New and old

For the board game I'm creating for class I had designed a board yesterday night however after play-testing other people's games and taking a second look at mine I decided I really needed to go over and simplify what I had. So after some sketches I came up with something that's much simpler and what I hope turns out to be better. Something that I've found out after making several games over the past year is that when you're first designing a game it's easy to add a lot of rules that you think are fun. The board then tends to evolve in order to accommodate all those rules, however when other people play the game the rules are difficult to pick up and the board can sometimes be confusing since they other have the rules to explain everything. I find if you then pick out all the key concepts that you really want, and try make the board and rules as simple as you can while still keeping those key concepts, people can have fun playing the game without being bogged down by unneeded things.

One thing that I've found helps when you're making a game is to have every rule explained in detail with an example, all labeled with a title that allows players to find the rule they're looking for clarification on easily. You should also have a quick-start set of instructions that allows players to get right into playing without having to know all the rules. Then when the players have a question about the rules they can read the ones they need to in detail.

This is the older board

This is the newer board

Time for some survival

So I haven't gotten around to making any more cards for the triple S game, however I'm now back at school for another semester in order to get my Game Design degree. I have three major projects until April so I'll be updating this blog with the progress I'm making on those. That being said I've designed 18 cards for a board game that is one of the projects.

It's all about making sure your tribe survives the longest on a island that is prone to many natural disasters. You can build structures that grant bonuses to your tribe, however you need resources in order to build them. There are three technological ages that the island will go through, changing after a certain rounds have gone by, a round is made up of every surviving tribe going once. The ages are Wood, Stone and Metal. An example on how building things goes is if it's the Stone age, you can build anything that's Wood or Stone as long as you have the necessary resources however you can't build Metal things even if you do have the required Metal resources.

There will be places that these resources can be collected on the board by each tribes group of explorers. If they're within the general area of a resource, indicated on the board, the group gathers one of the resource however if the group is right on the resource than the group gathers five of the resource, divided by the number of groups that are on the same resource.

I'll go into more details as I'm producing the game however that's a general overview of some parts of it. Here are the building cards that can be bought with the resources:

Card Look

It's a new year and about time I started working on the card game again. I've been pretty busy however I'm finding some spare time right now so what better then to make some progress with this game. This is the look for the cards that I'm thinking about going with, might change the layout after I've finished all the monsters and figure out exactly how I'm going to layout the playing screen. I'm probably going to work on getting more of the monsters done up this weekend.


















For the card game you use chips that are in the shape of blood drops. I've come up with two possible concepts for how they look, I'm leaning more towards the second one right now. The 'twinkle' is going to be animated and fade in/out as time goes on.

And the creatures keep on coming!

Got a few more finished today :D

Name : Old Lady Velma

Speed : 2

Strength : 2

Sexy : 8

Rare

Name : Manly Beans

Speed 3

Strength : 3

Sexy : 6

Rare






Name : Ac-U Puncture

Speed : 4

Strength : 3

Sexy : 2

Uncommon

Name : Gentleman Cannon

Speed : 4

Strength : 4

Sexy : 1

Uncommon

Guess it's all about the flesh color

So I had some more time today so drew up three cards for the card game I'm developing.

 Name : Weedle The Needle

Speed : 5

Strength : 3

Sexy : 1

Uncommon

 Name : Surly Mop

Speed : 2

Strength : 2

Sexy : 2

Common

Name : Tonne of Flesh

Speed : 1

Strength : 4

Sexy : 1

Common

Select Your Side

Today I've spend about 3-4 hours working on my game, I've gotten the double jump working, bad garbage can now hit and kill rats, and the level selection page is working.

For the double jump, I was having a hard time getting it to do what I wanted, but after taking a look at the code I've been trying to use I realized something, it would be far easier so just delete the guts of the function and start over. After looking back I saw just how complicated I had been making it, when in reality I was able to cut down between 5-10 lines of code and get it to work perfectly.

When I wanted to get the garbage to his the rats as well as the rubbish I first didn't think it would have to be done any differently then the hit detection I have for the garbage hitting the rubbish or the rubbish hitting the rats, however after did some thinking I had to consider that all the garbage and rats only has two targets they were looking for, one is the single rubbish and the other is the non-moving ground. This was easy enough to do if I just kept track of the rubbish's current x and y, along with it's height and width, but since there could be multiple rats and bad garbage I had to think of a different way. I ended up making a 2D array, with each position containing a smaller array containing information about that particular bad garbage. It has it's current x and y positions, it's width and height, if it's been removed from the screen(I used a Boolean) and it's name. This allowed my rat, every time it tried to move, to scan through this array using a while loop, checking to see if it was currently colliding with any bad garbage that was still on screen. The rat kills itself then modifies the array referring to the garbage that hit it, so when the garbage updates it see's that it's collided and shouldn't be on screen anymore so it kills itself.

The level selection page wasn't that much extra work because I've been coding this game so far so it works off what the current level it, so all I have to do when a different level is selected, is to then assign stats.currentLevel to the number of the button clicked. I did have a few problems trying to catch the event that was dispatched when a level was clicked but I was able to fix this by having my map page listen for the buttons on it, then dispatch it's own event to the main page controller when something was clicked. In order to place all the different level buttons using code but without taking too much time I ended up using 2D arrays again with a while loop. Each array inside the main array just contains the x and y position of each level button, this way all I have to do is change those two numbers, which are all in one location, in order to get the buttons to move around. I'm starting to use arrays more and I have to say they really cut down on not only the lines of code that I have to write, but it also makes it easier to go back and make changes later, if you arn't a big fan of arrays I'd really suggest finding a few tutorials and trying to slowly incorporate them into your projects, before long you'll hopefully find them as helpful as I do.