Tree Prototyping!

So I completely forgot about this assignment and it's 3am the day that it's due. Hope you enjoy some nonsensical, delirium.

Assignment was pretty straightforward. Partner up with someone, think of a game in 15 minutes, then PROTOTYPE.

My partner was Josh something. All I remember is that he liked Halo and had a beard. I didn't have any interesting ideas so Josh came up with the idea of some sort of territorial acquisition game. However, after throwing random mechanics at the wall and looking at what stuck, we came up with a trench warfare type of game, where the core mechanics were similar to chess and risks. The following is a brief summary of our mechanics of each version.

Version 1:
Materials: 6x8 game board, units (small blocks), machine guns (gold coins), mines/bunker (cards), dice.
Rules:
Two players.
Each player gets 7 units and 3 machine guns. Victory condition is when opponent loses all machine guns.
Before game begins, players take turns placing their machine gun placements and units. Roll dice to determine who goes first.
Units can be grouped into 2 units. A unit can move 2 spaces, grouped units move If a unit encounters another unit, both players roll and player with higher roll defeats other unit. A grouped unit means extra chances to roll attacks.
If a unit occupies a machine gun nests, they must occupy it for 2 turns in order for it to be destroyed permanently.
Cards are placed in the middle of the field and if a unit enters it, they the number underneath determines a certain effect.
You can use a turn to replenish lost units to the amount of machine gun posts you possess.

Version 2:
Materials: 8x8 game board, units (small blocks), machine guns (gold coins), dice.
Rules:
Two players.
Each player gets 7 units and 3 machine guns. Victory condition is when opponent loses all machine guns.
Before game begins, players take turns placing their machine gun placements and units. Roll dice to determine who goes first.
Units can be grouped into 2 units. Number you roll is number unit can move. For groups, its the dice roll divided by 2. If a unit encounters another unit, both players roll and player with higher roll defeats other unit. A grouped unit means extra chances to roll attacks.
If a unit occupies a machine gun nests, they must occupy it for 2 turns in order for it to be destroyed permanently.
Numbers are placed in middle 4 rows. Before each turn, a roll is made. If a unit is on a number that is rolled, they are immediately destroyed. This simulates land mines.
If a unit is within 4 spaces away from a machine gun nests, a roll is made to determine if they are destroyed by the machine gun. 4-6 is a direct hit and any unit in line of site of a machine gun is destroyed.
You can place up to two bunkers which blocks machine gun fire. You may also replenish units on top of your own bunker.
You can replenish 1 unit per turn.

Version 3:

Materials: 8x8 game board, units (small blocks), machine guns (gold coins), dice.
Rules:
Two players.
Each player gets 7 units and 3 machine guns. Victory condition is when opponent loses all machine guns.
Before game begins, players take turns placing their machine gun placements and units. Roll dice to determine who goes first.
Units can be grouped into 2 units. Number you roll is number unit can move. For groups, its the dice roll divided by 2. If a unit encounters another unit, both players roll and player with higher roll defeats other unit. A grouped unit means extra chances to roll attacks.
If a unit occupies a machine gun nests, they must occupy it for 2 turns in order for it to be destroyed permanently.
Numbers are placed in middle 4 rows. Before each turn, a roll is made. If a unit is on a number that is rolled, they are immediately destroyed. This simulates land mines.
If a unit is within 4 spaces away from a machine gun nests, a roll is made to determine if they are destroyed by the machine gun. 4-6 is a direct hit and any unit in line of site of a machine gun is destroyed.
You can place up to two bunkers which blocks machine gun fire. You may also replenish units on top of your own bunker.
You can replenish 1 unit per turn.



Play Sessions:

Version 1:
Person I played with was Josh and we were just testing our ideas. Since we didn't know any meta strategies, both of us played conservatively. The game was moving pretty slowly, with us grouping all our units together and slowly moving towards the other person's trenches. 20 minutes would pass and neither of us made any progress getting rid of their machine gun nests. We changed the rules a bit, allowing the units to move a little farther, and Josh blitz my machine gun encampments, destroying all three because I had little defenses.

Version 2:
This time I played with Magic Mike Phe. Learning from the last time we played, I wanted this to go a little quicker so I allowed the units to move by the dice number you roll. This increased the playing time significantly and we were able to destroy each other's encampments pretty quickly. Since this was the second time I've played it, I adopted Josh's blitz strategy and destroyed Mike's encampments quickly.

