52 WOGD Week 7: I Think Traffic Is Killing Me

DOWNLOAD THE RULES: PDF FILE
DOWNLOAD THE CARDS: ZIP FILE

Here is Week 7 of 52 for 52 Weeks of Game Development. I decided to work on another table top game for this week's piece. This one is a solitaire type card game based on the fact that I hate sitting in traffic when I go to work. I know my commute isn't the worst, but it's not optimal to say the least. An average day I probably have a 180 minute roundtrip commute. That's a lot of Game of Thrones on audiobook, but I'd much rather avoid it.

The game is pretty simple: you have three stacks of cards that represent the three lanes of traffic. Each deck has the top card facing up. Each traffic card has a value (minutes) associated with it as well as a rage value. During your turn you decide to drive down the lane you're in or try to switch into another lane. The goal is the arrive at your destination with the lowest time possible. Since there are 15 cards per stack, the fastest time to completion is 35 minutes, which is probably impossible.

I'd say this game was more of a way for me to express myself than anything else.

DOWNLOAD THE RULES: PDF FILE
DOWNLOAD THE CARDS: ZIP FILE

52 WOGD Week 7 Progress: I think traffic is killing me.

This week's game is going to be a physical card game where you're stuck in traffic. The goal of the game is to get the lowest time possible while avoiding raging out too much (as rage ultimately affects your final score).

I bought some index cards today and will prototype the cards. It's meant to be a quick single player solitaire-esque game. I wonder if it will make me appreciate my drive to work more. I also feel like I should provide a soundtrack to play this game to: The Honking of Horns Suite in E Flat Minor. That or just watch the first five minutes of Office Space on loop.

Custom Dice Are Expensive... Maybe I have an Alternative!

So these aren't the dice for my game Punch City Fighters. They are, however, pictures of the type of dice I would like to have made for the game through the funding of a future Kickstarter project. I was all gung-ho for this idea until I read this article from Daniel Solis, indie game designer extraordinaire. He talks about how getting custom dice (especially if you require multiple custom dice) gets increasingly cost prohibitive when trying to actually get a Kickstarter project successfully funded. He's had experience with his Writer's Dice project, so I trust his judgement.

So my dreams for this project are somewhat postponed. An idea did, however, come into my brain and lay some invasive eggs, which immediately hatched thereafter. What if I created an iOS app that handled the dice portion of the game? It wouldn't be resource heavy and it wouldn't be too hard to make. I would also be able to focus on the cards manufacturing portion of the game, which is much cheaper to get made. Also, since I still do the Flash to iOS export, I could offer the dice roller as a Flash app for folks who don't have iDevices. If I get Game Maker HTML5 working, maybe I can simply make an HTML5 version so you just need a web browser to get it to work!

It could happen and it'd be one of the first of its kind... barring the very polished Arkham Horror Toolkit app.

Punch City Fighters Update - v1.01

DOWNLOAD THE OFFICIAL UPDATED RULES: CLICK HERE (.PDF)

Josie and I played the game last night. She said the game is too slow, too complicated and there's too much randomness (which is actually a main reason for the slowness). Someone on the Board Game Geek forums called it akin to a "tax audit". They're all right.

I went and made some changes to streamline the experience and to require less components.

Damage: Instead of five health bars corresponding to five Fighting Dice, there is now only one health bar. As the Damage Counter moves down the health bar, it will periodically knock out Fighting Dice along the way. This provides a lot of options for character creation in terms of the rate of how Fighting Dice are lost, how many can be lost before defeating an opponent and making it less based on luck for matching.

Dice Change: The dice now have these faces: blank, block, hit and double hit. No more need to match kicks and punches and all that other jazz.

Super Moves and Spirit Counter: I took a page out of Street Fighter and Red Dragon Inn. Instead of having a different Spirit Bar to charge up for a Super Move, I have a Spirit Counter that starts at the bottom of the health bar. As it charges up, you just move the Spirit Counter up the health bar. If the Spirit Counter ever meets or passes the Damage Counter, you then have enough to do the Super Move.

This is more like a fighting game, which is what I wanted, since you typically gain Spirit during the match from doing attacks or getting hit by attacks. In the latter example, as you get hit and lose health, you're essentially closer to being able to do the Super Move.

I've updated the rules and hopefully this plays faster. I wonder if I can get Josie to test it out again tonight.

DOWNLOAD THE OFFICIAL UPDATED RULES: CLICK HERE (.PDF)

52 WOGD Week 6: Punch City Fighters

DOWNLOAD THE OFFICIAL RULES: CLICK HERE (.PDF)

Week 6 of 52 for 52 Weeks of Game Development has dropped like it was hot. This week I have a board game for you, just like I promised I would! I've had this need to do a dice based fighting game for a long time. Unlike other dice games out there like Cookie Fu, the dice play more of a Yahtzee role than anything else.

You can download the official rules above, but the quick run down of the game is as follows: two players choose a character to fight with. Each character has five Health Bars and Health Bars determine how many dice you roll (for example: 5 Health Bars = 5 Dice to roll or 3 Health Bars = 3 Dice to roll). Dice have four different faces: punch (x2), kick (x2), block and blank. You roll the dice at the same time and calculate hits from the results.

