I could never find the free breakfast thing at Starbucks, but it's okay because I didn't wake up early enough to enjoy it. I did get to enjoy a fun day of learning about game design. The day started with us getting into groups and playing a game called SissyFight. It's a card game where on each turn, everyone can either solo attack someone, team attack someone, or defend yourself from attack. You have 10 health, a solo attack takes away 1 health, a team attack takes away 2 health per person joined in the attack (or 0 if it's a 1 person team attack), and defending cuts this amount in half rounded down. Fairly simple game.
Our task was to pick a theme that fits this game and then adjust the rules to fit the theme (fiction) and make the game even more fun. We couldn't pick a single one of our themes, so we ended up joining the fiction of vampires and polygamy, which resulted in the Brides of Dracula. Each player is a wife of Dracula and the object is to be the favorite. The poker chips represented your affection with Dracula. Each turn Dracula grows bored with everyone, so you ante 1 affection per turn. When you attack each other, you steal the affection from them. There were a couple more rule changes we added, but all in all it turned into a really fun game I'd like to play with people. I think the funniest part was when we changed player's names from colors to more gothic sounding names and then accents started popping up during play.
After that we had some electives. Mine was the 4 C's and Facebook. We were supposed to come up with a fun Facebook application using the 4 C's of design (Creativity, Collection, Community, and Competition). Personally, I don't think many groups (including mine) came up with anything really fun. But that does kind of sound like a lot of Facebook apps (including ones I play like Mafia Wars...). Some people's games didn't even sound like they had ever used a Facebook app. Like one where everyone has to click a button at the same time...I really didn't understand that one...
The last event of the day for me was an elective called Us vs. It (which will continue on tomorrow). This exercise was similar to the first one. We played a game together and then re-wrote the rules. The purpose of this exercise is to remake an incredibly hard (if not impossible) co-op game to be possible, but still have drama. Essentially, the game is four of you are tanks trying to stop a rampaging robot from getting to town. Every turn, the robot must follow its program, so in the exercise, we were tasked with changing the program to try and make it better. We almost got there by the end of the day, so hopefully tomorrow we can finish it.
I repeat my previous comment: LUCKY!
ReplyDeleteYour Brides of Dracula improvement is a great idea - funny and original. Fantastic. Additional idea: give each player a character with unique names, maybe attributes, or special rules (e.g. one can do 2 damage on a normal solo attack, but adds only 1 or 0 to a team attack (or can't team attack at all)).