Board Game Deconstruction

The goal of Patrol Lost is to make it from a start tile, through a potentially large map and waves of enemies, to an escape tile.  Only 1 of 5 pawns of the person playing the "good guy" has to make it and survive to the end of the map and survive the turn, to end the game and secure a win for the "good guy."  For the "bad guy" to win the game he must spawn enemies out of sight, and work to ambush or find a way to defeat all of the "good guy's" pawns.

This game is a combat based race/strategy game and very loose in terms of it's rules, setting, and theme.  I'd call it a race because the "good guy" must progress through a dungeon before the "bad guy" can cut him off and kill his pawns.

Patrol Lost is played on printed hex tiles with map routes drawn on them.  The player playing the "good guy" picks 5 pawns, we used my Dungeons and Dragons minis, and the player playing the "bad guys" uses counters, I used various dice.  He has access to a large pool of enemies that is non depleting.  You also need about three d6's but 6 is optimal.  The "bad guys" mobs are all the same stat wise where some of the "good guys" pawns give bonuses to combat depending on their relative hex to each other.

The operative actions of the game for "good guys" are Moving, and declaring Combat.  The operative actions for the bad guys are placing a random tile for open line of sight, discarding tiles lost from line of sight, placing enemies from your pool of enemies, moving enemies, and declaring Combat. The

Resultant actions for good guys are clearing enemies out of the way, progressing through map, and making the map bigger via movement.

Resultant actions for "bad guys" are increasing difficulty, changing the randomly generated map, eliminating tiles so the end goal gets closer, blocking off routes, and eliminating the "good guys" pawns effectively moving closer to the goal of winning the game.

The way the developer controlled space in Patrol Lost was interesting.  The space was able to form and transform changing the environment as the game progresses.  The available play space changes depending on line of sight of the person playing the "good guys".  If one of the "good guy's" pawns loses line of sight of an area, the tiles in that area are discarded and no longer able to be played.  Conversely, if the good player moves to a new hex and new sight lines are created, new paths are open.


Chance has a huge role in the game.  While pieces are moved with some sort of strategy or skill, (or sometimes zerged), chance dictates all combat.  The combat is kind of clunky and weird, but it works.  Players must roll D6's against each other and it's highroll wins, but the results of the combat can be confusing initially.  Positioning also usually buffs the rolls and can sometimes hinder them depending on the "good guy's" pawn class if you play with classes, we did not.

Print and Play Board Game Exploration

 When you think of board games, what does PnP mean?  For me it's always been Pen and Paper, referring to RPG's such as Dungeons and Dragons and the like.  Apparently there is a whole other meaning to PnP.  A world of board games exists, specifically for you to print and play.  These games range from professionally developed to homebrewed and they seemingly have the same broad range of quality, design, and fun factor.

 Age Of Sovereigns

Age of Sovereigns' Website 

First on my list of testing was Age of Sovereigns.  On the surface it looks like a well developed game with interesting art and mechanics, similar to what I would imagine to be a Sid Meyer's: Civilization board game.  After we scratched the surface and popped open the rulebook, however, we realized that we were WAY in over our heads. 

 The game can last much longer than it's estimated 60 minute playtime simply because of it's complexity.  Since we were just picking it up it comprehending the rules and many different win conditions took much longer.  There were arguments over confusing rules and all in all it was just not the right game for what we were aiming for.  The time investment confusion of rules, and the plethora of mechanics caused us to stop playing prematurely and move

on.

Unbound: Endless War

Unbound: Endless War's Website

Unbound: Endless War is the most fun game we played.  It had major replayability, the rules were easy to comprehend, and we could easily modify it to play for more people than the suggested two

The objective of the game is to traverse space with your units and take over the enemy base.  Each turn you were able to summon units from your finite pool of them and place a space hex facedown that could be traveled into.  This brought strategy, bluffing, and an amount of gambling to the table.

There were specialty hexes in the deck such as a supernova, which destroys all adjacent hexes and units, and a black hole, which sucks in your units and traps them there for however many turns per unit that entered.  These added the entirely gratifying "gotcha" moments where you would wreck peoples plans, because the unexplored space tiles essentially became a minefield.

Shattered Olympus

Shattered Olympus Website

Shattered Olympus is a card game eerily similar to Magic: the Gathering.  The main difference is, you draw from a shared card pool, instead of your own deck, and battle the creatures of other players whilst protecting your life pool.  In theory this could be an very fun game, but their translation of land to be actual locations characters had to move through, in order to attack, seemed a little janky.

 All in all it was kind of fun (mostly because I like Magic) and a new experience, but it did not have the sticking factor that would make me want to replay it.  The rules were simple and easy to comprehend, which I now think is very important for something such as a print and play.  The mechanics were also pretty simple, for someone who plays magic, which just added to my ease of just picking it up and playing, but I could see where others would have issues.










More Photos:

Interview with Mick Larkins of Hi-Rez

 

 In game design one of our assignments was to interview a professional in the gaming industry.  I chose producer as I'm interested in eventually taking a leading role at whatever company I end up at.

