After Class

Well, the semester has come to a close and I've just finished my last class session with CS-108. It was nothing like what I thought it would be, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Being a CS major and the class being called CS-108 (I didn't know it was also called Art-108), I was expecting the focus to be a lot more on programming than things like MDA or "guess who's theory!," but I think that it was good to learn those kinds of things. I still plan to go towards Game Design as a programmer and leave the creative work to the designers, but I'm a lot more confidant with my own ideas and think one day I might try to design my own game, or at least pitch an idea or give feedback without feeling like I have no idea what I'm saying. The course itself was harder than I expected, but that was mostly due to my own forgetfulness and not realizing when due dates were, but all in all I most definitely enjoyed the class, especially the gamemaker project, it was a lot less stressful than the final project.

 I plan to visit the Game Dev club next semester, especially now that I have a 6-7:15 class on Thursdays, and the main thing keeping me from going was the time, since i live over an hour from school and would have had to stay an extra 7 hours at school or 2 extra hours driving to get to it. Finally, I would like to thank professor Morgan for making this a fun class (although I think he forgot about game of the month after the first month)

Final Project

The final project was definitely one of the more interesting things we've done all year, but I'm not sure that's a good thing. The idea I started out with was a rougelike dungeon crawler in which the player would have to make it through a certain number of random floors until they reached the boss. This proved to be a surprisingly difficult task, as Unity (which I decided to use for the project so that I could get some experience using it) makes it fairly easy to randomly generate a single room, but has no easy way to store those rooms so that the player would be able to move between them without having to generate them all over again. I got it to work by making a Room object that had a game-object that was the parent of all the tiles in that room.

But it seems it wasn't meant to be, as I encountered a major bug in Unity that forced me to restart from the alpha code that was stored on my desktop, where the room storage wasn't quite right, and then, as soon as I got it working again, I broke it while adding the level transitions, so I had to settle for a game where the player has to survive through as many rooms as they can.

In the end, although  I'm certainly not too pleased with the outcome, I think the experience was very helpful, as I now know a lot more about Unity, and will be much more prepared for the next time I attempt such a project.

Video Game Lab

The three games I played for the Video Game lab were This Is The Only Level, Canabalt, and Wizard Wizard. These three games, despite all being platformers, are all incredibly different games. On one hand we have This Is The Only Level, which, as its name suggests, has only one level. The catch is that it has multiple stages, where there are various small tweaks that make the game still interesting despite having only one level. Canabalt, on the other hand, is very different, the gameplay is only jumping while your character continuously runs to the right, away from some unseen threat. Unlike This Is The Only Level, Canabalt has very little variety, but it still gets players to keep playing by making them want to beat their previous distance.

 Wizard Wizard, also a platformer, is also unique from the other two. It could be considered the exact opposite of This Is The Only Level, as the way it stay interesting is by having many levels that the player can traverse.

I watched my partner play both This Is The Only Level as well as Canabalt, and those were also very different experiences. This Is The Only Level was hard to watch without trying to give my partner advice, and it made me want to try the solutions I thought of myself instead of just watching, whereas Canabalt wasn't very different to watch than it was to play.

Board Game Prototyping

The game my partner and I created was a turn based game played over a hex grid. It could be considered a strategy game, but it wasn't quite at that stage when we ended class on Thursday. The point of the game was to maneuver your piece to have line of sight of your opponents piece and then roll for attack range, and if they were within range, you defeated their piece and earned yourself a win, played first to 3 wins. The game was kind of fun and there were definitely moments that were stressful or just plain funny, but it wasn't anything anyone would spend money on.

Original Game

Mechanics - Before: The mechanics at the end of class would be grid movement, turn based, and dice rolling

Play 1 - In class: After the brainstorm session in class, my partner and I played the game ourselves. We noticed quickly that the game would be fairly short, and decided to make the game be decided by a first-to-three point system. Even with this system in effect, the games went by quickly, each one taking about 2-3 minutes, the longest one being probably 5 minutes. There were some nerve-wracking moments, such as when we were moving back and forth after continuously rolling low moves, or the time where I thought I had taken the game by getting directly next to the other piece only to roll a zero and enter XCOM flashbacks, but the simplicity of the game simply didn't leave much of an impression.

