Any word on the ongoing projects?
I have been absolutely rubbish at doing progress updates... seriously sorry, peeps! What I'm going to do is share a bit of what we've been working on, and the state of various projects we've got in the works, over the next few days. In some cases I'm going to keep it vague because I'm a troll, but I'll try to provide enough stuff to be interesting. Sound good?
Generally speaking, everyone's been busy with various things. For me, I've been studying design pretty intensively, to familiarize myself with 3D (something I haven't had much experience with in the past), and with what games are out there, and what techniques they're using to do what they do. I've also been brainstorming solutions to some unexpected challenges... for example, things like "
How to project a 2D Terrain Map over a Spherical World with minimal distortion", or "
How to create animations using algorythms or procedural generation, instead of animating every frame by hand". We've also been working together to design and redesign a few projects, prototyping them into something playable to check if they're fun, and sometimes scrapping them and returning to the drawing board.
One of our first projects (you might remember
the spoiler screenshot from a while back) was a prototype for an Electronic Boardgame, to learn the workflow, and make something simple and fun together. We took some inspiration from gardening, from Go, and from a few other places, and created KaiHua, a 2-4 player strategy boardgame themed around tilling soil and growing plants. However, we didn't realize that a simple, fun, and original classical-style boardgame is a pretty big challenge in Game Design. Basically, you're competing with games that are roughly as old as civilization itself. As a first project, it's kinda like a rookie going toe to toe with Muhammad Ali in the boxing ring... only he was also a Chess Board? Or something?
Er, moving on... back in March we put together a playable Pre-Alpha of KaiHua, complete with a few variations on the core mechanics, while I started to play around with graphics. It ended up being more interesting in concept than in practice. We also ran into issues with developing for a mobile platform that made things more difficult. We suspended the project for the time being, while we get some more practice on other projects. You can still check out the Alpha for yourself here, and I'll share some Screenshots and Concept Art too. The Pre-Alpha was meant for in-house testing, so I'm sorry that it's not really intelligible or pretty, but you're welcome to try it out if you're curious. Also, we ended up going for the "River" rule set, but other rule sets are included in the Pre-Alpha.
KaiHua Pre-Alpha Download:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/v40vawx3tgemuuw/KaiHua%20Alpha%20March%202014.zipThe main menu would look something like this in the final version. The flower would be made from animated parts, and you'd see one of the 4 possible flowers/teams each time it loaded.
- Basic: Players Fully-Claim 1 Empty tile, or one Half-Claimed tile they own per turn. Adjacent Empty tiles become Half-Claimed, their adjacent Half-Claimed tiles become Fully-Claimed, and an opponent's adjacent Half-Claimed tiles become Empty Tiles.
- Cascade (Multi): Every time a Half-Claimed tile becomes a Fully-Claimed tile, it Half-Claims the adjacent tiles as well. (Encourages longer-term strategic planning, and makes the game more exciting)
- Cascade (Single): As above, but only applies to tiles adjacent to the tile the player claims this turn.
- Slow Growth: As with Simple, but Players Half-Claim 1 Empty or Half-Claimed tile per turn instead. Half-Claiming a Half-Claimed tile creates a Fully-Claimed tile, and Half-Claims the tiles adjacent to it. (Encourages a more strategic and thoughtful mode of play)
- Wild: Half-Claimed tiles do not belong to particular players. All players treat them as their own. (Increases game speed and reduces/changes the nature of tile-claiming strategy)
Each players makes 2 moves per turn, from among the following:
- Till: (Valid on an Empty Square) Players creates a 5-tile cross of captureable Tilled Soil, centered around an Empty Tile. This territory doesn't belong to any player, and is worth no points.
- Plant: (Valid on any Tilled Soil square). Plants a new Seed on a tile of Tilled Soil. Seeds belong to the player, and are worth 1 point. Players can only plant one Seed per turn.
- Grow: (Click and drag a planted Seed into adjacent Tilled Soil) If a player has the largest number of Seeds adjacent to a contiguous region of Tilled Soil, they can capture it by Growing their seed into the region; they select the seed, and a direction to Grow into; growth then visually cascades from tile to tile, with an appropriate sound effect. Each captured Tilled Soil is worth 1 point, and can't be un-captured.
- Move the River: A river divides the game board in a vertical line between tiles. It acts as a barrier to Capture, splitting Tilled Soil regions to break a stalemate, allowing for clever captures, and preventing a Seed from Growing across it. A player can move it to another vertical or horizontal line; it can't be moved again until after that players next turn is over (they don't get to move it on their next turn either).
Anyway, that's the first of many belated updates. More soon!
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Topic: Victory Garden Games (Read 40036 times)