GD: Print-and-Play Step Two: Deconstruction

Space Junkyard

Goal of the Game
The goal of Space Junkyard is to harvest resources from space, fix old spaceship parts, and fit these fixed parts onto the helm of your ship. Each spaceship part has an assigned value which is counted up at the end of the game to give you your final score. You add up the points on each part and take away points for every open path a part has. The game ends when you run out of cards to place on the grid. Up to four players can take part in this game.

Core Mechanics
The core mechanics of Space Junkyard are movement, acquisition/storage, building, and tile placing. A turn is usually broken up into these four actions.

•  Movement

Each player has a ship that they use to move around. You can usually only move between one and three squares in a turn either horizontally or vertically, but not diagonally. You cannot move off of the grid, nor can you occupy the same square as another spaceship. If a Radioactive token is used, you may make a second turn in which they can again move anywhere between one and three squares.

• Acquisition/Storage

At the beginning of each turn, you can harvest one Radioactive token and store it in your spaceship helm. As you gather more spaceship pieces and attach them to this helm, you can harvest more and different kinds of tokens according to the symbols on the part's card. You can also only carry as many tokens as their current ship build will allow; with just the helm, they can store two Radioactive, two Scrap Metal, and two Mechanical tokens. This storage space also will change as the you adds more parts to you ship.
Tokens can be used to repair spaceship parts and fix them onto your helm. Radioactive tokens can also be used to give yourself an extra turn.

• Building/Scrapping

When you move onto a square, you can flip that square over and see what it is. Asteroids can be scrapped and will yield one token per each asteroid of the same colour. So, for instance, if you get a card with one blue asteroid and one red, you will get a Scrap Metal token and a Mechanical token.
However, if you land on a spaceship part, you have two options: you can scrap it and get the respective tokens as marked on the card, or you can attach it onto your spaceship helm if you have enough tokens to spend.
Once a card has been turned over and you chose to scrap it, it is placed in the scrap pile and cannot be used in the game again.

•   Square Movement

Finally, at the end of your turn, you are able to pick up a square from the pile and add it onto a row or column on the current board. In doing so, you move all the existing squares down a rung and knock the last square off. This square then is lost in space and is placed on the scrap pile where it cannot be reused. If a player is sitting on this square as it is knocked off, they become stranded in space and must use their movement ability the next turn to get back onto the board again.

Space of the Game

 Figure 1: A layout of the board with spaceship counters in beginning position

The game takes place on a 6x6 grid constructed out of the asteroid/spaceship part cards flipped over. These squares are 2D discrete areas on which the player can set their ship, though as the game progresses and more cards are removed from the grid the player may find their ship 'floating in space' with no strict square to be placed on. Each player also has a space where they store their resources and build their ships.

Objects, Attributes, States

• Spaceship

Figure 2: The four spaceship shaped counters used in the game

Now, the spaceship is technically two things: the spaceship shaped counter you use to navigate the space of the game, and the spaceship you construct with your helm and all the pieces acquired from the grid. 
The spaceship counter itself has a move attribute in that it can move anywhere between one and three squares in any direction that isn't diagonal. It can either be on the board or off the board, but when it's off the board it has to move onto the board within the next move.

Figure 3: A spaceship helm with three fixed pieces attached to it

The spaceship construction has the building attribute: it will grow when the player adds pieces to it. It also has a scoring attribute, as the scoring system is based off the final spaceship assembled at the end of the game. Each spaceship piece has a numerical score on it, but for every passage that isn't attached to another piece the score goes down. 

• Resources

 Figure 4: The three types of resource tokens.

The resource tokens are used to fix spaceship parts and attach them to other pieces on your spaceship. They can either be Radioactive, Scrap Metal, or Mechanic. There isn't much of a difference between these, except that spending a Radioactive token can give you a second turn. The state of a token is either 'I have this' or 'I don't.'

• Asteroids

 Figure 5: Various types of asteroids

Asteroids are part of the grid, and their locations are usually unknown to you until you discover them. Each asteroid card has a different configuration of asteroids on it, and the number/colour of an asteroid will dictate what kind of resource tokens you can harvest from them. So an asteroid card has a known/unknown attribute, a colour attribute, and a number of asteroids attribute. The state of these attributes will inform how you will harvest them.

