Sim City 4

Interactivity: In sim city 4 you create and control a city. You have tools to zone land, build roads, water infrastructure, power infrastructure and civic buildings. You use these tools to attract more sims into your city. There is also an aspect of financial management involved; players must control the cities revenue stream, which is generated by the sims in the city. City income is greatly affected by the average inelegance of sims, and investing in education ensures the next generation will be intelligent. 

Concept: The theme of the game is a city simulator. You build infrastructure in hopes to attract sims to your city.

Spatial Arena: The game is set on a piece of land. You build the city, so the arena is what you make of it.

Challenge: The challenge is to manage the finances, and balance spending and earning. The major challenge is trying to increase services provided to the sims as well as growing the city, while maintaining a balanced budget.

Story: Sim City does not really have a story beyond the concept. You are the mayor, and you create your own story.

Story
Setting
In a small farm town away from the major cities.

Protagonists
Birds

Goals
To survive the birdocalypse, and escape from the small town.

Threats
The birds attack the humans

Attempts
The birds are attacking everyone, including the main character.

Outcome
The user either escapes from the birds, or meets their demise from being attacked.

Consequence
Similar to the outcome the user either escapes or dies. However the escape may be more open ended than a happy ending. For instance the player makes it out and is confronted by a destroyed city and finding that their is no safe haven.

As a Game
Space
The game is set in a small farm town, alot of the environment will be outside. It will include things like, flat farm land, rivers that need to be crossed and the birds nest that must be snuck through.

Objects
The player may pickup melee weapons, guns and health along the way. The player will only have a very limited amount of ammunition for attacking the enemies .

Workshop 5 - MazeCraft Game Concept

MazeCraft is an 'escape game' with an added obstacle of an advancing torrent of water, which follows the user from the starting point and prevents the user from back-tracking too far within the maze.

Goal
The primary aim of the game is to escape the maze without drowing in the water that is moving through the maze from the starting point.

Rules

• The player rolls a 6-sided dice and moves that number of spaces forward or backwards.
• The player can not turn around during a move, however they can do it at the start of each move
• For each turn a player takes, a torrent of water advances one block in each availiable direction from the starting point.
• The player must move the distance given on the die unless:
• the player hits a dead end; or
• the player encounters a torrent of water
• If the player stops infront of the water, they must move away from the torrent of water on their next move
• If the player is unable to move due to the maze and the torrent of water, they have lost the game

Workshop 4 - Mazecraft

Testing Observations

• "The board is warped" - The board being paper, was not flat and was difficult to place pieces on.
• "The pieces are annoying" - The pieces used in the game are made of paper and are difficult to keep in place.
• Users reached a stalemate very quickly as one user cut the other off, dividing the board into 2 sections. The only way for a player to be victorious was for the them to roll a lower average for the rest of the game.
• Larger dice rolls where tested during gameplay to speed up the gameplay process. It was discovered that with the existing rules(dies if runs into wall, and only one turn per move) a 12 sided dice causes easy-death.

Week 3 - HexTron

Hextron is a game created by myself and Tristan Davey. Hextron is a board game based on the popular tron light race from the movie. However the major difference is the core game mechanic of the race has been replaced with a dice roll. This shifts the focus away from racing to probability, and requiring skill to determine successful moves.

Game Pieces
The only game pieces used in this game are the player pieces.

Spatial Arena
The game takes place on a 2D map consisting of a hexagon grid.

Gameplay
Players start each at one end of the map. The players alternate turns of rolling the dice. The number on the dice dictates the amount of spaces a player must move. The goal of the game is for one player to cut the other player off and leave them with no moves.

Rules

• Player must move the number rolled on the dice
• The player may set off from each move in any direction; however each move may contain one and only one turn.
• Player at no point can cross the path any player has previously taken.

Workshop 2

Breakout

Interactivity: In Breakout you control a paddle at the bottom of the screen and attempt to keep the ball bouncing upwards. At the top of the screen there are blocks, each time the ball bounces off the block you score a point, and the block disappears.

Concept: The theme of the game is rather limited, however the emphasis is more on the challenged the game provides to the user.

Spatial Arena: The game does not really have a setting, the arena is just a box that contains blocks at the top to score points off.

Challenge: The challenge in breakout is how the ball moves quite fast. When you get down to the last block, the challenged lies in trying to hit the last block. The game is effectively a race against the clock, and the challenge also lies in challenging friends.

Story: There isn't really a story in the game, as the games is purely the challenge in itself. Back at the time of release, alot of games where fairly simple and lacking in story. The advantage of this is that this game had all of the development focus on the challenge.

Hello world.

What's happening internet.
This blog is for the partial fullfilment of CP5604 and documents my work in the subject.