(Belated) Design Diary Monday: Deception

Last Monday I began brainstorming ideas central to the Pirate movies, and after mulling over it for the rest of the week I've found the concept of deception to be the most intriguing. Deception was present, or it was intended to be present, in every stage of the pirates card game design, where part of the crew you set sail with are suppose to be hidden, but in practice what your enemy brought to a fight never seemed to matter as much as your own composition.

So I kept the idea of deception as the central mechanic and narrowed my focus. When it comes to deception, two types of games come to mind: hidden role games like Mafia or The Resistance, and hidden value games like Dead Man's Chest's very own Liar Dice (okay, the movie didn't invent the game, but it certainly brought it to most people's attention). Of the two, I've come up with an idea to work with hidden values: the art of running researches and the possible deception involved in securing funding while having honest breakthroughs versus lying through your teeth.

In the beginning, I've started the idea with two very basic concepts: research projects and research breakthroughs, which supports the projects. The projects are public knowledge: everyone knows you're working on a project and trying to complete it in time. The breakthroughs, however, are hidden by default: you may have materials strongly tied to the project (yellow), "wildcard" materials (green) that supports the project but not to the degree of the "pure" stuff, and fake materials (white) that are made up stuff to prop up your project's credibility. The deception surrounding your research's actual progress forms the core idea of the game.

Expanding on this core idea yield the following:

Let's say your research's real progress is the sum total of your relevant material's strength (let's just call breakthroughs "materials" for now). Strong materials gives you 2 points, related materials 1 point, while made up materials obviously 0. At some phase in the game, investors would come in and invest more funds based on the number of materials you have, not the actual progress of your research. In turn, you can pour those funds into acquiring more projects and getting actual breakthroughs. This sets up the incentive for players to risk putting down fake progress because it means they'd get themselves the real stuff faster. We still need a reward mechanism for busting other people's lies though:

Here is one possible implementation of the investigation mechanic. An opposing player must spend some of the grant money for a private investigation into some aspect of the research. The more you pay, the more through the investigation becomes. For example, a cheap investigation can only randomly expose whether one of the materials is completely fake; another one might reveal several pieces of info at once; the strongest would probably tally all the materials and wager the actual progress is below a certain level. Problem is, I don't feel like there's a good reward to a successful investigation that is thematically and mechanically sound. I suppose the one paying for the investigation might get money from a lawsuit, and maybe this model is ultimately the best one (since it is extremely simple), but the one that I'm going to try developing actually looks like this:

So I've added one more layer to a research project, that is when you have enough actual progress, you can open up those materials to sell a real product for money and reputation. Reputation becomes the game's real measure of victory, not money. It gives research projects a natural life cycle so there's no need to clog up the play space with projects where all progress are real, and I can balance the game to give honest players appropriate rewards. I can also set up a reward for investigations that thematically makes sense - reputation - where exposing other researcher's bad practices would earn you some reputation but falsified claims might actually give you a reputation penalty. That part of the diagram might be changed, to be honest, but I think I'd very likely keep the "release a product" part of the project life cycle - it completes the game in ways that the simple version simply cannot.

I have some other ideas such as having collaborating research partners (splitting funds and reputations), or special restrictions attached to specific projects, but the general idea is sound. The next phase of the project involves a bunch of heavy calculations to come up with an initial set of numbers attached to all the different components of the game. Math... I guess... I'll do that next week. Yup!

Missing Two Deadlines in a Row

I've missed Art Friday from schedule issues, and family matters came up in the last minute that'd prevent me from posting Design Diary Monday on time (I'll still get it up in the next hour or two, though). The blog-a-day schedule is not as stable as I want it to be since I have not been able to (or had the motivation) to build a back log, even though that was my intention from the beginning...

And I just thought I'd link this up with my g+ since I've just read about that today! Not exactly the best face to show after a month of (mostly) consistent day-a-blogging.

Oh well, there would be a burst of contents, since I'll be doing my design post, a make up art post, and a rant post all in a matter of hours. Well, the art post would come even later, actually...

