A Challenge to... MYSELF! Making a game every week

[Morph Bark]

Spoiler: Boring-Yet-Relevant Background Stuff

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Yesterday I went to an open day for IGAD, the study of International Game Architecture & Design at the NHTV school in Breda, the Netherlands. I became inspired to go there next year and study Game Design & Production (my sister's already done a Visual Arts studies, I know a lot of people in Programming, but neither are for me). I love making stuff and see people enjoy it. In my first year in high school, I made a board game with trivia questions on things we had learned during that year. Later on, I made a ruleset expansion to a card game people had made based on a forum and its members. Both are currently lost, and both are also too old to be relevant enough to bring with me to an interview to be admitted into IGAD.

So, because I want to get into a Game Design & Production education, I'm setting a challenge for myself: to make a game, or the basics of one, every single week until January 10th. It doesn't matter if it's a board game, a card game, a tabletop roleplaying game (or adventure module for one), a video game or an outdoors game, as long as I create one each week. At the beginning of each week, I also have to make a plan on how to work on it, allocating time on tasks (drawing, making props, picking music, writing narrative, etc). I may use more time on the tasks, but the time allocated must be the minimum used. At the end of the week, I write an evaluation of the time used and how well I had planned at the beginning, I look over the game I've made, and I put it up for the evaluation by anyone who cares to examine it.

tl;dr:

1. Until January 10th, 2014, I create one game each week.
2. It doesn't matter what kind of game, as long as it can be classified as one.
3. At the beginning of each week, I make a planning on what to do and when to do it.
4. At the end of the week, I evaluate my planning skills, the game I've created, and put the game up to be evaluated by others.

EDIT: Currently I am going through the process of getting accepted into the school, IGAD at NHTV Breda. I'm also running a PbP game of my own devising here, which involves a lot of role-playing and strategy.

[Crimmy]

This... seems pretty extreme, then rad. I wish you the best of luck!

[Dumbledore lives]

I actually have some experience with this. I'm currently studying for a Bachelor of Arts in Game Design and last semester I took a class where for the first four weeks I think we had to make a game a week. Each week we had different mechanics to experiment with, as well as different requirements. After those initial weeks we spent more time on the games making four over the course of the semester, approximately one every 3 weeks.

There is one thing you should be aware of though, you will make bad games. You will have bad ideas and work on them really hard and even after hours of work it will have still been a bad idea. We all have thousands of bad ideas, and a few good ones, and something like this is the best way to get through a lot of bad ideas. It's a very rewarding experience but ultimately very time consuming, and I wish you the best of luck in this endeavor.

[Morph Bark]

This... seems pretty extreme, then rad. I wish you the best of luck!

Thanks! Appreciate it!

I actually have some experience with this. I'm currently studying for a Bachelor of Arts in Game Design and last semester I took a class where for the first four weeks I think we had to make a game a week. Each week we had different mechanics to experiment with, as well as different requirements. After those initial weeks we spent more time on the games making four over the course of the semester, approximately one every 3 weeks.

There is one thing you should be aware of though, you will make bad games. You will have bad ideas and work on them really hard and even after hours of work it will have still been a bad idea. We all have thousands of bad ideas, and a few good ones, and something like this is the best way to get through a lot of bad ideas. It's a very rewarding experience but ultimately very time consuming, and I wish you the best of luck in this endeavor.

Oh, certainly. This is primarily to get used to the work, to get the idea mill going, and to actually, personally produce a prototype I can bring with me to the interview. At some point I figure that I will take the good ones I work more on them.


For this week, I've decided I'll create a tabletop game with a board similar to Colonists of Catan. The board will consist of hex-shaped tiles, each of a kind of environment and with certain resources that can be collected there. The players will play as mammoth hunters. The goal of the game is to be the first to kill a mammoth. Until then, players will have to survive and develop skills and weapons to hunt the mammoths.

There are some other details I've worked out, but they need some more working out first.

[Morph Bark]

The first two weeks have gone well in the challenge, but the current (third) week has hit a slow point. I'll be taking this time to configure the rules of the first two and allow me to post them up here, should there be anyone interested in reviewing and/or using them.

[TheWombatOfDoom]

I thought you'd be posting them here anyway...so I'd love to see what you get.

[D20ragon]

Yes please! I plan to go into game design myself(that, or writing),and I'd love to see your games!

[Morph Bark]

I thought you'd be posting them here anyway...so I'd love to see what you get.

