the game.

The players move through the board by way of playing cards. Each player is initially given 2 cards between the value of 7 and Ace (chosen at random) and at the beginning of each turn the player can chose to either A: pick up another card or B: play a card to move through the board.Movement is simply the value of your card, divided by two (rounding down)
Roadblocks are things like group projects and presentations. The only way to pass through these roadblocks and possibly pass the other players is by working with another player and adding each other’s points to see if they can pass through. A score of 21 is required to pass a roadblock.
Decision points are placed at chokepoints on the map, which may be skipped by passing through a roadblock. These points will give the player a ethical choice that they have to make, such as using the extra time in the night to study, or using that time to relax. Each choice would result in a different extra card added to the player’s hand.
Tests are points in the game that come at every stage end. Only one player can pass through the test stage at a time. This is achieved by having the highest score out of all 4 of the players that arrive at the line. Score is determined by a single card in the player’s hand, chosen by the player.
The win condition is simple. Whichever player has the highest score on the final test wins.