Draft Design #3: Escape!

Theme of the week is: Escape!

...and through another collaboration with alphablu3, LinCheAn and verguzjansen, We have came up with something special, what we would like to call: Mouse Lab!

...And Voila, once again!

...not that in any sense the map shown above you makes sense at all at this current time, but, here comes the explaination.

The story of the game is about a mouse being trapped in a labyrinth (note: Lab stands for Labyrinth, not Laboratory). Inside the big labyrinth, the mouse needs to find pieces of cheese that are scattered around in the place somewhere. Using their keen sense of smell, the mouse could identify which squares contain the cheese and this has been indicated with the slightly-orange-shade-of-yellow on the map above. After gathering all the cheese, the mouse needs to go to the mouse hole indicated in dark blue on the map.

...That sounds quite straightforward isn't it? and it's not going to get any harder somewhat, it's just a mouse gathering cheese...

That's where we spruce things up, there would be 2 obstacles that halts the mouse in their search of the golden cheese; enter: Cat and Mousetrap.

Simple rules put upfront, the mouse will die if the mouse touches a cat or a mousetrap. The difference between these two are that the cat are able to move one or two steps every time the mouse move.

...That is still quite simple, isn't it? Just need to avoid the cats and the mousetraps, they would be clearly indicated in the map, aren't they?

That's where the things got even harder for the mouse....

The mouse is only limited to 4 line of sight radius for cats, so he may not know where and when the cat might show up. And a staggering 2 line of sight radius for mousetraps. These are in for the surprise and difficulty factor for the mouse...

Think you can have what it takes to be the mouse?

Well only if you can solve this:

Voila... THE COMPLETE LAYOUT OF THE MAP, with the traps and cat paths and everything.

The point is that the complete layout is the only thing the players would not see, the masters of the game define the location of the cat and the mousetraps and tells them to the player. which will then take preventive measures to make sure nothing bad is going to happen to the mouse.

Regardless, this game will be up for playtesting some when in the future.

Draft Design #2: Territorial Acquisition

The theme for this week is Territorial Acquisition, and the first game that I have popped out in my mind is Chess.

With all the minds of the four of us, game designer (co-developed with: alphablu3, LinCheAn and verguzjansen), we have come up with this:

Voila!

BattleChess, A variation of chess.

The pieces are arranged with a facing position, the thing would move as it was in a normal chess, however there is a twist: The pieces have to move regarding their own direction they are facing, thus, the possible moves of the pieces are:

Pawn
Two or one step to the front, for the first move, one step to the front if not, one step diagonal to attack. Not possible to change facing position.

Rook
Sideways and forward, regarding to the facing position

Bishop
Diagonal to the front, regarding to the facing position

Knight
Two steps front and one sideways or two step sideways and one step front, regarding to the facing position

Queen
Diagonal, straight or sideways to the front, regarding to the facing position

King
The only exception, the King is able to move one block to any direction.

The players each would take turns as a normal chess would, a player would move consecutively towards the other. A player would have the option to move their chess pieces, or alter the facing position for any piece except the pawn.

Here's the twist: Each pieces have hitpoints and an attack point. When a piece is attacked (a capture, if it was of the normal chess rule), the piece would suffer an attack on the hitpoint meter and would be reduced by the attack points. The piece would be captured if the hitpoints is reduced to zero, however if the hitpoints are not reduced to zero, the defending piece would retort the attack and the attacking piece would suffer the attacking damage of the defending piece.

the table of the hitpoints and the attacks are listed here:

Pieces	Hitpoints	Atacks

Table of the hitpoints and the attacks of the pieces.

The game would end when the hitpoints of the King is reduced to zero, there would be only one condition of draw to the game, no stalemate, no king-king stand, as the king would have to face each other off in a manner, if after 50 of king-king stand, the king with the highest hitpoints would win, if the hitpoints of the king are the same, the game would draw.

Review: The Golden Era of Gaming, The 80s - Dragon's Lair (Cinematronics, 1983)

Think... at the 80s, what do you think the typical video games to look like. Pacman, Mario, Donkey Kong, etc. The graphical hardware limitations might be a factor in determining the depiction of the characters of the games. They are nothing but sprites, mishmash of pixels being fused together into something that makes it look like something that people could imagine (and boy! Video games of the 80s does require a whole lot of imagination to make sense).

Super Pitfall!, one of a classic 1980s game.

It would be safe to imagine that all of the games of the 80s look like a standardized colour blocks aligned to each other, like the picture above, right?

...The answer is not... quite...

