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.

Tabletop Games Section now open on Shen Games

The Tabletop Games part of Shen Games is now open. It's about, I don't know, four months late.

My next 52 Weeks of Game Development game will actually be a tabletop game. I spent some time during lunch today working on the rules and I'm pretty excited about it. It's my fighting dice game and I'm finally at a place that feels good to me. I'll hopefully have it put it up soon (definitely by Saturday)!

Also, since the game won't need custom-custom pieces, it'll be free for all! Woo!

Related Link: Tabletop Games on Shen Games

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

Webcomics and Flash Distribution

A thought came across my brain this morning regarding webcomics and distribution. I was thinking that it would be a good idea to package up my comics, either in volumes or complete archives, and then place them all into one Flash file for easy distribution.

Now this isn't to say that I'll change my site to a Flash based one. No, that would simply be awful and an SEO nightmare. It's to package it so people can enjoy a huge chunk of it at their favorite portals or simply download the SWF so they can enjoy the comics on their computer at their leisure without an internet connection.

Does anyone remember webcomic lists? It's definitely a very useful service, but navigating through those directories is a horrible experience. There's just too much content and it can be overwhelming. Webcomics can also fall victim to "horrendous web design", like your comic is buried 900 pixels beneath the fold where you've pasted your blog, tumblr, three ads and picture of your cat. It's not that you're a bad comic artist, you just may not know better.

In any case, I hope this idea is something that works... but is one that is only used for good. I can see it quickly taken advantage of and worthwhile distribution networks getting spammed up to their necks in these "comic compilation Flash travesties".

Are there any other avenues of distribution for content like webcomics? I'd be willing to give up all of those ad impressions (one per comic view) on my site if I can simply reach more people to just read the dang thing and minimally utilize ads at all (maybe one at start).

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 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

agameaweek.com

This fine developer has been doing for three years what I've done for three weeks. I hope I can make it through the year!

In any case, this is worth checking out. It's always impressive and inspiring to know that there are folks out there who are also into the same things you are.

Related Link: agameaweek.com

52WOGD Week 2: Invisible Walk (Flash)

Language: Flash (AS3)

Thoughts: The second week of "52 Weeks of Game Development" is complete.  The game I created is called Invisible Walk.

Have you ever played a video game where you can pick up a powerup and it makes you invisible to the enemies? Sometimes the game's visuals make you invisible to you as well, but there's some kind of visual marking that makes it possible to still track where you are (shadow on the ground, your avatar flickering in and out, etc.). I remember playing this one DOS indie game called Marshmallow Duel a long time ago and one of the powerups you can pickup is the invisibility powerup. Since it's a 2-player game where both players share the same keyboard, they had to make your character disappear completely in order for it to be any use at all. It was sometimes frustrating simply because you didn't know where you were either and you may just fall off a platform to your death. Needless to say I didn't use that powerup too often.

I decided to take that idea and combine it with the simple maze game concept. The difference is that the maze itself was hopefully a cognitive map established in your own mind of where the start and goal spots were located. Some of the inspiration came from this one cognitive study that showed how storing a visual map (let's say of a map of a town with landmarks, trees, etc.) in your brain was actually storing that map in your brain. Specifically, if you were to trace one landmark to another in your mind, the time it took for you to respond to "locating" those landmarks was proportional to how far those two landmarks were on the actual, physical map. So the way the map is stored in the brain is very much the same as the actual map itself. The further those two landmarks, the longer it took you (perhaps by mere seconds) to locate and recall those landmarks.

Anyhow. Fun times. I think I'll be doing a physical game next week or a simple platformer with impactJS/HTML5.

Related Link: Invisible Walk

52WOGD Week 1: Chance Dice (Flash)

Language: Flash (AS3)

Thoughts: The first week of "52 Weeks of Game Development" is complete. The game I created is called Chance Dice. I recently purchased this book called Dice Games Properly Explained because I've always had this affinity toward dice based games. I like the mix of luck and strategy because sometimes that "lucky roll" is equally as rewarding as it is frustrating.

I based this game off of the ruleset for the game "Evens and Odds". The game essentially has you rolling five dice, subtracting the odds sum from the evens sum. The original game has you pulling tokens from a central pot for any positive score (12 - 5 = 7 tokens from the pot to you, for example) and putting tokens back to the central pot for a negative score (8 - 10 = -2 tokens, for example).

I switched it up a little by adding the ability to hold dice at the cost of a roll. This way you can mitigate a terrible roll (let's say all odds) by holding on to the lowest one of the batch. This also allows you to balance whether or not it would be a good idea to sacrifice a roll (or more) to simply hold some good dice (like a pair of 6's).

I also formatted the game to be 480x320 so it would run on an iPhone. It's up for approval now and will be free to download. I'll let you know when it's officially launched.

Source: AS3 CS5 (~500kb)

Related Link: Chance Dice on ShenGames.com