I've taken a slight break from Cutlass and Compass to work on several card games with my partner in crime Allen White. This takes me back to some seriously deep roots, and I was pretty excited to get some ideas out.
The first game comes from the concept of time travel. I've always been fascinated by the paradoxes and cascading effects of time travel shows, books and movies. To my wife's frustration, I'm always yelling things at the screen like "why don't they just go back to the beginning of the episode and redo it?" Now I had an opportunity to explore all my crazy ideas.
All games are a series of cause and effect, and the time element creates a neat representation of the state of play. By changing a cause earlier in the timeline, the effect of their change would ripple down the line to modify cards further in the future. Because you're all time travelers, you can see the effects of a particular timeline and count up the bonuses at some future date.
I've gone through many iterations at this time (hundreds of destroyed note cards) and there are some really important things learned along the way:
We originally had a single timeline that each player could hop into and alter. They would do so by modifying one of several historical figures. When you modify it, you count up points (like suits) along the timeline to get a final value. It had some good moments: you could turn Einstein into a king, but it took too long to calculate the values and that part wasn't fun.
Tracking items in a line can sometimes lead to having to track multiple numbers in your head. People can't really track more than 3-5 numbers at a time, and you could easily mess up the value and get an entirely different outcome. At that point, you relied on other players to catch you and pay attention, which is not how I wanted it to work.
To fix there problems, we separated the timelines and reduced card effects to only affect adjacent cards. Clearer labeled values (colored pips) on each card help players more easily visually identify their current values.
With these changes, the game runs much smoother, and player can focus more on their strategy, and crazy histories rather than the mechanics.
Sunday, March 2, 2014
Monday, February 3, 2014
Morality in games
Morality concerns the principles between right and wrong actions. In games, especially role playing games, moral choices are everywhere, but what makes these choices meaningful?
In an effort to make better moral choices in games, I've spent some time doing research on morality. I found two good books that helped me, and I'd like to share them.
The first book is The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris. In his book, he writes about how we evolved as moral creatures and defines morality in a graduated scale. The somewhat controversial stance states that we can actually measure morality in a objective manner, rather than the typically subjective way people define morals within individual societies. The key premise that struck me was how you could get this measurement. He begins by posing that a moral society is a measure of the amount of human suffering that occurs within it. The worst state of morality would be a society that creates the most amount of suffering for the maximum amount of it's populace. From there, you have societies that create less suffering for an increasingly larger set of the population. These creates a series of peaks and valleys of societies that are more or less moral.
The second book is Moral Minds by Marc Houser. This book focuses on how we make choices on moral issues. This makes it especially interesting as the psychology can be directly applied to how you can predict players will behave. One of the more interesting aspects of the book discusses how politics is an extention of our morality. The two main stances discussed include the authoritarian (conservative) and anti-establishment (liberal) members of society. I found it interesting how the authoritarian approach has an inherent advantage, given that our minds evolved in a world where we listen to our parents to avoid dangers in prehistory.
A couple of ideas that came from this research:
Moral choices should impact the experience in an expected way, but still surprise the player.
Moral choices are more interesting when there is not a clear definition of good and evil choice.
In an effort to make better moral choices in games, I've spent some time doing research on morality. I found two good books that helped me, and I'd like to share them.
The first book is The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris. In his book, he writes about how we evolved as moral creatures and defines morality in a graduated scale. The somewhat controversial stance states that we can actually measure morality in a objective manner, rather than the typically subjective way people define morals within individual societies. The key premise that struck me was how you could get this measurement. He begins by posing that a moral society is a measure of the amount of human suffering that occurs within it. The worst state of morality would be a society that creates the most amount of suffering for the maximum amount of it's populace. From there, you have societies that create less suffering for an increasingly larger set of the population. These creates a series of peaks and valleys of societies that are more or less moral.
The second book is Moral Minds by Marc Houser. This book focuses on how we make choices on moral issues. This makes it especially interesting as the psychology can be directly applied to how you can predict players will behave. One of the more interesting aspects of the book discusses how politics is an extention of our morality. The two main stances discussed include the authoritarian (conservative) and anti-establishment (liberal) members of society. I found it interesting how the authoritarian approach has an inherent advantage, given that our minds evolved in a world where we listen to our parents to avoid dangers in prehistory.
A couple of ideas that came from this research:
Moral choices should impact the experience in an expected way, but still surprise the player.
Moral choices are more interesting when there is not a clear definition of good and evil choice.
Saturday, February 1, 2014
Cutlass and Compass
Back after a busy development cycle to clear off the dust on this blog. I'm currently working on Cutlass and Compass, a strategy survival game about pirates and island hopping. You can find out all about it on my sister site www.dicewrench.com. It's my first solo-coding project using Unity3D, so I decided it had to be a fairly ambitious project to stretch my brain to the limit. You can check out my youtube channel for latest updates here.
Currently, I've got a large number of systems built as well as the underlying framework for HUGE levels. Finished systems so far include:
Level Generator for reusing chunks
AI Task Managers so the pirates get tasks
Various Managers for updating tiles, harvesting tasks, animated assets.
Inventories, chests, drag and drop features
Saving!
I'm really quite excited to get into the nitty-gritty of gameplay. First on deck, ships and sailing! Time to build a ship controller and AI.
Currently, I've got a large number of systems built as well as the underlying framework for HUGE levels. Finished systems so far include:
Level Generator for reusing chunks
AI Task Managers so the pirates get tasks
Various Managers for updating tiles, harvesting tasks, animated assets.
Inventories, chests, drag and drop features
Saving!
I'm really quite excited to get into the nitty-gritty of gameplay. First on deck, ships and sailing! Time to build a ship controller and AI.
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