Blog Post 5 GameMaker Game

For my final project, I decided to make a game with my partner, Tony Lam, using game maker studios. At first, I thought this would be a simple task, but I was wrong. There are so many aspects to game design that we had to consider while writing this game. For instance, we had to come up with a story, game play mechanic that will compliment the story, and sprite pictures that go along with the story too. Not only this, it is hard to share the program on game maker. What I mean by this is that, it is not as easy to transfer my program to Tony so that he can edit the program at the same time. Basically, this transferring of program is not like what Tony or I are used to when we program in Java or C++. There's a feature called Github that allows us to share code and we can see the changes the other person made on the code. In game maker studios, there is no feature like this. Anyways, enough about the technical aspect of game maker that I have experienced.

                The game Tony and I wrote is about an person who was experimented on in order to improve his combat capabilities. In order to do this, he battles against zombies that are cake monsters. The game play is like binding of Isaac where movement and fighting is in a twin stick shooter style (move with w a s d keys and attack with the directional keys). Overall, the game came out decent, but I would have like to have a little more time to work on it, in order to improve it. One of the ways to improve it can be to improve the art work for the game. Neither Tony nor I am an artist so this part was a hard for us to handle since we both are programmers. Luckily, Tony came up with some pretty good sprites despite being a beginner.

Link to game: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/cvcbl3iq4hxa3k9/FqdUZZ9HjK

Blog Post 4 Official Game that gives you 10 extra years of life

                Jane McGonigal talk on her game that can give us 10 extra years of life is one of the most interesting talks I have ever listened to. I have not thought of games the way she has described for years. With all the talk from people around me saying that games are a waste of time or that they would not play games because there are better things to do, such as do more school work and not play, I started to lose my reason for playing games. I felt that in order to keep up in life with others, I had to prevent myself from playing games. Mrs. McGonigal argues otherwise saying that games are a good way for you to stay happy. The reason why I thought this was interesting is that when I stopped playing games as often in order to keep up in my college work, I started to slowly feel more and more depressed. Depressed that I have to work all week long programming and not spend it playing games with my friends or loved ones. This is wrong, and I should make time to play games. According to Mrs. McGonigal, games can help you increase your life span by increasing your physical, mental, emotional, and social resilience. I agree with this because recently, I spent some time playing Super Mario 3D on the Wii U with my friends. This game pretty much increase all of my resilience(physical, mental, emotional, and social) as it made me jump up in joy with my friends as we worked together to overcome hard obstacles in the Mario game. Thanks to Mrs. McGonigal, I will not think of games as such a waste of time anymore, but use it as a medium to make me more happier. This way I can make it so I am not stress out as much and can continue to work hard towards my college degree and feel super better.

Blog Post 5, Games I played in class

During class, I played a couple of games with Tony. Five notable games I played were QWOP, Canabalt, Super Puzzle Platformer, This is the only level, and Oregon Trail.

QWOP was an awkward game for us to play since the control mechanics for this game was extremely hard to get used to. The game basically lets us control a runner calves and legs and we use the q w o p keys in order to control him. Each of the keys listed let us control a different part of the leg and due to this, we had trouble moving the runner very far. Basically, we button mash our way to victory or like 1 meter.

Canabalt was a fun game where you control a player and make him run across the map. This is essentially a platformer where you jump over the obstacles with the jump button. The fun part about this game was competing with Tony to see who can get the furthest.

Super Puzzle Platformer was another game we played which was very  interesting. This is a puzzle game where you match blocks randomly fall down and when the colors matches or whenever you feel like shooting, you shoot the block in order to destroy it. It's better to shoot the blocks when they all match in color so you can get a higher score. Overall, this was a very fun game to play.

This is the only level was a game with only one level. This was a simple game where you move to the goal and repeat the level, but what this game did that was so perfect was that it varied the level design so that you can experience a multiple of gameplay mechanics. Examples of this are where the room darkens and you see nothing and have to memorize the map layout beforehand or when the camera zooms in on the character and you can't see the overall stage anymore.