• Spaceship parts

 Figure 6: A spaceship part. This particular part can be scrapped for two Scrap Metal, one Radioactive, and one Mechanic. It can store two Scrap Metal tokens, and gives one Scrap Metal token to you per turn. It has three open paths to connect to other parts.

Similar to the asteroids, spaceship parts are part of the grid and share the same known/unknown attribute. When you uncover a spaceship part, you activate the scrap/fix attribute-- you can scrap the part to take its resource, or spend resource tokens to fix it and add it to your ship. To add it to your ship, you need to pay the resource tokens shown on one side of the part, as well as the resource tokens on the part that you want to attach it to. Every spaceship part has a score attribute, a scrapping attribute, a resource-storing attribute, a path attribute, and a resource-giving attribute. Given these attributes, you will consider whether or not it's worth scrapping or fixing. Some parts, considering their scores, may make no sense to fix.

Operative Actions/Resulting Actions

• Moving Spaceship 

With every turn, you can move your spaceship either once or twice. Moving your spaceship twice means removing more squares from the board, which quickens the gameplay and potentially denies an opponent a chance at getting resources. Once the board becomes more empty, you can remove squares nearest to your opponent by claiming them first, leaving them with nowhere to go.

• Acquiring Parts

When you land on a spaceship part, you can choose either to scrap it or to fix it. This is an exercise in opportunity cost-- does the amount of resources you can harvest outweigh the score of the piece? Sometimes a piece has three potential pathways and is only worth one score point, making it senseless to fix unless you have three other parts to fix onto it. Some parts will only have one open path so that when you use them, they will essentially close off your potential to build. 
There aren't any resultant actions from acquiring parts that affect your opponents, besides perhaps challenging them to get more parts to compete with your obviously superior spaceship.

• Moving Squares

At the end of your turn, you have the ability to change the layout of the grid. You can move along one column or row by adding in a new square, knocking off whatever was at the other end of the row or column. There are two strategies here: either you're trying to fill the grid with more squares and fill in the empty spaces left by the scavenging, or you're trying to get rid of resources near your opponents by knocking off nearby squares. You can also knock your opponent off the board, but usually the penalty for that sort of thing is less than the benefits. If you're knocked off the board, you can enter again along whatever column you were nearest. So, essentially, if you're knocked off, you can move three extra squares than usual. Some may try to knock themselves off the board specifically for this reason.

Rules
I think I've already pretty much covered the operational and foundational rules of the game. The actual written rules themselves come in a nice little packet with diagrams in case you get confused. It offers three optional game modes you can play-- a two player game in which 16 squares are already moved from the grid, a 'more junk' game in which you can add a second square at the end of your turn if you scrapped two asteroid squares during your turn, and a 'less empty space' game in which you don't move the gaps when you add a new tile to ensure there is no free space on the grid. The rules add that these games can be combined as the player sees fit.
We couldn't think of any house rules when we were playing, as the game itself is already pretty complicated.
An advisory rule I can think of is try not to fix ship parts with three or more paths. There's almost no way the benefits outweigh the eventual cost. 

Skills
A lot of this game is about weighing costs and handling resources intelligently. Understanding the cost-benefits of fixing a certain piece and acknowledging the inherent chance built into the game are also skills that will help.

Chance
Chance plays into this due to the unknown nature of the grid. Will you land on an asteroid? Will you land on a spaceship part you can afford and will help you store resources? Will the resources you harvest be the ones you need in the next turn? These kinds of uncertainties will plague your playing experience ceaselessly.

I really can't reiterate enough how much I enjoy this game. The graphics are crisp, the gameplay fresh and interesting, and it's just competition enough to give it an edge without getting people too worked up. I would highly recommend it.

GD: Print-and-Play Extravaganza

To start my foray into understanding basic game design, I and a few friends decided to try out some print-and-play board and card games. These are games which are freely available online to print out and assemble yourself to play either by yourself or in a group. What a concept! We discovered, however, that finding a good game amidst all this clutter is pretty difficult. Here are some of our findings.

