CAGD 112 Eporfolio 2

Flipbook

I can't embed the video because of the file size, so here's the first frame of the video. For the Flipbook assignment, we took hundreds of pictures and played them rapidly to create the illusion of motion. I used a monkey figure and some playing cards to make it look like the monkey is playing a game of solitaire. As I don't have a tripod, getting the setup right was tricky as I was limited to just what I had in my dorm room. If I could move the camera, I would prefer a more higher angle to view the cards better. 

Hyper-Realism

For the Hyper-Realism assignment, we used a variety of digital editing effects to combine our source files into a hyper-real result: something that can't feasibly exist in real life. I edited this statue to make it appear as if it is coming out of a stone wall. I also edited the holes from the tree to make it look like the wall was full of tiny holes. My goal was to make something that looks creepy, and I think I succeeded.

Portrait

For the portrait assignment, we had to take a portrait of someone, so I asked my roommate to help be my subject. The editing for this was fairly simple compared to the other projects, I just adjusted the color values of the image to make the reds stand out more and the greens be slightly duller. I also increased color contrast on the subject to make him stand out more. 

CAGD 170 Unit 3 Postmortem

 For Unit 3 I was part of Group 6, and we made the game "Capital March." The core elements of our game are based around a map of the US states where players buy up senators, using money they earn on the stock market, and manipulating the game through elections. Because our game is very strategy-based, we aimed for those types of players like the Competitor or the Director. For the age demographic we were thinking older than 12, since the subject matter probably would probably be more interesting to people who understand the US government. 

The first elements of the game we developed were the map and choosing where to start, then expanding. There are 2 buyable senator tokens per state, and players expand out from where they start to try to control as much of the board as possible. We built in the money system to go with this. We planned for players to have a sort of auction if they're competing over the same senator where it goes to the highest price, but later in development realized that was hard to keep track of, so we fixed this problem with stacking the senator tokens to indicate how many times it's been bought (and therefore how high the competitive price should be). We wanted to give players lots of different strategic choices, and this system succeeded at that right away by letting players pick where to start and where to expand to. Players can also choose to buy the second senator of a state to reinforce it, though later on we made this a bonus move that doesn't take up a turn since the lack of expansion otherwise makes it less effective than buying one in a new state. 

The stock market came in pretty fast after our money system. We came up with the idea of using tokens to represent how much stock players have as a good representation of value. For balancing it we changed the numbers a few times, but generally wanted stocks to rise on average (with about a 66% chance to go up each turn) so that way they're worth using. This is reflected by how inflation in the real world means that putting value in assets makes it more resistant to inflation and therefore more valuable. 

All of those mechanics were ones we had planned out from the start. My partner came up with the initial idea of the subject matter of the game, money and corruption of politicians, and I came up with a lot of the early skeleton (100 senators, money, stocks). After some playtesting we liked this game but still felt it was too simple and didn't have enough to mix things up or keep it interesting. So in a later version, we had the idea to add elections.

Elections reward players for spreading wide but having deadlocked states gives risk to players who don't double-up their states. The balancing of this was pretty intricate, but mostly came from thinking of simple solutions to different contingencies (such as if a state has one of each senator, who does the vote go to?). An integral part of this system is that votes can be bought for cheaper than the price of a senator both lets players make comebacks as well as lets players make risky plays through elections and have access to them earlier. After some testing and development, we made it span over multiple turns so that way the starting player has less of an advantage because now there's room for 2 turns of back-and-forth between the players. The elections pretty naturally tied into the stock market, which integrated everything together excellently as we now had 3 different systems that fed into each other. You use stocks to get money, you use money to buy senators and votes, you use senators and votes to win elections, you use elections to improve your stocks. 

One final addition we made was a bonus election result which is the choice to call a recess and skip a few turns. The idea behind this was to prevent long, drawn-out games by letting a player with a lead speed things up to put pressure on the other player. This pressure hopefully forces a confrontation.

CAGD 170

The group I partnered up with for our Unit 3 Playtest made a game called Gold Rush, which was the first one I play-tested with my partner. It was a pretty fun game to playtest, and we were able to get it moving pretty quickly once we started playing.

When reviewing it to give them feedback, one of the first things I did was run some probabilities. In the game you receive amounts of gold by rolling dice, and I was really struggling to get anything. However, upon doing the math, it seemed to be about a 50/50 chance every time you roll, so I was just getting unlucky. However, there were upgrades to assist with this issue, but all of them costed more gold than I was getting. As my partner realized, with his luckier rolls he didn't really have a need for them. So through our testing of the emergent properties of the game, we found that the pretty narrow price range for their shop was too steep a price for struggling players to have access too, but for well off players it was more worth it to just save your money for the win condition of getting 200 gold. However, I praised a lot of the upgrade designs, with some good variety as well as good limits and breakers (for example, increasing your storage space per mining trip to allow players to possibly return with more gold each time to catch up).

