Games teach you Life!

Spent  (http://playspent.org/)

This game is about living at the poverty line in North America, and pretty depressing. The whole point of the game is to make it through the month without starving, losing all your money, or getting sick. The game likes to throw a lot of random events at you, such as you bringing a pet into your down town apartment, your kid needing something, or being fired from your job, which happens a lot. Actually the game likes to give you an event every single day, which is a bit unrealistic I think, but the events are quite believable (though condensed into a month). Also you're a single parent, but you can't collect child support from the mother/father, so I'll assume they are dead, or that the USA has different laws concerning child custody.  None the less child support comes in monthly and doesn't really help in the span of the month that the game takes place in.

Now that I'm done ranting, my experiences with the game. The game is about meaningful choices, but the meaning comes from your morals, and the difference between what you can do, what you want to do, and what you cannot do. You are a single parent so your child will want things from you, though not as regularly as if it were a spoiled child, actually your child is really well behaved from what I've seen (blame my 7 year old brother... but he's a good kid). I felt that I had to at least try to give some happiness to your child in the game, so the first few play-throughs I'd buy them the present, the field trip and also give them the extra $3 for lunch, and what not. The first few play-throughs though I was unable to pay for their club activities, which made me kind of sad. Also note I never bought them that $5 ice cream when the ice cream truck came around, felt it to be a bit spoiled. On my fifth play through I actually got really excited that my child may have been gifted, and even more excited that I was able to pay for the materials for them to continue their education. I hope my child gets a future brighter than mine, err... not that I have a real child at the moment, maybe in the future.

On my first 2 play-throughs I was fired from both of the jobs I had, a week into the job. I found this to be really detrimental, but somehow I got through the month on both tries. All subsequent play-throughs I never got fired, due to knowing what gets you fired, or that the event never came up.

The three "life lines" on the side of the game took be three play-throughs before I even noticed they were there. The use of space in the game is a bit sparse, but I assume it's because of my monitor's resolution being much bigger than the default resolution needed to play the game.

Really nice game, that opens up this perspective to the player.

You really only get one chance. Seriously. Unless you get a new computer.

One Chance (http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/555181)

Every day that I could check, I checked to see if the player could jump off the top of the building. None of the days allowed for the player to jump off the building.

For my one play-through of the game, since the game only allows for one play-through (unless you wipe your cookies and domain or something) I went to work for all the days, except the day you witness your co-worker jump off the building. I ended up with the ending where on the last day the main character creates the cure, and saves himself, though I'm not sure if he saves his daughter (her eyes are closed when they are in the park).

The game felt very unusual on the first day, when it is announced that the world would end in six days, but when you go outside to read the newspaper it said on it that you had discovered the cure for cancer. All and I the wish to repeat this one chance is probably what the game wanted the player to feel, and I sure feel it.




The other games were either too easy or simply nice, but didn't evoke as much emotion. American Dream was really easy, and definitely not a good representation of stock market, but that's not the point any ways. It just made money and partying seem to easy, maybe it is? As I Lay Dying had a weird feel to it since well the girlfriend was not exactly in shock that her boyfriend had just killed himself, albeit accidentally. But the whole game revolves around transporting his corpse, which didn't really stick out for me. Prior I did not understand. I played it twice with two different endings, and I still did not understand fully, but understood a bit better since I saw the two different endings. The End of Us felt really nice, but felt more like an experience rather than a game, since there was no goal. Flight I only skimmed through since I had seen a friend play it before. It was simply a throw, and upgrade game. Distance, I didn't get into it much, but it seems to be on a similar strand as the End of Us.

Create Your Own Magic Card

Here are the three Magic: The Gathering cards I created:

Wisp Faerie is a very basic monster, I wanted it to be extremely weak since it comes and goes like a wisp from a candle wick. Since we can't have any effect monsters I just made it a 1 White mana monster, giving it a cost of 3 in total and I put 1 more into defence than attacking since it's a wisp, a fluff of air.

The Guardian of Embersky is inspired by the Studio Ghibli film Tales of Earthsea which is based on the series of books by Ursula K. Le Guin. Since it's a dragon I assumed it had even toughness and power (due to dragons in Pokemon doing this with their stats) so I made it a 6/6, and since it's a Red creature it will have a total benefit of 13, so 1 Red mana and 9 Colourless mana balances the cost of the card (1 Base + 2 Red + 9 Colourless + 1 Bonus for having over 5 mana cost).