Rhythm Thursday: Drum Variations (Paranoia)

Learning drum patterns. Always fun, though the end result isn't necessary listenable. Oh well, here it is anyway:

Webcomic Wednesday: Future Sight P6

I really have to work out a schedule for these kinds of things. I blame Dead Island...

I'm not a fan of being able to read into someone's internal dialogs, but soon as I planned the rest of this chapter I realized it'll be necessary. Oh well, at least there's a setup page for it so it won't get confusing later...

Rant Tuesday: I Don't Want to Rant about Dark Knight Rises or the Shooting

...but apparently I can't put anything else in my mind at the moment, so I'm stuck with these ideas.

The movie was fine. It was... good, I guess? It certainly didn't leave an impression like The Avengers did, or Inception, if we're talking about a movie in Nolan-verse. I think the movie worked up until the Lazarus Pit sequence... everything was logically hopeless up to that point. And then the writers realized they've written themselves into a corner and things started to unwind in increasingly comical manner, until the ending when it pretty much ended up like this:



(I still can't believe none of the friends with me got the reference when I mentioned it)

...and the shooting that'll forever be associated with this movie. Whenever inhuman tragedies like this happens, I really wish there's a way to erase the identity of whoever is responsible... not for their sake, but so that their names would never be recorded anywhere in history... in a generation where every voice wants to be heard but few would be heard, I find that rewarding these extreme acts of depravity would fast become a dangerous slippery slope.

...on the other hand, I find it extremely difficult to sympathize with the victims and those related to the victims of these events. I'm suppose to feel sad, I think, but I don't know any of these people, just a name and a vague description. I know how I'm suppose to feel, but whatever feeling I have is not going to be genuine. And when am I - when can I - be happy again?

Design Diary Monday: Brainstorming Solutions

Alright, so starting from this week there's no more scripts for me to follow. I've arrived back at the point where I need to make changes to the game, and I'll be spending the time on these posts actually working out problems instead of reporting results from the past.

The first order of business is to try and see if the pirates card game, in any form, is salvageable. I had a chance to watch some of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies over the past few weeks, and I was reminded of the things I wanted to portray:

• Hunting for legendary treasure (Aztec gold, the compass, the heart, what have you)
• Deals and betrayals
• Satisfying broadsides making ships explode

I didn't think I was successful in getting any of those points across. I've never come up with a convincing way to make players go after specific pieces or types of treasure; none of the versions ever got to a stage where temporary alliances made sense. The closest I've gotten were the ship battles, back when there were dice rolling... getting a good cannon roll and making ships explode on the spot felt good, but that was all the way back to the first version of the game and I don't want the rules to ever get that complicated again.

Honestly, let's just pretend I have the Pirates of the Caribbean license for a moment and think about how I can get the back and forth wheelin' and dealin' between all the characters work as game mechanics. In Dead Man's Chest,

• Jack needed the Dead Man's Chest to avoid his fate of servitude
• Will needed the Compass from Jack to secure Elizabeth's Release
• Elizabeth acquired the Letter of Marques but needed the Compass in return
• Jack agreed to trade the compass for the chest...

...

Actually, this is clearly not as complicated as I remembered, is it? An easier way to describe the formula is,

• Player 1 is after item A
• Player 1 has B but for some reason cannot directly reach A
• Player 2 is after item C, and he can trade B for C
• Player 2 now has the option to get A so he can trade with Player 1 for B, or steal B from player 1, or negotiate with a player 3 directly for C instead...

Okay, the trading is getting Catan-ish. I can work with that. Ultimately, I think I'll need to introduce secret objectives to the game: for simplicity's sake, let's say each player needs to acquire some unique item that won't come up as a found treasure.

Secondly, there would be time limited opportunities that allows items to convert from one type to another. probably a set of cards that shows the item obtained with the item requirement in small print.