Version 3:
The third time I played was against my brother. I didn't change much to the rules except for the fact that I made the map a little bigger. With more refined rules, and a bigger map, we had more interesting exchanges. The blitz strategy doesn't work quite as well since the map was a lot larger, but once a unit broke through the front lines, it was quite easy to destroy their machine gun nests.

All in all, the sessions were pretty entertaining and coming up with unique, dynamic strategies was a very cool experience. This blog is a little more dry compared to my last one because this is goes into more technical detail about the prototypes and experiences.

"Play" and Board Games

My blog post from last time was pretty cut and dry, lacking the self deprecation and silliness that was evident in my CS100W blogs. Therefore, it's time to NOTCH IT UP A LITTLE BIT EH HEH HEH!?!?!



I may or may not be inebriated during the writing of this post.


Anyway, our task as of last week was to play a couple of board games and write a future session report.

My four person party consisted of Mike Phe, a goblin from the land of Foon, Andrew Soto, another goblin of Foon, and Aidan Nguyen, a fellow countryman...of the land of Foon. You can get to Foon by entering the drive thru of the Burger King located on the "corner of Irving Park and Clark Street in Chicago, Illinois, USA."

Right off the bat, Dark Lord Morgan here forced ME against my WILL to introduce to a bunch of goblins the game of Carcassone. Luckily I wasn't yet dead or reincarnated, so nothing was violated within the contents of my will.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/822/carcassonne

Before we got to playing Carcassone, we decided it was more appropriate to play a simpler and quicker game. Andrew brought ZOMBIE DICE, a game pretty much about testing your luck.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/62871/zombie-dice



The goblin Andrew started the game off, and was immediately met with a couple of shotgun blasts, accruing ZERO BRAAAAIIIINNNSSS. Bigger question is, who's shooting the shotgun? Michonne? Bill? Shawn? World may never know. Aidan in turn was also murdered after having an unlucky two shot gun blast roll. Magic Mike, however, through some dark sorcery was able to roll a couple of brains before cowardly refusing to continue rolling for more brains. What a bad zombie.

I on the other hand, with precision and skill, rolled the most brains that round and had a very comfortably lead. Or so I thought.

Since I rolled so high the first round, I had a skewed perception of the odds of rolling brains instead of shotgun blasts. This in turn led me to aggressively continue to roll, which all ended with me getting any brains because the odds of getting a shotgun blasts were pretty high.

Andrew on the other hand learned his lesson and played way more conservatively, stacking his brains one by one until he initiated the end game by obtaining 13 brains, forcing the rest of us to roll in one last ditch effort.

Safe to say we left with a multitude of holes and Andrew stood atop our corpses as the winner.

In the end, I had a pretty good time playing zombie dice. Egging people to roll further and gamble is the core human experience...to failure. Which is why we do it so we can be the ones to stand atop the rest. HAHAHAHAHAHA. But yea, Zombie Dice is a game where being conservative is the way to win. HOT TIP. BROKE THE META.

Then we played Carcassone. But since we only need one session report for the completion of this assignment, YOU AIN'T GETTING ONE BUDDY.

Blog Post 1: Adopt a classic arcade game

The game I decided to play was Space Harrier. My only familiarity with the franchise was through Bayonetta, where one of the levels was an homage to the original Space Harrier. I played through about 8 levels before I got bored, which took me around 30 or so minutes. It’s a game that gives you an illusion of depth and space where you’re flying into the screen, shooting and dodging enemies. Space Harrier definitely had a spectacle that many other arcade games didn’t have. Some of the enemies were large stone faces or gundam-looking robots. The bosses were mostly all dragons, even a two-headed dragon where you had to damage its head. One of the most frustrating aspects of this game is how difficult it was to aim your shots, especially during boss fights. Only way to change the trajectory of your shot is to move in the direction of where you want to shoot and the momentum will carry your show. There is a little aim assist but it doesn’t help with the boss fights.

It was interesting to see how easily it was for a game to be emulated in a web browser. If I would have played this on an arcade, I probably wouldn’t have played more than a couple of levels since I would need to insert more coins if I were to die early on. I am grateful for the option to insert as many coins as I wanted to, but it removed any sort of challenge or sense of accomplishment as opposed to playing the game on an arcade cabinet where it was mandatory to insert coins to proceed (unless you’re really good.)

Overall it was interesting to see how old arcade games played back in the day and I felt I would have enjoyed my time more if I played it on the original hardware.