• For the players of the game, it's two-player and player-versus-player. 
• The objective is to get 200 gold. 
• The procedures are rolling dice and using a spinner to return gold, as well as buying items from a shop. 
• The rules determine how much gold is given based on each roll and the utilities of the shop items. 
• The resources are gold and shop items. 
• The conflict is that the game is a race between players, as well as being able to buy items that sabotage the other player. 
• The boundaries are fairly abstract, but mainly encompass the two actions you can do as well as the limit on how much gold you can make per turn.
•  The outcome is based on which player wins by completing the race first.

Another game I checked out was called Traveler. I really liked its formal elements of progressing along a board with random encounters, and I really liked a lot of the random encounter cards, with lots of interesting mechanics and variety. The major criticisms I had of it was mostly consistency in its terms and definitions. For example, it used the term curse to refer to a couple different mechanics and didn't really define how it worked as far as I could tell. It also had characters choose one of three classes at the beginning of the game but didn't explain how this changed gameplay. I also assumed players moved along one space at a time, but it's possible there was a different mechanism; however it wasn't immediately obvious on the rule sheet like basic mechanics should be. I still enjoyed reading through everything and think the game has a lot of potential for our next two revisions.

One last game I checked out was called Fury, a player-versus-player fighting game where players can choose to attack or protect specific points of their body. The premise for this game is really cool to me, as well as the main mechanics of allocating different points (distributed by drawing cards) to different limbs or organs to defend yours or attack your opponents. Overall I really liked this one, with my only criticism being some specific organization on the rule sheet.

CAGD 170 Unit 2 Postmortem

For Unit 2, I was part of Group 5. For our project, we had to create a two-player board game themed around fast food in the rhythm genre, aiming at a target age range of 30-40 year olds. We made our game, "Corporate Chaos" as a player-versus-player board game in which players attempt to capture their opponents pieces under a restrictive time limit. Players can combine their own pieces to make 15 unique combinations to choose from, as well as pick up to 6 pieces to add to the board over the course of the game. Our timing system is a playlist of 90s music (to hit the 30 to 40 demographic) of at least 7 songs, in which players can add a new piece at the start of each new song, and the winner is the player with the most points awarded for capturing pieces at the end of the playlist. 

When it came to designing the game, we only encountered one major problem. That was playtesting, which was really hard in an online environment. One of the reasons we were inspired by chess is the way that people used to play it across great distances through letters; because every spot on the grid can be expressed by a letter and a number, if two people each set up their own board, it's super easy to communicate your moves to the other person (ex: Knight to E5) and have them understand and replicate what you're doing. We were able to get in a few viable playtests in this way. However, it was still substantially more difficult and less than we would've been able to do in an in-person class. Online, we had lots of limiting factors like printer access, physical desk space, and especially time. 

Despite that, I think we were able to create an effectively designed game. We focused on making a game that's easy to understand, and that stayed throughout. Our rule sheet is only two pages, and the setup and playing of the main game is described in only 5 paragraphs. We increased the complexity with each version, I think to the benefit of the game. The early versions, however, weren't nearly as interesting or unique because of this. We tried to focus on only a few mechanics that are versatile enough to make up a whole experience. 

The development process was pretty easy for us, considering that we kept in mind that we wanted to keep it straightforward and focus on only a few central mechanics. By the final version, this ended up being: adding elements as the timer progresses, and combining pieces. We both knew that giving players meaningful choices makes for a fun game, so we made these elements as customizable as possible. Players get to pick one of 3 unique pieces with 2 copies each to place anywhere in the back row of the board. That's already 24 possibilities. With combination pieces, we originally only had the Pizza Hut and Taco Bell pieces combinable. However, we realized for the final version that the game would be more interesting if the players could combine any two pieces. This results in 15 different possible combined pieces (although some may be better than others). Either way, the player has a lot of choice in how they set up their pieces. 

On our first playtest, we found that the game was too slow, and we were nowhere near done by the time the playlist was up. So we replaced the original objective of capturing the king with a "most points wins" objective instead. We then assigned each piece point values. We did this to encourage players to be more aggressive and make riskier plays, making the game more exciting and frantic and improving its pace.

CAGD 170 Solitaire Postmortem

 I am Milo Bruschke from Group 4. For our Solitaire mod, our group changed the rules in three main ways. First, we changed the objective to be to collect only the royal cards,  listed as the king, queen, and jack of each suit. Second, we changed the behavior of these cards, so that any number card can be played on top of them, but will need to be discarded if it remains on the royal card when it is collected. Third, we reorganized the tableau and stock pile, to make the tableau much bigger and transform the stock pile into a six card hand.