The third card Earthborn Priestess is a dryad that is more geared towards being defensive, but since calculating extra effects were not taken into consideration I couldn't make it a defender card and give it a power of 0. Since it was a Green monster and has a mana cost over 5 it has a cost of 9, so I made the power 1 and toughness 8 to balance the cost.

That is all.

The Progression of Ragnarok Online

You may have heard of this MMORPG, it was the first Korean MMOG to make it big outside of South Korea. It's name is Ragnarok Online, and fits in the time frame between first and second generation MMOGs, making it almost guide less (no quest chains, minimal tutorials), and very "grindy". Do note this is a historical post, as Ragnarok Online recently went through a "renewal" and much of this information was changed.

Sometimes known as Lagnarok Online, Final Fantasy Tactics Online  , or that game with cute sprites with 3D backgrounds.

The speed at which characters leveled had to do with many different things: which class the player was, how good their gear was, how much they were able to spend on supplies, what their stats were, what their player skill build was, and if they wanted to play solo or in a party. We shall select the cookie cutter build INT/DEX Wizard build that I know best... since I remade that same character about 4 times over the course of a year.

You create your character, name it Bob the Magical Wizard, you pop into the world, and are promptly dropped into the Novice Tutorial grounds. The class progression always starts you at the Novice class, which has only one passive skill that gives you basic abilities (using emotions, sitting, creating parties, opening storage, class changing). This is a mediocre part of the game, as a future Mage you started your character with 9 points in INT, 9 in DEX, and the rest in either LUK or AGI, and are restricted to do melee damage with a character that has only 1 STR. No worries, it's cake, a bit slower than someone who would make a Thief or Swordsman, but cake. It would take about an hour or two to reach job level 10 (RO splits levels into Base levels and Job levels, base levels give stat points, job levels give skill points). It's time to leave the tutorial zone, and go into the clueless grind that is RO.

The game will throw you into the town of your choice, and you must finish the class change quest to change into a Mage. Once you class change into a Mage, then it is time to shine. At the beginning both the Mage and Archer class have it easy levelling as they both have powerful ranged attacks, and can get away killing monsters without ever getting hit. It also helps that there are quite a few monsters that don't move at all, and as a Mage all you have to do is stand there and drop magic on them from a distance, so the monsters never retaliate. Levelling at this point is fast, and quite enjoyable. Stats wise the Mage would pump INT, and not invest in any other stats, skill wise the Mage can get defensive skills like Fire Wall which allows them to fight moving monsters, or some disabling magic like Frost Diver which freezes and immobilizes monsters when it succeeds. The levelling soon becomes slow though, since in general the EXP needed to level goes up in bursts every 5 levels, and soon even strong monsters would give less than 0.01% of your total EXP. Once the Mage reaches either job level 40 or 50 (or any number in between) they change class change to Wizard. At this time the Mage has probably maxed out their INT at 99, and are now working on pumping DEX, which increases cast speed.

When the Mage class changes to Wizard the job level is reset to 1, but they keep all their Mage skills. Since the job level is reset, getting the first few job levels is very quick and easy, and accessing new powerful Wizard skills opens up many new ways to level. The monst powerful skill Storm Gust can almost be used as a blanket all AoE damage spell, and also disables monsters by freezing them. Levelling in a party now becomes very viable, and the speed of gaining job levels is very quick, while base levels are not as quick, since base level is not reset when class changing. Once Bob the Magical Wizard reaches a high base level (90+) the EXP required to gain a level increases drastically, almost quadratically. By this time the Wizard would have already maxed their job level at 50, and will painstakingly need to take hours, either solo or in a party, to gain a tiny bit of exp. To put it in perspective the easiest monster to solo is a Sting which gives 4081 base EXP, and at level 91 the Wizard needs 11,649,960 EXP to gain a level, so 2855 Stings equals one level. One Sting would take about 30 seconds to kill and maybe 15 seconds to find another one on average, so about 35 and a half hours of grinding for a level. It gets even worse after the player reaches base level 95 as shown in the chart below:

The last level from 98-99 takes 99,999,998 EXP, a 72% increase from the EXP required from 97-98. There is no wonder why the first person to reach level 99 on RO was a botter... seriously. 

 It also does not help that if a player dies they lose 1% of their maximum EXP, which can be hours and hours of play time if they are at a high level. This game can be very soul crushing, but also very rewarding, as much of the stats work quadratically just like EXP progression.

