Post General Conference thoughts (plus, files printed)

Figuring this is a game design blog, I suppose that some part of it should deal with games. So, I printed off all the Interstellar Pig files on Saturday! Yay! Now to cut out the cards and fix the board and pieces.

This last Saturday and Sunday were General Conference.  This is a time when the living Prophet and Apostles of the Lord Jesus Christ speak to the church. It's such a marvelous blessing to have living prophets and apostles on the earth today to lead and guide the church just as the ancient apostles did thousands of years ago.

During the sessions I took some notes. Here are some of the thoughts that I had while watching.

President Uchtdorf: We take technology for granted. We also take the gospel for granted. The gospel is amazing! What shall we give in return for being blessed so much?

Elder Hales: If we loved Christ more, would we suffer less? We are missionaries to our children and teachers to them. Give devoted time to your children.

Sister McConkie: The Lord doesn't want us to suffer longer than needed; He wants us to turn to Him. Pray by the Spirit.

Elder Christensen: Joseph Smith was a prophet.

Elder Uceda: Prayers should come from the heart.

Elder Cornish: Stop comparing ourselves with others. If we need to compare do so with our past/present/future self. The Atonement is for saints as well as sinners. Rationalizing is not repentance.

Elder Andersen: The Lord needs you to be more engaged in this great cause of missionary work/member missionary work.

Elder Cook: Don't do gospel extremism. Don't make one principle more important than another. Sooner or later everyone will have to sit down to a banquet of consequences.

Elder Stevenson: One can never be too young to receive a testimony of the Book of Mormon. Substitute some social media time for reading the Book of Mormon.

Elder Christofferson: The Atonement made it so that mercy can overpower justice. Some blessings come only through obedience.

Elder Bassett: Seek knowledge: sincere desire, obedience. I know that God liveth His children, nevertheless I do not know the meaning of all things. Have God, not you, guide your spiritual learning and growing.

Elder Yamashita: Stories of missionaries. In our lives there will be trials.

Elder Oaks: Pray for desire to help with missionary work. Keep the commandments ourselves. Be a faithful member. Pray for inspiration on what we can do to share the gospel to others. Success is inviting people.

Elder Holland: Hometeaching is more than visiting; it is helping and being a friend.

Elder Curtis Jr.: Testimonies from and of the Book of Mormon. You will feel the Spirit in your life as you study the Book of Mormon. The Spirit will help you resist temptation.

President Uchtdorf: Story of Alma meeting Amulet. What can we learn from Alma's story? How are we like Amulek?

President Eyring: Treat others as they could be. As others have lifted you up, lift others up as well.

President Thomas S. Monson: Obey the Word of Wisdom.

President Thomas S. Monson: The Plan of Salvation is true.

President Nelson: The purpose of life is to have joy. Joy comes from and because of Christ. What can we endure today by focusing on the joy that is set before us? Anything that opposes Christ and His doctrine destroys joy.

Elder Muers: 5 ways to increase the impact of partaking of the sacrament: Prepare in advance, arrive early to Sacrament Meeting, sing and learn from the words of the Sacrament hymn, spiritually participate in the words of the Sacrament prayers, ponder and remember Christ as the sacred emblems are passed.

Sister Reeves: Repentance and forgiveness.

Elder Ballard: If you are thinking about leaving the church, first ask yourselves: To whom shall ye go? We are all on different parts of the path and should be treated accordingly. Christ will never abandon any one of us.

Elder Davies: Go to church to worship; worship at church. Worshipping God is essential for any follower of Christ. We cannot love God at the same time we hate or ignore others. Spiritual experiences have to do with what's in our hearts, not with what's around us.

Elder Robbins: The natural man has a tendency to judge others unrighteously. To chasten: To purify. "Whom I love I chasten that their sins may be forgiven." Reprove when moved upon by the Holy Ghost, not when moved upon by anger. The way you see child is how you treat them and the way you treat them is how they will become.

President Eyring: Gratitude on the Sabbath day.

Elder Bednar: Know Christ, don't just know about Him.

Elder Ashton: Being born again is a process, not an event.

Elder Carl B. Cook: Service is the very fiber of which life in the Celestial Kingdom is made. All church callings come through God, through His inspired servants.