That was the plan, but I'd gotten distracted and forgot about it. It largely had to do with the fact that I've worked all weekends, being away from home from 7 AM 'til 9 PM. Missing at least a day to work on these certainly had effect.

Anyway, let's show these babies up!


The Mammoth Hunt
Week 1's game was quickly decided on to be a board game, in which the players play prehistoric hunter-gatherers. Since winter is coming, they need a lot of food for their families. To provide them with enough food, the players set out to hunt mammoths.

The conditions to win are:

• Have 5 points or more
• Stand on the same tile as the mammoth

The mammoth appears as soon as one player has 5 points, but can only be placed on Tundra tiles. If a player reaches 5 points, their turn ends (they make final preparations for the hunt). If a player with less than 5 points enters a tile with the mammoth on it, their turn ends (they try to hunt the mammoth, but the mammoth proves stronger). This means that by the time someone reaches 5 points, someone else can reach 5 points before the first person has their turn again.

The players take turns, going clockwise. The players roll dice to see who goes first, with the lowest roll winning. Players have three actions on their turn:

• Move their player token one tile.
• Gather resources from the tile they stand on.
• Draw or play a card.

Each of these actions may be performed multiple times in a turn. At the start of their turn, starting at their second turn, players need to pay one food token. If they don't, they lose one of their actions this turn.

Gathering Resources
To gather resources from a tile, a die has to be rolled. If the result is equal or lower than the number next to the resource on the tile that the player wishes to gather, they are successful. If resources are gathered from a tile, that resource becomes unavailable for two rounds (put two black markers on top of the resource's picture). Stone becomes permanently unavailable if it's successfully gathered.

The resources are: food (apple symbol), wood (log symbol), stone (rocks symbol) and leather. Leather is automatically gathered when a player gathers food and has an active knife card.

Drawing/Playing Cards
Cards show tools that players can make with resources they gather, for example: making weapons or traps from wood and stone, or clothes from leather. Tools give an amount of points to the player and also give additional abilities.

Spoiler: Card Descriptions

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Knife
Resources Needed: 1 Stone
1 Point
With the Knife you are able to gather Leather every time you roll a 1 to gather Food.

Spear
Resources Needed: 1 Wood
1 Point
With the Spear you increase your chances of successfully gathering Food. Your die rolls are lowered by 1 point when gathering Food.

Stone Spear
Resources Needed: 1 Wood + 1 Stone
2 Points
With the Stone Spear you increase your chances of successfully gathering Food. Your die rolls are lowered by 2 points when gathering Food. You cannot have a Stone Spear and a Spear at the same time. If you have a Spear, put the card on the bottom of the card pile.

Bow
Resources Needed: 1 Wood + 1 Leather
1 Point
With the Bow you can gather Food from 1 tile away, instead of only on the same tile.

Stone Axe
Resources Needed: 1 Wood + 1 Stone
2 Points
With the Stone Axe you increase your chances of successfully gathering Wood. Your die rolls are lowered by 2 points when gathering Wood.

Trap
Resources Needed: 2 Wood
1 Point per Trap
When you play this card, you place the Trap on the tile you stand on. If you put it on a tile that has a Food resource, you can roll for that Trap to gather Food, even if you aren't on that tile. The Trap can only successfully gather Food once.

Giant Trap
Resources Needed: 2 Wood + 1 Stone + 1 Leather
No Points
When you play this card, you place the Giant Trap on the tile you stand on. If the mammoth appears or enters the tile with the Giant Trap, the player who made the Giant Trap wins.

Spoiler: Land Tiles (examples)

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These are only examples, and are pretty bad-looking, but luckily they're only examples. The inverted-colour desert is supposed to be Tundra. I also want to include Hills (1-2 Food, 1 Stone or 1 Wood) and Plains (1-3 Food). The watery tile is meant to be Rivers (1 Food) and I thought of making it special in that Food doesn't become unavailable and Spears are more effective, but I'm not sure. Might have them only be accessible through boats, too.

I originally wanted to go for 10 points, to make it a decent length for a game, but I haven't thought of enough things to give points yet.

The second game, Calvin Cards'n'Dice (Name WIP) I'll put up later.

[_Brone_]

nice man this is a very good idea good job

ha this post made me a halfling

[TheWombatOfDoom]

nice man this is a very good idea good job

***snip***

I wouldn't talk about such things if I were you. Forum rules and all.

[Morph Bark]

Mentioning a forum title is against the rules now? o.O


Anyway, what do you think of it?

[D20ragon]

It's very nice. I would certainly play it. It seems to be a combo of Settlers of Catan,and minecraft, in a cool way.