Ladies and Gentlemen, may I present to you this:

Dragon's Lair

...And no, I am not bluffing, this game was made in 1983, it was released to the arcade system (Proof, if you don't believe me).

From what I've shown you, it won't be a surprise but at that point of time, the graphics provided on this game is the piece-de-resistance. It was often considered as the most revolutionary; it became revolutionary enough for people to pay twice the usual price for an arcade machine usually is at that time ($0.50 rather than the usual $0.25). To add more on the game's impact on the history of video gaming, this game is one of the three video games that are featured on the Smithsonian Institution, along with Pacman and Pong.

The story of the game might be called a cliched damsel-in-distress that is captured by a dragon and needed to be saved, a hero would step up to the challenge and tried to save the princess from apparent danger. That's where the adventurer Dirk the Daring and the princess Daphne would fit. The ending of the game itself is as predictable as one would read a princess in a fairytale story, Dirk slays the dragon, frees the princess and both of them lived happily ever after.

The castle, princess Daphne was confined here

The player would have control of Dirk in a few aspects, the controllers of the arcade machine consist of a joystick and a button for the sword. Dirk needs to perform specific movements at a specific time to proceed with the game, if a wrong button is pressed at the wrong time, the player would lose a life. For example, if a snake appears, the player should use their reflexes to press the sword button, killing the snake, else the snake kills Dirk. On the other hand, if there is a landslide on the right area of the screen, the player should move the joystick to the left, if the player moves to the right, the landslide kills Dirk.

A ghastly being appears, press the sword button to kill it!

Dragon's Lair can be classified as both a memory game and a trial-and-error puzzle solving game. The main challenge of this game is that the player wouldn't be able to finish the game on his/her first playthrough, the player would need to have a lot of memory on each stage pattern, what will come next and what button to press and when. The process might take a strenuous amount of time (I have played the game for at least 50 times, and yet I am still dying on the stupid bits of it), and will find people coming back for more to just see how would they fare against their previous self, getting a tiny tad further into the story each time. But believe me, it feels great to:

Turn this...

...into this!

Dragon's Lair received much of an impact that the game was ported into home entertainment system, some of which are: Floppy disks for PC and Apple Macintosh, Catridges for Commodore 64, Sega CD (Add-on to the Sega Genesis), Philips CD-i, Panasonic 3DO and more recently is available on a direct download from the PlayStation Network to both the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable. The game has also spawned their own sequels and remakes, some notable series of the Dragon's Lair are:

Dragon's Lair on Nintendo Entertainment System (1990)

Dragon's Lair II (1991)

...and the newest so far: Dragon's Lair 3D (2002)

Whatever made Dragon's Lair famous (might it be the revolutionary graphics, the new take on the video gaming controls, or just plain overpriced machine on the arcade corner) made it to be well known to the world as it is now, Start your Questing!

Draft Design #1: A Race To The Finish

The theme for this week is A Race To The Finish....

...and what I have came up with is this...

Voila!

It might seem to look like gibberish, but this is a game of strategy and simulation combined with a racing element out of it.

This game was jointly designed with alphablu3 and LinCheAn to design this game, they are awesome people, check out their blogs!

Each player is a horse trainer, and every week the horses participate on a race. The goal of this game is to be the last player having money (i.e. Make everybody except yourself bankrupt). Each player would have a starting money of $500.

The training phase is when the players choose to train their horses. There are 2 status that the horse can be trained in, stamina and speed, each status training would cost $50. The speed status starts at 10 and would be incremented by 10 each training and have a status cap of  150, while the stamina status starts at 10 and would be incremented by 15 each training, and have a status cap of 300. For both of the training, there is an option to use a trainer, which doubles the training fee, but also doubles the outcome of the training. Each player can allot 6 days of training or day off (no training fee), on the 7th day, all of the players comes to the competition phase. For each competition phase, the player would have to pay $50.

The competition phase is when players compete for the prize money to train their horses even further. Each of the horses have a fixed initial stamina of 5000, and each turn costs 500 stamina minus the current stamina of the horse (e.g. if the horse has a stamina rating of 200, each turn will cost 300 stamina). Trainers could also let their horses to jog, instead of run, this will reduce the stamina cost to 0, and would increase their stamina regeneration to whatever their stamina rating is (e.g. if a horse has a stamina rating of 50, and the player chooses to jog, the horse would regenerate 50 stamina). Players could also choose for the horse to sprint, sprinting costs 1300 minus the current horse stamina rating (e.g. if a horse has a stamina rating of 100, and a player chooses to sprint, the horse would spend 1200 stamina that turn). If the horse's stamina fall below 1000, the horse enters tired mode, and will not consume any stamina but will slow down. Jog reduces the speed of the horse by half, tiredness will reduce the speed by 75%, but sprint would double the speed, thus the following table is derived:

State	Base Stamina Cost	Speed
Run	500	100%
Jog	0	50%
Sprint	1300	200%
Tired	0	25%

The table of the speed-to-status-to-stamina costs.