The last game we played was Oregon Trail. Oregon Trail was a simple click and point game where the game plays by itself, and we supply the answers to the options and the game moves on. The game was not particularly fun to play, but it had a simple game play mechanic where you just pick options and pray you make it to the end.

Overall, I liked Super Puzzle Platformer the best out of the  games I played because I thought the game play mechanic was a fresh way to experience puzzle games.

Blog 4 Game prototype

                For the tabletop gaming I came up with, I came up with the main idea for the game from a video game I know about called "Zombies ate my Neighbors." Instead of making a game though, I decided to make a card game with an idea about zombies and trying to survive. The rules for my game are simple. To set up the game, you give out 5 "human" cards to each player that is playing. Next, you roll a dice and whatever number you land on is how many cards you draw and when you are done you pass your turn to the next player, and they roll the dice. Depending on the card you draw, you do a certain action. In the game, there are 6 types of cards which are human, zombie, 2 humans, medic, weapon, and bunker. Basically, for every humans you draw, add it to your hand with the other human cards. From the name, human is worth 1 x human while 2 human is worth 2 x humans. Every time you draw a zombie card, you have to discard 2 humans whether it be one 2 x human card or two 1 x human cards. When you draw a medic card though, you pick up 2 humans from the discard pile (if there are none in the pile, hold onto the medic card and use it immediately when there are 2 humans in the pile). A weapon card can be used to kill a zombie or another player's human card. A bunker card is used to protect you from one zombie card so that you do not lose 2 human cards. Depending on your luck, you may add the bunker, weapon, or medic card to your hand if there are no zombies cards that you have to waste these cards on in order to protect yourself. In addition, for every card that is drawn and is not a human, it goes to a discard pile. From here, when you run out of cards in the deck, you just pick up the discard pile, reshuffle it, and continue the game from there with the leftover cards. The goal is to be the last player left with human cards and then you win.

                To make this game, all you need are some paper, a pencil, and a dice. Next, you write down however many cards of each type you want then play the game. In my game, I made 30 zombie, 25 human, 4 medic, 5 2 x human, 4 weapon, and 5 bunker cards. In the first several play session of my game, I ran into some problems with the game being too short with only human and zombie cards. Thus, I added in 2 x human cards and medics to make the game last longer. This worked for a while until I decided that in my next play session I should add another card which was the weapon card. Now players can attack other players in order to win. Finally, I added a bunker card as a defense mechanism in the game during my 4th play session. With the play session I had from this Monday though, I realized I should fix my card ratio since there were too many zombie cards and a player lost when he draw nearly 6 zombie cards in a roll. Overall, this is my current prototype for my game and how it went when I played the game I made several times.

               

Post 3

                A table top game that I played recently was "Are you a werewolf?" The game is basically about villagers trying to figure out who the werewolf is. Out of the entire village, there are two werewolves, one seer, and the rest being villagers. After the first night, the werewolves would pick one villager to kill until all villagers are gone. In order to win, the villagers would have to figure out who the werewolves are by using their deduction abilities to see who is lying or who looks suspicious. In addition, the role of the seer is that they are allowed to check to see what a player's role is in the game, whether they are a werewolf or villager.

                In the play session, we are giving a card with a role on it, and this is the role we would play. Furthermore, we would have a commentator or supervisor that would check to make sure no one is cheating and tell the story to everyone as we play. To simulate each night, everyone would close their eyes and make noises such as clapping their hands so that they cannot see or hear anyone else. From here, the werewolves would wake up and pick who they want to kill then the seer would pick one person to see who they are. Once this is over, it's time to vote for who the villagers think is a werewolf.

                Essentially the core mechanism of this game is the player's ability to observe and deduce who is the werewolf. In this game, most of the time, the werewolf will lie and make up any excuse they can to throw people off from their trail and get the villagers to kill each other and not them. From my experience, the werewolf made an excuse of being drunk and could not be the werewolf. Also, any time there was someone who tried to use their reasoning in order to tell everyone else why the person they suspect was a werewolf, they would be picked off first to die. This game is intense in the sense that if you speak up, you were usually the first one to lose. Overall, the game was very fun to play.

This game can be found at this link. http://www.looneylabs.com/games/werewolf