Henry Video, Game Design Wrap-up, New Game Idea: Quantum Computer

So Henry was super cute this past week and I took a video of him, then edited it a bit in my movie editing program.  Then I uploaded it onto Youtube for your enjoyment. Here you go:

So Winterim is wrapping up. Friday was our last full day, and we do have class on Monday, but it's only for 35 minutes, so it's not really class as it is somewhere to stick the students before the Winterim assembly. Speaking of the assembly, I made an awesome video for it from my Psychology and Science class, but because it drops student names like crazy I'm pretty sure I'd get in major trouble from FERPA if I posted it as public. So I can't share it here, as if I did try to post it it would give you an error and "video not found' and such.

Anyway, Winterim. My Game Design class also wound down. In Game Design the first week is spent playing games and learning the mechanics and what makes them fun and how they run and what-not. The second and third weeks are when the students break off into their final groups and create their own game. The top three games are then professionally created, with artwork and parts and such. Last year I got a one month free trial of photoshop to do the artwork. This year my wife got me the Pixelmator program, which is just like Photoshop. So I can handle the artwork. The parts will be done again through Printplaygames.com, which is a website that has pieces and can print off boards and cards and such.

The three winners this year were: People Zoo, Basketball the Board Game, and Contagion. People Zoo is a card game where you are an alien race that travels back in time to kidnap people to put in your future alien zoo. There are six different time periods you can travel to: Middle Ages, Renaissance, Classical, 1800s, 1900s, and the 21st Century. There are six different categories in each: Military, Writer, Artist, Religious, Theatrical, and Political. The goal of the game is to collect one of each category from one time zone or one from each time zone in one category. There's also worker placement and auctioning involved.

Basketball the Board game is a game where you play basketball. Each team has five players: a Point Guard, a something else, a something else, a something else, and a fifth one you can tell I know little to nothing about basketball. But each of those groups has a deck of cards, and you get one per category in the beginning, which tells you who that player is and could give them special abilities. And one one player does something, like scores or blocks a pass, their stats improve in that area. Once a player's stats improves enough, they get better, such as adding one to their die roll every time they try to score or something.

Contagion is a post-apocalyptic cooperative game, where you and the other players try to avoid zombies as you try to collect resources to find the zombie cure. Each player gets their own unique ability (think Pandemic, or Forbidden Island, or really any game with variable player powers). The board is a big hexagonal grid. After everyone takes their turn (which consists of using 5 action points) the zombies all move to whichever player is closet to them in true mindless zombie style. However, as the game progresses it becomes harder, with the zombies becoming faster, more zombies spawning, and so forth. If a player does encounter a zombie they have to draw a card from the Infection deck, which will either say Clear (more likely) or Infected (less likely). They keep it a secret though, which introduces the there-could-be-a-traitor-among-us thing that Dead of Winter and Shadows Over Camelot has.

So those are the three games. Students are buying copies of them, with the people that made the game wanting to get one, of course, but others were interested in getting a copy too. People Zoo will be around $20, Basketball around $32, and Contagion around $38. The Game Design budget will take a little bit off the top of that.

So last week during my Sunday nap (because we have 8 in the morning church and so we need a nap) I had this dream. In this dream I was playing a card game. And since earlier that week we had talked about Quantum Theory in my Psychology and Science class, it was fresh on my mind. So this game I was playing in this dream was a quantum particle game where the cards were like quantum particles: you knew what they could do, and they kind of existing in all their states at once, but once you played it and "observed" it, it locked itself into place and could only be in one of those states.

I knocked around in my head a lot of things I could do with that. And there's still tons of possibilities out there. (If you can think of any let me know.) What I finally settled down on though was a quantum computer idea, where the cards you play make up this big computer, and when a program runs through it it runs through your cards, but you never really know what side of the card it's going to come out of until you run it. Once I had that idea I bounced round some more ideas and came up with what I have developed over this past week.

The cards are hexagonal cards. The game consists of two parts: building the computer and then running it. In part one, you card draft your hand, then take turns playing cards from that hand onto the game board, which will be the computer. Next part of the game is running the computer. Each card, which represents a quantum particle piece of the computer, will have anywhere from two to four connections leading out of it into some of its six sides. Each connection will have a number or numbers on it from 1-6. When you run the computer and the information-bit-whatever-you-call-it (I've called it the Pulse because I don't know what else to call it), anyway when the Pulse goes into that quantum part, a die roll determines along which path the Pulse travels. And you get more points the farther down the Pulse goes in the computer, but according to how many of your cards the Pulse went through.

And there will be different ways of choosing a die, it won't be completely random. The most common example is, let's say it's a two player game. Three dice are rolled. The first player chooses one of those three dice and moves the Pulse. Then the second player chooses one of the remaining two dice and moves the Pulse. The third die is discarded, and three more dice are rolled. That kind of thing. So there's strategy in it, instead of just hoping the numbers turn out well.

Anyway, that's my idea. I've already got all 42 quantum tiles designed (yes, there are 42 of them and yes that was on purpose), and I'm working on the exact ways you can manipulate dice grabbing. The one above is the classic example, but there's also going to be crazy things going on in some runs as well, such as: roll four dice. The third player divides them into two groups of two, giving two to player one and two to player two. Player one picks one and gives the other to player three. Player two picks one and gives the other to player three. Player three picks one of the two he got and discards the other. You know, stuff like that.