The stats all progress linearly until they hit a break point, where the stat would jump up quadratically. These break points happen for STR ever 10 points (DEX if you're an Archer/Hunter), and INT every 5 and 7 points for maximum and minimum damage and gives a bonus of x^2 damage, where x is Stat/Stat Break Point. More graphs (from iROWiki):

So from this progression, it is no wonder why the developers decided to overhaul the whole entire game, and attempted to change all these formulas to a linear progression. If they had kept going the way they had players  would be completely over-powered, and the game would be either one-shot them or you get one shot. The developers actually continued the trend for a few years, and the end-game guild siege called War of Emperium was pretty much a one shot fest. It wasn't until recently that they changed the whole system to accommodate growth for the game, though the game is over a decade old, so the developers may have not foreseen this at the start.

Personally I think that a logarithmic growth, or any sort of progression with diminishing returns would have been better for the progression of the game. This would of allowed for long time growth, and also encouraged players to mix around their stats rather than remaking their character if they messed up their stats and missed a bonus break point. Diminishing returns would mean that the lower stats would give good benefits, but adding too much may not be as desirable, and let the player decide which other benefits they could work on, or simply just add to the already very high stat.

The "renewal" of Ragnarok Online actually changed many of the resources to increase linearly, with 1 INT meaning 1.5 MATK, and 1 STR equals 1 ATK (though there is a bonus...but let's not get into that). Playing the game with these new mechanics does reduce the importance of stats quite a lot, and allows for the game to pump out new content that would of been completely unbalancing using the old progression, such as gear that gives +4 INT, when back in the day +2 INT was a giant boost to damage if it hit a break point.

In the end the renewal system did what I wanted, the progression of the game is much more linear, even the levelling is quite linear now. The only problem that still unbalances the game is the racial and elemental resistances, and the use of consumables to recovery health, but one might say it is what makes the game unique. None the less, the game will continue to stack these gear resistances, until it will reach a point where one resistance in particular: Demi-Human resistance which also encompasses other players in PvP, will reach 100%. This will cause every player, if they wear these gears, to do no damage to any other player, making PvP unplayable. These resistances should be looked into and reduced along with damage in the game, since the game right now, to offset these huge stacked resistances simply gives players skills that have massive damage multipliers (100000%+ sometimes). The developers should of scaled the resistances so they were much smaller to begin with, maybe starting with only small gains like 1% or 5%, rather than huge gains like 30% and 10%. The developers could also just removes these entirely, but this would take away from the game, since it was always a crucial part of the usefulness of gears.

Game design, it's very complicated.

Reading Raph Koster's opinion on the difference between rules and mechanics, and from what I gather he says that rules are parts that make up a mechanic. He uses the action of jumping in a plat-forming game as an example: rules are things like gravity, inertia, discrete values that can be removed or added, mechanics are the "black box" that encompasses these rules. Mechanics would take in player interaction from dynamics, in the Mechanics->Dynamics->Aesthetics framework of games, and then using the discrete rules, is able to vend out a value, like say the player will jump 24 pixels up after taking in gravity and previous velocity.

More deadly things in one screen than I wanna be the Guy. Rules wise the enemies have a radius of 1.0f or a bounding box of size 24x24, mechanics wise getting close to them means death!

A game designer needs to have a grasp of things on the atomic level of the game, made up of floating point numbers, boolean, and integers. Tweaking these things tweaks the rules of the game, maybe make a monster easier to dodge by shrinking the collision box, or make the player walk slower by turning down that floating point number which controls speed. The game designer can spent hours tweaking these values (the above game is a tuning game, where you can tweak some numbers to clone jumping aesthetics in a game like Mario) to get the feel they want for the game.

We should probably have a playable game first though...

Keltis

Keltis is a multi-player (2-4 players) board-game with an Irish theme where the goal is to get the highest score at the end of the game. The group I was in played with four people, and it took us about 50 minutes just to finish one game, as we found the rules difficult to understand.

In Keltis the aim is to get one of your coloured stones to the highest position along one of five paths. This is only one way to rack up points though, other ways include collecting "wishing stones", landing on a direct score spot on the track, and not having one of your pieces on the first three spots of a track (which awards negative points). Due to the difficulty of calculating points at the end of the game with the existence of the direct score spots, there is a score keeping stone and a score keeping path along the perimeter of the game board.