Each week would have 6 distances, incremented by each week , these are: 1000, 1500, 2000, 3000, 4000, 5000. The horses would move in a spinner of 5 values each value is a speed multiplier, the quotation would be as of follows:

Spinner	Speed Multiplier
1	1.00x
2	1.25x
3	1.50x
4	1.75x
5	2.00x

Spinner-to-speed multiplier table.

Thus, a possible scenario of the game is when a horse has a speed rating of 50, and uses sprint, while spins a 3 on the spinner, the horse will move 150 steps (50 x 200% x 1.50).

The winners of the race would be awarded money, the money division table is as follows:

Position	Prize Money
1	$150
2	$100
3	$30
4	$0

Table of prize money of 4 player games.

Position	Prize Money
1	$150
2	$75
3	$0

Table of prize money of 3 player games.

Position	Prize Money
1	$100
2	$25

Table of prize money of 2 player games.

After the racing phase, the training phase is re-run again. The players would play until the last player has money left.

Review: Back to the 70s - Pong (Atari, 1972)

The 1970s was a dawn of a new era in gaming, The all great grand-daddies of the newer generation of gaming started in the form of video gaming. It started in the development of a game entertainment system for homes (dubbed as "Interactive television" at the time). The Magnavox Odyssey in 1972 was the result of the 21 long years of conceptualization, exploration, and design.

The Magnavox Odyssey, The first ever home video game console

The Odyssey is nothing more than two paddles that can be moved horizontally and vertically through the dials (the rotary thing on the box-looking controller), don't believe me, look at this:

The actual screen of a TV hooked on to a Magnavox Odyssey.

But wait, does it feel familiar? Whether it is the two moveable paddles on the screen or the lack of certain graphics thereof, this console inspired to create one of the most well-renowned grand-daddies of video game of all time, and that is..... *drumroll*

Pong.

Pong is a game created by Atari in 1972, it is a recreation of a game of table tennis (ping pong) to a video game. where a player plays a match against another or a pre-programmed computer. When it is initially set up in a small bar, the game was an instant hit. The day after, the arcade machine was receiving complaints of quarters not being able to be inserted in the slot, after close inspection, the coin box was fully loaded with coins that it can't take more.

...And that's when the video game industry sparked the breath of life...

Pong itself has a simple game mechanics of two player, or a player against a computer, moving the paddle back and forth via the means of a rotary controller (much like the odyssey), several re-creations of Pong has different controllers such as keyboard input (up and down) or a mouse input (the paddle moves vertically with the mouse).

The ball in play would start to move towards one paddle, and the direction where the ball moves next would be indicated with the position of where the ball has landed on the paddle, if the ball hits the paddle on the right end, the ball would move towards the right, and vice versa, if the ball hits the paddle on the left, the ball would move towards the left. Both players would try to return each other's ball movement and will score if the ball passes the paddle of the other player.

Paddles are being moved to return the ball towards the opponent

The goal of this game is simple; it is to score as many as possible while conceding as little as possible from the other player, like a table tennis match would. The limits of the player being considered a winner may vary between Pong consoles and variations, some Pong variations would consider a player would win after reaching a certain points, some would have a time limit and the player with the highest score wins, but most of them would just play until the players stop playing.

Boom, I scored!

The difficulty level of this game also varies to the kind of Pong variations that are present, some Pong games are incredibly and impossibly difficult, because the computer would know where exactly the ball is going to land and position the paddle on that spot. Other Pong games, not as so, because the computer is programmed to return most of the shots but not all.

An impossibly hard Pong game, I don't score at all

Other than it being a simulation of a table tennis match, the game simply has no story to imply howsoever, one could call it, a never-ending table tennis match of two competitors fighting to get higher score than the other.

At the time, Pong was considered revolutionary and took shape of the video game arcades that we know now. At that time, a single Pong machine could take in up to $40 a day, which equates to 160 plays, it was rare then for an arcade machine to produce that much of an income. Pong generated a huge pubic attraction and became one of the video games that will surely go down in history.

Play the remake of Pong in Java here!