Thirdly, items randomly appear and the players have low influence on the items they can get their hands on. It sets up scenarios where two player can trade items that'd benefit each other. There needs to be justifiable reason for trade to make more sense instead of just killing or blowing up each other, which should be an option...

I guess this is how the game would proceed. Next week I can continue this work or try and fix the rock-paper-scissors combat!

Art Friday: The Black Knight's Last Stand

Going to lose a lot of time over The Dark Knight Rises this evening so this will be a quick one:

In light of the midnight shooting, stay safe everyone. You can never be too careful.

Melodic Thursday: Chip Church

I was actually looking around Renoise to see if it comes with a string synth that sounds somewhere near the ballpark of Carly Rae Jepsen's Call Me Maybe, but I ended up finding a chiptune instrument that I want to play with instead:



A very simple melody. I've never quite figured out how to spice these basic pieces up a little though.

Webcomic Wednesday: Future Sight P5

Completely ran out of time today since I've lost my head start doing the game concept yesterday. Also: Title Drop!

I have immense trouble drawing any character that looks to the right, mainly because I'm right handed and I've never made any effort to spend even amounts of time drawing people that faces different directions. This is also one of those pages where it's just suppose to be two people sitting around and talking about a bunch of stuff, so it's kind of rough to think of a layout that won't bore everybody to death.

I really have to draw more people facing right.

Game Design Bonus Tuesday: Steampunk Feminists Vs. Zombies (The Card Game)

This is the newest strip from The Escapist's Critical Miss. Satire be damned, when it comes to cool concepts you just can't go wrong with a name like "Steampunk Feminists vs. Zombies"... so I've decided to come up with the framework of a card game based on the title. At the very least, it'd be a no obligation brain release from all the trouble I'm having with my current game's design.

So here goes!

Concept

True to the name, the game must contain elements of steampunk, feminism, and zombies. The easiest design is to do a co-op zombie apocalypse survival game, and then layer it on top with steampunk gadgets and a smattering of feminism ideas... and I'll be doing that here. KISS and all that junk.

Here is how it breaks down:

• Zombies. The players are defending their homes and zombies are knocking at the door. If they take down all the players, the players all lose. The game escalates as more and more powerful zombies are being thrown at the players as the game progress.
• Steampunk. In order to fight back, the players assemble various makeshift weapons from household items... while engineering plans for more efficient and powerful steampunk weapons and barricades can be assembled, the players have limited rights to wield advanced weapons and have restricted access to the machines to assemble the items. Which leads to...
• Feminism. Since all the player characters are female, in order to win the rights to use advanced machinery, the players have to risk leaving the safety of their homes to hold rallies, conventions, and assemblies in order to advance their rights. At the final stage, the players unlock the right to build the "Enigma Machine", the ultimate anti-zombie doomsday weapon. Once it's built and deployed, the players all win the game.

Components

Character Cards: each player is represented by a character. Each character has a few statistics that affects her effectiveness in specific game related tasks:

• Leadership determines how quickly the feminism track moves when she makes assembly and speech actions.
• Engineering affects the speed she assemble and disassemble items.
• Vitality determines the number of damage she can take before she is eliminated.

Materials: The player can spend actions to scavenge for materials. Most materials can be broken down for parts, shown on the right side of the cards. They might also serve directly as makeshift barricades or weapons, though they're not very effective. Finally, advanced disassembly techniques can break certain materials down into specific gadgets, but the disassembly process requires access to a dissembler, a class-restricted machine.

Plans: The player can also spend actions to acquire plans. Most plans require materials to assemble - the list of components required are on the left side of the cards. Barricades can directly block zombie attacks round after round, while weapons can directly eliminate zombies. As the players gain more rights to use advanced steam power and assembly machines, they can assemble power generators to power automatic weapons, freeing them precious time to continue their road to women's suffrage.

Zombies: You just can't get enough of 'em. After spending all available actions, each player must add additional zombie cards to the horde. The zombies shamble from house to house, bang on barricades, and if the player is unlucky, they just might get a chunk of flesh or two bitten out of them. As the zombies are eliminated, more and more powerful strains of zombies enter the fray. To stop them once and for all, the player must work together to advance the feminism track...