Space Junk
http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/26747/space-junkyard
Type: Board
Goal: Build as big a ship as possible by scavenging old parts from a space junkyard.
Time spent playing: 30 minutes
Time spent setting up: 45 minutes (the spaceships themselves were pretty fiddly to put together, and there were a lot of resource tokens)

I think we all agreed that this was the most fun and most successful game of the session: the aesthetics were clean and consistent, the gameplay interesting enough that there was some serious competition, and the print-and-play version was very well put together (note the absolutely adorable 3D spaceships). There were some mechanics that didn't quite synch up, though-- for instance, a trick that gave you a chance to gather two resources in one turn meant that we ended up having an almost empty board very quickly. A structured grid on which to lay the cards also would have been beneficial, as it became a game of randomly guessed layout very quickly.

Bad Grandmas
http://www.goodlittlegames.co.uk/games/02-bad-grandmas.html
Type: Card
Goal: Have the highest score by the end of the round by beating the opponent's grandmas (subject to change)
Time spent playing: 15 minutes
Time spent setting up: 20 minutes

This was an... interesting game. Judging from the site, it seemed like it was more of a conceptual game rather than one that focused on the mechanics. The drawings on the cards themselves were amusing, as was the descriptions, but the game itself seemed rather uninspired. I've played a number of versus card games of a similar style, and though this game does spice things up a little bit with it's 'take a card at the beginning and follow it's instructions when scoring' idea, it's not that impressive. The games themselves are short, and overall this game could benefit from having more cards and being play tested more. 2/3rds of the games we played ended in a tie.

 Shape Up
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/142068/shape-up
Type: Card
Goal: Match up your given card to as many adjacent similar shapes on the board (we weren't actually entirely sure what this meant)
Time spent playing: 20 minutes
Time spent setting up: 10 minutes

Out of all the games we played, this one was the one we were least enthusiastic about. It could have been that we were all operating on minimal brain power by that time and were looking forward to going to bed, but for some reason it just seemed to complicated for us. The rules didn't cover all the possibilities of card movement (was replacement legal? what did the little numbers mean in the corners?), we weren't sure what the exact endgame was, and it seemed to require the same knowledge of type pairing as poker did. In the end, we gave it up for dead and went back to playing Space Junk.

GD: Skinner's Box and Portal

“At the beginning of the Portal development process, we sat down as a group to decide what philosopher or school of philosophy our game would be based on. That was followed by about 15 minutes of silence, and then someone mentioned that a lot of people like cake.”

—	Erik Wolpaw, writer of Portal.

Games can be considered a series of test-reward situations. You are put in a situation in which the goal is reasonably well articulated and you are rewarded when you reach said goal. Sometimes you're even rewarded when you fail: a bad end may still reveal information to you, or another storyline will become open to you. This idea of a game as an environment for goal achievement resonates strongly with B.F. Skinner's theories on human free will. In some ways, a game can be an exaggerated version of Skinner's principles of reinforcement and reward and his Operant Conditioning Chambers. The name Operant Conditioning Chamber sounds like it's directly from the gameplay dialogue of Portal. "Now entering the operant conditioning chamber. Please mind out for errant electrical currents." But it's not! Skinner originally created the Operant Conditioning Chamber to show how animals will respond to outside stimuli in ways that essentially effect their own reasoning and will, using reward and aversion therapies. Rats and pigeons would be trained to pull levers by associating them with either pain or food. After a while, the animals associate certain stimuli with good or bad things, and react in an appropriate manner. To this degree, Portal is almost like a human-sized, human-oriented version of an Operant Conditioning Chamber. Let's consider how Portal starts. You start off in a fairly bland room, so of course your first instinct is to explore it. Human beings in a game, almost a rule, will try to figure out all the ways they can break it. Pick up the clipboard, jump on the bed, look around; how can this room be broken, escaped? You respond to the voice (GLaDOS) as she's the only external stimulus available, and because she has the ability to supposedly create these portals that let you escape the room. The test in the first room is easy enough: place the cube on the button and you're allowed to go on. But why do you want to go on? You get a reward by way of affirmation from GLaDOS, but that's not enough. It's the promise of more things to interact with, more ways to solve puzzles and finish tests, that makes you go forward. In Portal the Operant Conditioning Chamber doesn't reward you with food or punish you with electric shocks; instead, you are rewarded with more knowledge about the strange facility and the shadowy figure of GLaDOS with more opportunities to prove yourself, and you are punished by failure and having to repeat the puzzle. In this way you feel compelled to finish more tests, because you want to get this mental fulfillment and sated curiosity. This is probably why I marathoned Portal and finished it within an hour: because I felt compelled to do so. It wasn't by my own free will that I finished the game, however; it was the clever programming and writing of Valve that steered me in the right direction, externally manipulating my own desires to make me feel like I needed to finish the game. To that extent, Portal and most video games are excellent examples of our complete lack of free will. Skinner would be proud.