Now, I play a LOT of Smite.  There's something about a third person camera that just makes the MOBA genre more playable to me and the mythological background that I love.    Imagine my elation when Mick Larkins, Executive Producer and Lead Programmer, at Hi-Rez replied to my random twitter private message that housed a request for an interview.  (Hi-Rez develops Smite, Paladins, Tribes: Ascend and Global Agenda.)  Mick happily answered the questions I posed to him, and here they are:

 

- What Major projects have you been involved with or are you proudest of?

Mick:  "I've been working at Hi-Rez Studios for 11.5 years and shipped Global Agenda, Tribes: Ascend, and SMITE.  I'm currently working on Paladins. "

- In short, what are your responsibilities?

M:  "Currently, I'm executive producer and lead gameplay programmer on Paladins.  I help guide the logistics of the project as a whole and direct the technical gameplay code."

 - How important are the relationships between coders and artists? 

M:  "Extremely.  Artists and programmers work in different styles, so being able to speak each other's language and bridge gaps leads to better communication.  Communication is critical for the creative process to be successful. "

 - What are a couple of the hardest challenges to overcome pre, during, and post production?

M:   "*In pre-production, finding the identity and "pillars" of a game is difficult.  Our production style involves principles of rapid-application-development and prototyping so that we can try hundreds of options, then see what works. 

*In production, the trickiest thing is changing gears to a more solidified pipeline, yet remaining agile enough to make fundamental changes if needed.  We make games as a service and so we pay special attention to analytics of our playerbase. 

*We don't really have a post-production.  Our games are living, service-oriented experiences, rather than ship-and-forget titles. "

- Why do you love your job? 

M:  "It is challenging work, yet when I see fan response it makes it all worth it.  Plus, Monday mornings are typically more interesting than Saturday mornings. "

- How stressful is the work environment during "crunch time?" 

M:  "Crunch time is a very loaded term in this industry, and I'm not quite sure everyone agrees on its definition.  Being a game developer, much like other creative disciplines, requires passion and sometimes long hours.  There is good stress and bad stress.  Creativity requires us to stay hungry and not become complacent, but it is not for everybody.  Bad stress and bad "crunch" comes from poor management. We do not require our developers to work weekends."

- How frequently do people cycle through jobs in your experience. Like how often are people contracted for a certain amount of time?

 M: " At Hi-Rez, we look for rock stars and try to keep them as long as we can. Our employee retention is very high.  Since I've seen this studio grow from 6 people to 275 people (and still growing), there is a tremendous amount of opportunity for folks to shift responsibilities throughout their career path."

 - What is the coolest thing about working for Hi-Rez? 

M:  "We make games from our passion, not because of a particular investment or publisher agreement.  Also, seeing the success of our creative process."

 - Since your games are focused primarily around combat, how did your team finally decide that your combat system was competitive, and more importantly, fun. (That one seems hard so feel free to cheeseball that one if you want lol.) 

M:  "I have always dreamed of games as a perfect platform for competitive viewing.  Our first game, Global Agenda, did not have a pro scene, however we did have the concept of alliances, and so the idea of player-organized teams were there. 

With our next game, Tribes, embraced the e-sport scene.  Also, Tribes among the first free-to-play games on Steam and one of the first games to integrate Twitch directly into the client. 

With SMITE, we decided to make a massive investment into our pro scene and it has really turned into something special.  We now take the competitive side into direct consideration when designing future games, like Paladins."

No matter how many skins I buy, or how close to 700 hours deep in Smite, when do I smash through the wall that makes me pro? 

M:  "Come to SWC this January and talk to some teams! :)"

Being A Game Producer

We had to choose a role in the game industry to research and make a powerpoint explaining it.  Naturally I chose a game producer because who wouldn't love to be a leader.  I actually found out some interesting things about it, the big one being, you don't need any degree for game design, art, or programming.  They're also one of the highest paid members of a game design team.

For this project I interviewed Mick Larkins, Executive Producer, and lead game play programmer at Hi-Rez.  I will upload hat in another post as it was a twitter interview and is going to take some formatting.  For now here is my powerpoint.

https://docs.google.com/a/c.ringling.edu/presentation/d/1EJB1zVxGYWD4zk98_7_uy5s6i04AeAdIKecRqcLpwCY/edit?usp=sharing

A Peek into Freshman Year Game Art

The Sketch

Project Realization

My favorite class from Freshman Year at Ringling was definitely 3d Design.  It felt like the first class to cater toward my major (because it was).  There's something about planning out a 2d image and bringing it to life, in our dimension, that is very fulfilling. My favorite project of the class was the grunt character design project.

Meet the Gurlgug.  A pack predator that destroys and consumes everything in coastal towns and riverbanks cities.  The Gurlgug uses a fisherman's gaff to hook his prey so they can't escape.  Smaller creatures are unfortunate enough to be consumed whole by his gaping maw.