The way a player moves down a certain coloured track is by playing cards of that colour in either ascending or descending order, but once they pick one order they cannot change to another order with that coloured track. An example would be that a player has a hand with two blue cards that are numbered 1 and 2, and three yellow cards that are numbered 10, 8, 7, and a three other cards of different colours. The player would most likely either want to start by playing a blue card in ascending order, so first the blue numbered 1 card, and on their next turn the blue numbered 2 card. Or the player could decide to play the yellow cards in descending order, so first the yellow numbered 10 card, then 8, then 7, allowing them to move one of their pieces up three steps along the yellow path.

The game ends when either the deck of unused cards runs out, or there are 5 pieces on any of the tracks that are in the top 3 spots of the track (spot with 10, 7, and 6 points). The player with the most points at the end wins!

- Things I Liked:

Probably one of the first things that stuck out of my mind was that in the rules it was stated that the first person to play would be the one who most recently travelled to Ireland, this allowed me to go first.

Another thing that allows for re-playability was that the direct score, wishing stones, and extra move spots are shuffled for ever game. So one game the movement spots might all be down one path, so it would be very easy to get one piece up to a high spot on that path (probably use the doubling score piece). Or more likely all the pieces would be spread out and depending on what cards that player draws that round they must pick which path is best to go down, without one path being blatantly obvious that is was a desired path.

I liked that the game moved quite fast after we ironed out all the discrepancies in the rules. The most important aspect of the game would be to plan ahead, and if there are no favourable moves, pray you get the card that you need. Other than that plays per player would be simply placing down one card and moving one piece (or more if they land on a movement spot).

The fact that there are negative scores for landing in the first three spaces of a track, and also for not getting any wishing stones means that the player needs to spread out their strategy, even though the best way to play the game would be to get to the highest place on a few tracks. For players who aren't able to get to a high spot in a track they should attempt to cover up their weak spots by getting more pieces to a mid point in the tracks, and they can still win. I actually fell into this trap while playing the game, and ended up with a piece in the negative zone, that caused me to place in second. I was the first one to get to a high point on the track, but I kept stalling and decided to put a new piece in play, but the game ended promptly after, and I lost 3 points.

I liked the fact the board was mainly green... since it's my favourite colour. The art was also nice, the board is covered in Celtic art.

- Things I Disliked:

The board's score keeping path does not have negative spaces, and since we were all newbies, many of us started down multiple paths at the start, resulting in up to -20 points. It wasn't until we passed roughly the mid point of the game before any of us got a positive score.

I also disliked how the board was shaped, the starting point was converged, but the pieces didn't all fit on the starting zone. Also the paths can really only fit up to 2 pieces on one spot, so playing with 4 players leads to pushing and shoving of pieces on the board.

I dislike the inclusion of the wishing stones since they give those who climb faster an advantage, and they already have an advantage of more points. The wishing stones are a removable game piece, so only one person can receive it's benefits, and whoever climbs faster is more likely to get more of them.

The discard mechanic is also a bad aspect of the game, as discarding is possibly the worst thing for a player to do during the start and middle of the game. The discard mechanic also gives players who are high up an advantage since it allows for them to not put a lower piece into play. An example of this would be that the player has 3 pieces at the last spot of three different paths, they see that their score completely topples the others, and can simply continue to discard a card and not move a piece (not gain a negative score), until the game is complete.

I dislike that there is not a way for a player to stall or really effect the movement of other players other than maybe by picking up wishing stones. Other than snagging wishing stones first the player is pretty much playing by themselves, and watching that the other players don't go over their score.

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The one element I would design differently would be to completely remove the negative points so it would be easier to count points. So the points gained from each spot on a track in ascending order would be : 0,1,2,5,6,7,10,11,14, and the wishing stone points would be : 0,1,6,7,10,14. I might also remove the double score piece as with the increased maximum points you can receive, this would be a very powerful piece to play right, and quickly. Would you keep the double score piece in the game even though doubling the score would lead to +8 more points than the normal version? Should the double score piece, double both the bonus point spots on the track, and also wishing stones that it collects? Would this be game breaking?

Personally removing the double score piece would increase thinking that players have to do, and would encourage players to spread out their advances. This spreading out of advances would keep the game more balanced, and also it may hide certain player strategies. Having the double score piece would automatically cause players to simply look at their hand, and pick which ever colour of cards they have the most and send it down that path, without much other thought. Or the player would simply look at the board and send the double score piece down a path with a lot of bonus score spots, and double the points along that path, a pretty transparent strategy. Many other players would probably follow suite, as there really is no way to play against a player.