Simple, right?


The strategy comes from when the moment after the dice are rolled. You can see what your opponent has rolled, but then you place the dice behind a screen and arrange them in any way you would like on a grid of six slots. So when you start comparing the dice, you compare them in sequential order from the slots (so the less dice you have the more likely you'll get hit, but not necessarily).

My future plans with this game are to distribute and update the game rules while keeping the game free for all. I also plan on doing better artwork when I have more time (and am not under the "game a week" ruleset). I also plan on starting a Kickstarter project to fund a Deluxe version of the game. The Deluxe version will have custom dice (versus the ones I've made or substituting with standard six-sided dice), professionally printed Character Cards and nice box.

If you have any ideas or comments about the system, character balancing, new modes or even new characters, please let me know! I'd love to continue to support this game and keep it free as long as possible.

DOWNLOAD THE OFFICIAL RULES: CLICK HERE (.PDF)


Punch City Fighters by Alexander Shen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.shengames.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.shengames.com.

52 WOGD Week 5: Mailing a Package

Week 5 of 52 for 52 Weeks of Game Development has arrived earlier than expected. I was actually going to do a word game, but have pushed that aside for this choose-your-own-adventure about my horrible experience at the post office yesterday. Mind you that it wasn't, strangely enough, the fault of the post office but of my own negligence.

The interesting thing is that I decided to use this piece of software called Twine. It's essentially a piece of software that let's you make interactive websites. I always find it easier to lay out ideas and game flow in my sketchbook, so finding software that mimics this (and is free) is always a plus. Its exported project is also a webpage, which makes it widely available for others to experience. I think it's a wonderful prototyping tool and would look into using it more in the future.

Related Link: Mailing a Package

52 WOGD Week 4: Failed... but here comes another week!

I missed week 4. I couldn't finish the game I was working on. The game I wanted to do was inspired by the old arcade game called Timber. You would be controlling a lumberjack as trees popped up. Your goal would be to cut down as many trees as possible before time runs out.

Then my mind shifted and I had a slight change in design. The game would still revolve around the lumberjack walking around and trying to chop down as many trees as possible. However, the goal would be to survive as long as possible as the screen would continue to populate trees on the game board. Each step you took would increase the "tree deploy" counter. When that counter hit the "deploy" mark, a tree would be randomly generated on the board. Ultimately the board will fill up before you could cut down any more trees.

That also didn't happen since, well, I didn't finish the game.

Some of the reasons that it didn't work out:

• I wanted to use HTML5, so I employed the efforts of the Construct 2 engine. I literally got as far as having the lumberjack move around that ultimately wouldn't be the way I wanted him to move around. It's a nice environment to work in, but I just wasn't able to get it to do exactly what I wanted right away (what I would know how to do with AS3). I may have to stick to languages I'm familiar with until I get a better grasp on this HTML5 stuff.
• I completed a bathroom remodel with my wife. I spent most of my free time painting, knocking down drywall compound and installing fixtures.
• I had to finish up a freelance project due last Wednesday.

In any case, I'll be able to revisit this idea some time in the future. It also doesn't mean I'm giving up my quest! It just means I no longer have a blemish free record. Wins: 3 Losses: 1

On to next week!

PS: It's funny as the Global Game Jam also happened last week, something I really wanted to participate in. Go fig!

Related Link: Lumberjack moving in HTML5

52 WOGD: Lumberjack Sprite Sheet

Here's the entire sprite sheet for the lumberjack I did during lunch. It didn't take too long as it was mainly moving a few pieces around versus doing an entire sprite from scratch. I spent the rest of lunch looking at enchant.js, a game framework for HTML5.

It kind of confused me a little bit. I think I'm going to start with Construct 2 first. [cue nervous laughter]

52 WOGD: Lumberjack Sprite

I made an animated sprite during lunch today. My game this week is going to be a simple grid-based lumberjack game. I'm thinking whack-a-mole, but you have to use the keyboard to move the hammer. In this case, it's a lumberjack and chopping down different types of trees.

52 WOGD Week 3: Decision Engine

Week 3 of 52 Weeks of Game Development has found me revisiting an older project I talked about in this post about a Decision Engine.

The basis of the Decision Engine is combining my love for comics and choose-your-own-adventure stories. So in this case it shows you a story panel and two decisions. When you make a decision, the decision becomes the new current story panel and two more decisions appear. I coded it so in addition to the two choices, one choice may become available as well (a story progression panel, not a decision panel).

Update 1/22/2012: I got the FTP setup and finally uploaded the game over at Shen Games. I was at the book store today and thought about expanding the engine a bit more into a site that would be able to run the code, upload your own images, specify your own screen size and so on. Then I realized that I don't know any PHP or backend stuff at all. I wonder if I'll be able to find the time to create a full-blown COYA story down the line.

This game isn't very interesting story wise, but was more of an engine exercise.

Play the Game: Decision Engine