[Grinner]

The mammoth appears as soon as one player has 5 points, but can only be placed on Tundra tiles. If a player reaches 5 points, their turn ends (they make final preparations for the hunt). If a player with less than 10 points enters a tile with the mammoth on it, their turn ends (they try to hunt the mammoth, but the mammoth proves stronger). This means that by the time someone reaches 5 points, someone else can reach 5 points before the first person has their turn again.

...

I originally wanted to go for 10 points, to make it a decent length for a game, but I haven't thought of enough things to give points yet.

Is that a typo?

[Morph Bark]

It's very nice. I would certainly play it. It seems to be a combo of Settlers of Catan,and minecraft, in a cool way.

Thank you. The idea to use tiles came from Catan, yeah, and was added in second after working out the basic idea behind the game of resource-gathering mammoth hunters.

Is that a typo?

It's a failure to correct. Originally, it was 10 points, as the end of the post says, but I changed it to 5 by the end. Seems like I missed one of the instances of 10. It's been corrected, thanks for spotting it.

[Morph Bark]

And here's the other one that I created in the second week. The third week I got kinda a big brainfart, but ended up with an idea for a tabletop game, which I will slowly be working on in addition to all of this. The development so far can be found here.


Colour Coded
For this game you need some coloured 6-sided dice and some cards. It doesn't matter what kind of cards they are, but it would be handy to put them into some card sleeves so you can't identify the kind of card it is by looking at the back of the cards.

All players start by rolling their dice. All players should have an equal amount of dice, but they don't need to have the same colours. The goal for each player is to get all their dice to 6. The first player to get all their dice to 6 wins.

After rolling dice, all players each draw 4 cards from the pile. The player with the lowest total result with their dice goes first. At the beginning of their turn, a player draws a card. They may then perform two actions:

1. Play a card to increase their own dice's points.
2. Play a card do decrease another player's points.

Play a card to increase your own dice's points
If you choose this action, you look at the colour of the card you play. If the card has more than one colour, only look at the dominant colours. You increase the points of the die with the same colour as the card's most dominant colour by 1. If the card has more than one dominant colour, you may increase a second die with the same colour by 1 as well.

Play a card do decrease another player's points
If you choose this action, you look at the colour of the card you play. If the card has more than one colour, only look at the dominant colours. Pick one of the colours and choose one of the other players. The die with the corresponding colour that that player has decreases by 1 point.


Increasing/decreasing a die's points
Whenever the points of a die change, you pick up the die and turn it to the new number and put it down again. For example, if you rolled a 5 in the beginning and another player uses a card to decrease it by one point, change the die to display the side with a 4 on it.

[thatonesungod]

is this still a thing

[Morph Bark]

is this still a thing

It is! Unfortunately I don't venture in this part of the board often, which is why it's easy for me to forget to keep this updated. I am currently finishing the write-up for a board game version of EMPIRE!.

I will present most of my works so far at my assessment interview, which is tomorrow. Afterwards, I can post up the rules for the EMPIRE! board game for scrutiny, comments and criticism.

[Afool]

Great! I hope you have a fantastic time at the interview!

[Iruka]

So, how did the interview go?

[Morph Bark]

Hey! Sorry, didn't keep up with this thread, since the original goal of January 10th is long since past.

The interview went really well! The only downside, a big downside, was that I hadn't made an actual video game, which would've ensured me being in. Now however, it's a matter of whether there will be places left over once all those that have more practical experience have been let in.

On the side, there are more complications. I've received a letter telling me that my high school diploma is no longer valid from this year onwards for schools that pick students by lottery, which might be the case for students that don't get 100% ensurance to get into IGAD (the school I want to go to). The governmental agency that covers educational matters told me that if I meet all the schools standards I can still partake in the lottery. The funny thing is that I meet all but one of those standards, and that one standard is having a valid high school diploma of a certain level. (The level is not in question, since I received the highest, hardest possible high school education in my country. The only way in which it could've been harder would've been to have Latin added and twice as many Biology classes.)

I've received an email yesterday from IGAD for another test I'll need to make that I haven't checked out yet. I'll also be calling them this afternoon to check about the whole lottery thing, because if it isn't a lottery at all, then the diploma matter is settled. I'll still need to twiddle my thumbs I actually get in though, because the only alternatives are going back to my old school (which I'd have to restart and would likely not get a job for in that field) or the military (in which I couldn't have the education and position my expertises lie in simply due to requiring vision correction a half point outside the required norms).