Monday, 16 March 2015

Design Document: Tower of Ascension


The doors of the tower of ascension will soon open an event that only happens once every 100 years. Guilds have been preparing for this event and now gather at the base of the tower, waiting for the doors to open so that they may enter and ascend to the Promised Land. The tower is a dangerous place and other guilds will do anything to stop another guild from entering the Promised Land. Those that do make it too the top of the tower will be met with a one of the six Gods of power, and receive their final challenge.


An asset list
Six Guild cards
Eighteen God cards (three of each type of god.)
Eight Red player units
Eight Blue player units
One Game Board
Two Four sided dice (movement and player battle dice)
One Six sided dice (Boss battle dice)

·         Too win you must get your pieces to the end of the board (Purple Square) and pass the boss which gets you one point for each piece that does. At the end of the game the player with the most points wins.
·         When a player gets a piece pass the boss the unit is removed from play and can be spawned back into the game so they can earn more points.
·         At the start each player should choose one guild card each and put the rest into another pile.
·         The guild card that they choose will have a matching colour with one of the six bosses (Gods of power cards); they do not have to fight this boss and instead get a free pass.
·         When the player gets to the purple square they must draw the top card from the boss card pile. This is the boss they will have to fight. Once defeat place that boss card in a separate pile.
·         To fight a boss you have to roll the six sided dice and match the number at the bottom of the boss card. If they do not match that player unit will die
·         If a player unit dies they are removed from the board and must be spawned in again
·         To get a unit on the board the player has to roll the four sided dice they can then place a piece on any of the yellow spawn square.
·          A player can have all eight of his player units on the board at the same time.
·         To move around the board a player has to roll the four sided dice. They can move any of their player units that they like, but must move one.
·         The movement flow of the board goes like this: start at the far right yellow square and move toward the far left yellow square. You then move onto the blue square and head up toward the purple square.
·         The unit must always move toward the top of the tower. (purple square)
·         One player units can be stacked on top of each other up to the max of eight units stacked.
·         A stacked unit moves as one and cannot be un-stacked.
·         To fight another player you must land on the same square as them. Then both players will roll one of the four sided dice each at the same time. The Highest number wins killing the other player.
·         In the event of a matching roll (both players roll the same number) then the attacking player wins.
·         You cannot fight another player on the yellow spawn squares.
·         When stacked units fight they only lose one of the stacked units if they lose. They must then fight again until only one of the player units occupies the square. This also applies in boss fights.
·         During a boss fight as a stacked unit you will only lose one of the stacked units if you fail to defeat the boss. You must then roll again to fight the boss. When you do defeat the boss the whole stacked unit gets to be removed from play. Gaining you a point for each unit that you had stacked and still alive on the boss square.


This game is designed for two players and based on the original game of Ur. It takes at least five rolls of the movement dice (four sided dice) to get to the end of the board, and each game has a time limit of twenty minutes. Game play should be quick but the players will still need to be tactful about each movement. 

Nosgoth and why you should be eatting silly humans.

Nosgoth is a free to play game on steam that is based on the legacy of Kain series. It is a multiplayer game in which humans fight vampires. You take 10 minute turns on each side trying to get to thirty kills each time on a 4v4 map when you first play it seems like vampire have a great advantage but as you level up you soon come too find that its actually the humans with the advantage. Its a highly satisfying game especially when playing as a vampires you will notice this when you first play and reaver the base vampire class and start pouncing on humans from the roof tops. I prefer to play as a sentinel swooping down and kidnapping humans its very satisfying dropping a person into a group of reavers.
Here is a link to some game play footage from the ever annoying yogscast:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXV-WW0Abd4

Games Britannia: Joystick Generation

I find the title of this episode to be accurate but soon it would be thanks to VR. About this episode:
He talks about how games have come from board games to computer games and how some games might make people question the actions they do in such games like in grand theft auto where you can run rampant murdering every citizen (this does get boring after awhile) too games like world of Warcraft where people are creating an online identity for themselves.  I find one thing missing and that's the real world consequences of our in game actions and such things have been show to happen in games like EvE online. It is an spaceship MMO game that has a real and working economy people can actually make money playing the game if they do it right. The in game currency actually holds a real world value a long with the spaceships and everything else in the game. Which is why a story on virtual fraud is rather interesting. In EvE when you get destroyed to lose character progress and your ship is destroys and everything in it is too this can then be looted by those that killed you. So things like banks and insurance exist in the world and some are run by players. But what happens if the player running a bank decided s to just take all the money in the bank and leave. This is exactly what happened to one group and he stole a lot of money. The only way of contacting him was a phone number which has received threats up to this day sadly this is a phone number to a library and not the person who stole all that virtual money. It is rather interesting to think a game can have an impact on peoples lives now what will it be able to do when the line between game and reality is hard to see.

QR code treasure hunt or why giving up is sometimes a good thing

So in today's lesson we had the first half consist of a QR treasure hunt. You would scan a QR code and it would then show you a riddle which would lead you to your next QR code. Its actually pretty fun to do and I was about and hour and 4 QR code complete when I decided to throw in the towel and call it quits mostly because I was just lost and also because I was hungry. I get back to class and about 30 minutes later other people turn up too and it turns out that it might have be impossible to complete to thanks to some outside tampering of a car park security man. It was fun and quite the good pervasive game. There are other like it such as the assassin guild which I talked about in my previous blog post and other which are like treasure hunts where you use a GPS tracker to find a treasure box which you then take and item from and put one back.  Pervasive game are a lot of fun they combine the real world with the game world and it seems to work rather well. A good example of such is Cruel 2 B kind. here is a link to a video of some people playing it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrVZ5JxXfqQ

La decima vittima or the most lost film I have ever seen

La decima vittima or the tenth victim is a very confused film. Its about a world where a show called the big hunt in which murder is okay as long as its televised which seem like a good premise. Yet what they do with it kind of makes your brain cells die very painful deaths. Yet the film spawned a cult following which in turned spawned a game where people would hunt other players and kill them. one would know the identity of the other they would be the hunter and the other player would not know who there hunter is they would be the victim. safe zones would be established but as long as you are not in out its fair game. They would use not deadly ways to kill each other like a wooden spoon would be a knife and Nerf gun would be a real gun. It seems like a lot of fun and its has made this things called assassin guilds which are popular on university campuses. Here is a link to a trailer
warning its horrible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kobrYqV7nk its also in Italian.

Making Ur more uuuuuuuurm better?.

That joke will never get old for me. I choose the make even more changes to the game of Ur this time i changed the name calling it Tower of Ascension. I gave it a quick background story and made some changes to reflect how I wanted it to be played. The first major change was removing the safe zones I preferred the game this way, then I set the unit count to eight and made it so that it was not a game about getting rid of all your guys but more of a game of getting as many to the end as you could. So i allowed a piece that had reached the end be able to be brought back into play this would allow you to earn more than eight points. I also added a time limit twenty minutes and some extra stuff to make the game more interesting and hopeful more tactical.
Here is a picture of what the game includes.

A Trip To The British Museum

So we had a trip to go see the British Museum more importantly see the ancient games that we have been playing in the British museum. we arrived in typical British weather it was cold and raining  lightly. As we walked around we got to see a lot of old ancient games this also included the game of Ur which happens to be my favorite, and apparently someone many years ago had the same opinion as they had carved the board into a statue probably where they where posted to guard. This amused me greatly as to think that even back then people wanted to kill time while on the job. we then spent some more time looking at other parts of the museum before I finally caved into to the need for food and went to look for something good to eat which almost made me late for the bus back to Ipswich.