Missing at point blank range, XCOM style

Play 2 - At Home: I decided to start the at home playtest by playing the original game without making any changes. The first time my family and I played, the game went incredibly quickly, we both made a beeline for each others' pieces, and each round finished within a minute, with it basically being a game of chance. From this, we both agreed that there simply wasn't enough strategy to make the game engaging and prevent it from being completely based on RNG. We increased the number of units from one to three (soldier, scout, and sniper, the alliteration wasn't planned) and gave each of them their own movement and range modifiers, and then started our second game. At this point I should mention that, since my family is in the middle of moving and I didn't have any pieces to use at home, we played in tabletop simulator.

The new and improved rules, not sure if they're readable

Play 3 - Class Again: This time, the game was significantly more engaging. Having 3 different units to move around meant we had a lot more options for strategy. Should I send the sniper and try to get a high roll to take this unit out from a distance? Or should I send the scout and try a rush? we only got to play one game, but even that was helpful, as we decided the ranges were all to long, and so reduced the scouts range to 2 and the Knights range to 4

game played after the rule change, knight is the soldier, thief is the scout, and archer is the sniper

Mechanics - After: after the changes I decided I could finally add strategy to the list of mechanics

The Resistance Session Report

The game I played in class and will write my session report on was The Resistance (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/41114/resistance). The game was played with Nelson Nguyen, Ricky Reyes, Alex Mai, Hoagie Do, Austin Anderson, Fion Leong, and Madhuri Jujare

Round 2 of the first game

Mechanics: The mechanics listed by BoardGameGeek are partnership, simultaneous action, and voting. I would personally also consider it player elimination, as even though no players leave the game, if a player is confirmed as a spy, they've basically been eliminated from the game.

Game 1: After playing a practice game to familiarize ourselves with the rules, we started the first game. The spies were Alex, Hoagie, and myself. The first round, a spy was chosen to go on the mission, but played a pass card to relieve themselves of suspicion. The second round, another spy was placed on the team, and played a fail, but the resistance became suspicious of another resistance member. The third round passed without a spy on the team. The fourth round, which requires at least 2 fails, got it's original team proposal rejected, but thankfully passed the second time with 2 spies on the team, who managed to fail the mission, but the two spies got suspicion placed on them. In the final round, the last spy, who no one had suspicions of (or at least not enough people did), managed to get onto the team and failed the mission, achieving victory for the spies.

Game 2: In the second game, Alex and myself were once again on the spies team, but this time our ally was Nelson. This time, the first round passed without any spies, but the second round ended in a failure. Suspicion quickly fell on the correct person, and all other rounds managed to succeed (round 4 had one fail, but required two to fail)

Summary: The Resistance's rules were easy to learn and were quickly grasped after only one practice game. We were able to play one practice game and 2 real games within the class time, with about 15 minutes remaining in class, which means the games took an average of ~17 minutes. I only ever played as a spy, so I can't comment on playing as the resistance, but most of the fun of the game came from managing to convince the other players that you were innocent, and laughing as you played a fail card. I imagine the Resistance players would be more stressed during team picking, since they don't know who to trust.
 

Adopt an Arcade Game

For this blog post the class was required to play a game off the Internet Arcade from archive.org, and I chose to play good old Tetris. I've played many versions of Tetris on many different platforms, including the arcade cabinet, so I thought it would be a good game to comment on how playing it on an emulator is different from other platforms.

One of the first things I noticed was that the game was actually much easier on an emulator, as arrow keys are much more accurate than an old arcade machine joystick. Other than that, the emulator had a lot of performance problems, and constantly slowed down. Compared to versions of the game designed for computer, rather than emulated arcade machines, It ran very poorly.