Feminism Track: Once the player feels secure that their barricades would hold, they can spend actions to assemble and make speeches. These actions would push the players further up the feminism track. At certain milestones, all players would gain the rights to use a new class blueprints, allowing them to build more powerful machines to fight the horde. Ultimately, they must advance to the end of the track to gain the right to vote, then acquire the rights to build and deploy the Enigma Machine to end the zombie menace once and for all.

Game Rules Draft

1. The objective of the game is to eliminate the imminent zombie threat. As a cooperative game, all players must work together to achieve a common goal. The players all win together or they all lose together, even if some of the players are eliminated during the course of the game.
2. In the beginning of the game, each player selects a character.
3. Put aside the "Enigma Machine" plan card. Separate the advanced zombies from the normal zombies. Shuffle and form the zombie deck, materials deck, and plans deck. Put the "Enigma Machine" at the bottom of the plans deck.
4. The game begins. Draw zombie cards equal to the number of players and distribute them equally between the players. This is the initial horde.
5. Each player take turns in order:
• Activate Machinery. As long as there's coal to power steam generators, power can be generated to activate steam powered weapons and barricades. These activation effects do not cost player actions. The coal is spent in the powering process.
• Take Actions. Depending on the state of the game, the following actions may be available to the player. Each player can take up to 3 actions per turn.
• Scavenge: draw a material card or plans card and add it to the player's hand.
• Trade: hand a material a plan, or an assembled item to another player.
• Speech: the player spends the remainder of his or her actions to advance the feminist cause. Make a leadership check and advance the track accordingly. As milestones are reached on the track, the corresponding class unlocks occur immediately.
• Assemble/Disassemble: Once the class I blueprints are unlocked, the players earn the right to disassemble materials and assemble them into basic machinery. A plan can be turned into an actual item as long as the materials are available for that player.
• Use Items: use a material for its base effect or a machine for its activated effect. Items that are automatically activated cannot be manually activated on the same turn.
• Zombie Attacks. Make attack rolls for all zombies currently attacking the player, and add additional zombie cards in front of the player afterwards. When the zombie deck runs out, increase the zombie cards drawn per turn by 1, reshuffle all the eliminated zombies and add 5 advanced zombies to form a new zombie deck, and continue to draw up to the necessary number of zombies.
6. If a player takes damage equal to or more than the character's vitality, that player is eliminated. The zombie that is attacking that player will spend a turn on the deceased player, then on the next turn that player's character is removed, and all zombies attacking that player redistributes to the remaining players evenly. Any remaining materials on that player can be scavenged; any functional machines are considered broken and must be repaired with an Engineering check (after the machine is scavenged). The players lose the game if all player characters are eliminated from the game.
7. To win the game, the players must reach the end of the feminism track, and with the plan in hand, one player must assemble the Enigma Machine and spend the required power and actions to activate it. When it is activated, all players win the game.

And I'm done! Since I've ripped this concept from someone else it'd probably be a bad idea to actually develop it (besides, the whole zombie survival thing is seriously overdone lately), so feel free to copy/steal/redistribute/whatever.

Rant Tuesday: Verily, This Lack of Taste Buds Can Turn Bothersome

Lately, I've been concerning myself with one of the more innocuous attributes I have: I usually don't have a strong preference for anything at all. Aside from several choice items in each category, I have no problem with most types of cuisine, movies, art style, women archetype, games, tv shows, music, fashion choices...

I've always thought that not having a preference is a good thing, a sign of having tolerance for all the strange differences we possess and not being a bigot about certain beliefs, but lately I'm terrified by it. It's like not having tastebuds, or not being able to feel pain. If I can't tell good games or good art from bad, how would I ever arrive at a point where I know I'm making good games or creating good artwork?

I don't think that sense of preference can ever be learned. If I'm born without it instead of just having to discover or rediscover it, then I think I've found something to be afraid of for the rest of my life...