GD: Assassin's Creed Trailer ReCut

To show my newfound ability to use Premiere Pro at a reasonable level, here's a bunch of Assassin's Creed B Roll shots spliced together to make a cheesy Romcom trailer. The idea was to make an advertisement for Assassin's Creed, and I'd figured everyone would do a pretty similar job, so... I deviated slightly.

RL: Steve Hickner and the Importance of Timing

Last weekend, Ringling had the pleasure of welcoming Steve Hickner, Dreamworks director and storyboarder, on campus. As a Game Art and Design Sophomore, I attended his lecture about ideas, films, and storyboarding with a little trepidation. What use could storyboarding be for me? We were doing a cinematic breakdown of an Assassin's Creed trailer in our Game Design class, but I still couldn't quite understand what the importance was. You can't storyboard a video game, I thought. This seemed like a lecture for the CA majors, not for GADs. I knew we had to make a trailer for a game as our eventual thesis, but that seemed so far away, and the focus would be more on the gameplay rather than the cinematography, I had hoped. Perhaps I was missing the point?

But as the lecture went on, and we viewed more and more instances of re-storyboarding and re-storytelling, I formulated a differing opinion. In all of the storyboarding, as much as the shots and the cuts were important, it all really came down to timing to really tie something together. A lot of the thesis ideas presented by the CA students had, while not perhaps jokes in and of themselves, a progression and a punchline that needed to be realised in a way that resonated with the audience and didn't fall flat. To maintain the balance between anticipation and appreciation was a serious task. Like a comedian prepping for a joke, setting up a scene and pacing things just right are integral for a game as much as any other media. You can't just straight-up barge into a boss fight first thing in a game (unless you're something like Dark Souls, then you can do what you want. But the point is knowing the rules before you can break them).

Later on I found an article written by Warren Spector named The Commandments of Game Design which seemed like a perfect addendum to this thought process. A veteran of the industry who has worked on Deus Ex and System Shock, Spector has written a series of essentially Do's and Don'ts that are applicable to most areas of game design. He addresses the idea that a game is more like a dialogue than a movie: it's something to be spoken to, and interacted with. With these things in mind, we can't just storyboard our way into a good game: we have to consider things from a variety of different shots and angles, not just a one.

DA: Summer Concept Work Con't: Internship

  This summer I had the great privilege of interning at the London office of Albourne Partners Ltd., a hedge fund advisory group. I was tasked with redesigning their iconic Village, a unique website idea which sets Albourne up as a quaint English village complete with their mayor, Sam. The site layout had remained approximately the same for the last ten years, so it seemed about time for a bit of a makeover.
  Of course, getting the right shape down and keeping the same iconic feel of a village was an interesting challenge. I researched and documented as many village buildings as I could and tried to stick with a colour scheme that was rustic. Here's the creation process behind the village pub, the Bridge Inn:

  In the end I drew about 17 or so buildings to put together on the final village map.
  I had a great time working with Albourne, and I can't wait to see what the final website will look like when it goes up! I learned a lot about working in a serious business environment, and about working on a time sensitive project.

3D: Fishing Village Concept Art

For our GAD 3D class, we had to come up with a concept for an 'alleyway;' that is, a space that can be inhabited and surrounded on all sides by architectural features. I found myself drawn to the village of Fenghuang in China, and so took that concept and bolted with it. Here are some original sketches, as well as the final concept sketch and a visual I used in my presentation.