These game mechanics were intended to develop this emergent play: without a great deal of luck, players probably won't be able to uncover enough of the tableau to succeed unless they utilize the royal cards as spaces to play number cards on. So the player can "sacrifice" cards by getting them discarded in order to uncover more space. This forces the player to take risks; moving a number card onto a royal card will uncover extra space on the tableau, but could mean the player misses out on a card they'll need later on.

There's several ways for the player to approach this. A player could just play risky and sacrifice cards, although this might harm them later on. A player could mitigate this risk by sacrificing only low-value cards, such as aces or twos. Alternatively, a player can sacrifice multiple cards at once, getting rid of as much as possible to clear lots of space on the tableau. Or, the safest strategy is to move number cards atop royal ones only temporarily until a different position can be found for it. Because of this complex emergent mechanic of "sacrificing," players can approach the problem in a variety of different ways. They can play risky or safe. 

Through our playtesting, we found that these core mechanics worked really well. We came up with the concept pretty early on and built the rest of the game around it. The iterative design process mostly served to help balance the game. For example, our original version had a ten card hand. However, this meant it was too easy for players to rely on it instead of using the risky royal cards. So for our second version, we reduced the hand down to 6.

During our playtest with another group, they initially found the game very challenging. We intended for the sacrifice mechanic to be something the player learns how to do after some trial and error, so the play-testers found the first time playing fairly difficult. To help fix this problem, we added a visual explaining how sacrificing cards works, as well as some written tips to help guide new players along.

Project completion was pretty easy and efficient for our group. Because we developed a solid core concept early on, most of the work was just writing up the rules and revising them. This was only about a page of writing and we completed it pretty quickly. The other work for our project was creating graphics for the rule sheet. This was also carried out in a timely matter.

Overall, this project was a fun experience that taught us the importance of communication between game designers and players. We developed a unique game through playtesting and refined it both in balancing and in clarity of objectives and mechanics to players. Getting other people to playtest your game can help find flaws in how the game is explained, as you the developer, who is already very familiar with how the game works, might not be able to catch that.

CAGD 170 Solitaire Mod

I was part of Group 4. For this project, we were tasked with developing a mod for the card game solitaire. I used to play solitaire a lot as a kid, so I was already very familiar with the game.

My initial instinct was to think simple: come up with one or two major changes and make minor tweaks afterwards to match. To be honest, after a few minutes of rearranging the cards around, my partner and I came up with a core idea: instead of organizing and then collecting all the cards in the deck, the player instead had to unearth a smaller number of cards from a larger pile. This ended up being the twelve royal cards, giving the game a sort of "revolution" theme, trying to seek out the royalty attempting to hide among the populous.

To make the tableau a much bigger place for the royal cards to hide in, the stock pile was greatly reduced. For our first version, the tableau was 7x6 cards (because as a Hitchhiker's Guide fan, I can't resist the allure of 42), and so the stock pile only had 10. From there, it made more sense to just have it as a hand from which all cards can be used at any time.

Through playtesting this seemed to work quite well, and a few other rules followed just from playing around and seeing what would be most interesting. These rules were being able to play anything on a royal card, but losing it to the discard pile when the royal card is collected. The idea really just came about while playing, but in the first version of the game, there was no real need to use this. Any time the player might get stuck, it's easier to make the safe play of using a card from your hand to continue sorting the cards. It doesn't make sense to run the risk of building a pile on a royal card that you will eventually need to destroy when you collect the card.

So after playing version 1 a few times, my partner and I came to one main conclusion: it's too easy. The game probably sounds complicated hearing it, but if anything it's simplified compared to regular solitaire. Your goal is simpler and so are your tools.

So for version 2, we reduced the hand further and therefore increased the tableau. The hand now only has 6 cards. It can't be symmetrical anymore, but after some testing, we adjusted the cards in the tableau to be embrace the asymmetry found in the base game. This makes the short pile of only 5 an optimal starting place.

For a visual, here's the version 2 board design:

After another round of testing, this felt too difficult, so we proposed one last clever tweak: when dealing out the hand, aces get re-shuffled back into the deck. This way, every card in your hand might be useful to you. However, it's still pretty limited.

The added difficulty makes the player engage with its unique system. Players may oftentimes face a dilemma: should I collect this royal card now, or leave it in case it is needed to maneuver cards later? Should I stack cards on top of it and risk having them permanently discarded?

Because solitaire asks the player to sort every card, every card is needed. So discarding cards early greatly increase the likelihood of having to discard more cards in the same way later. This emergent system forces the player to have to choose the best way to use their resources: using them for complex plays, or using them to further the immediate goal.