Elder Rasband: Satan wants you to forget spiritual experiences; the Lord wants you to remember them. Our minds quickly forget spiritual experiences, so act on them ASAP! Do not forget your heritage, especially your Divine heritage.

Elder Schmutz: Why do bad things happen to good people? God compensates for "unneeded" suffering. People keeping covenants aren't except from suffering, but the gospel helps them through it. To grow from a trial we must actively use our faith to actively grow from it.

Elder Nattress: Teach your children the gospel.

Elder Runland: Elder Runland set off a firecracker in the chapel before church. Repentance: He who repents the same is forgiven. The Atonement leaves no footprints--after repentance you are completely clean.

Interstellar Pig equipment and rules

Here are some of the equipment cards and also some pages from the rule book. I still need to tweak a few things, but otherwise things are looking good.

I had a free download of Photoshop for a month trial, but that trial ended at the end of last week. Now, in order to make edits, I need to go up onto campus and use a campus computer. This makes finishing these files a lot more slow. Normally I'd be able to edit on the bus or after school on my personal computer, but without the program I'm stuck to infrequent trips to campus to use those. I've been able to do so only a couple of times the last few days, and got a little bit more done, but thankfully I finished the whole rulebook before that, and also the equipment cards. Like I said, I just need to make a few modifications.

After that though, it looks like I'll be able to start printing off these files later on this week.  Using some sticky paper I got a few months back, and the white card stock Heather got me for my birthday, I'll be able to print off the cards and board. The cards will go on the card stock, and the board will go on the sticky label paper to put onto an actual game board. A Blurt! board to be exact.

I'm deciding on what to print the rules off on. I'm thinking card stock simply because it will be nicer and more durable and it cost the exact same either way: 15 cents per color sheet. I can't decide as to whether or not do also make a covering for the box all fancy. If I had photoshop on my personal computer still I'd say hey why not that's awesome, but now having to go up onto campus is a bit of a detriment.

So here are some sample pages from the rules and some sample equipment cards. Like I said, I'm going to change a few minor things, but other than that they're all pretty much final.

Notice how on the bottom of each of the equipment cards (or Attribute cards as they're called because they're called that in the book) is a little number. These numbers act the same way they do in 7 Wonders: the number of players in the game determines which cards you use.

Interstellar Pig character cards

Okay!  So last week you saw the awesome board for the updated version of Interstellar Pig, and now it's time to show you the updated character cards.  Like I said last week, I tried to make every character balanced with every other character. This was done by: 

(1) IRSC. The lower the number, the smarter the creature is. This enables them to use more advanced weapons and equipment, as well as gives them an advantage in battles (they can preroll one of their dice). So obviously the character with the lower IRSC is going to be at an advantage. But not to fear, because the characters also have:

(2) Livable Atmosphere and Temperatures. I tried to balance out the IRSC by having those creatures be comfortable in atmospheres and temperatures that were slightly more rare. If you notice from the boar, 6 planets have Oxygen, 5 have Flundonium, and 4 have Hydrogen. The two smartest aliens breathe Hydrogen, followed by Flundonium, followed by Oxygen. Also, a lot of the least intelligent aliens breathe Oxygen. This, combined with what comfortable temperatures they can be in, leads to a list of planets that they are immediately able to survive in without any equipment. The number of planets slowly goes up the stupider the alien becomes. However, these advantages and disadvantages can easily be offset by a Thermal Suit or Breathing Apparatus, which is why there is also:

(3) Agility. A lot of the less intelligent aliens have higher agilities. During battles, the creature that is more agile takes the difference of their agilities and adds it to his/her total attack. So if I was a Replilia battling Marleam, my agility is 3 and his is 2, so I would add 1 to my attack. This might seem slight, but there's always the possibility of you being the agile An-Neld facing the Parasitic Tapeworm, with agilities 4 and 0 respectively, giving you a +4 attack. But do not fear, because there is one other thing that a lot of creatures have to balance out their characters, and that is:

(4) Special Abilities. The top 5 smartest aliens don't have one, and then the abilities start from kind of lame and go to really good. Examples are: the Gludo is immune to the Lichen, the Replilia has a symbiotic slug that lives in its mouth which lowers his IRSC whenever he eats food (it's in the book, people), the Parasitic Tapeworm has an increased handsome, Human Beings can reroll their movement dice once, and the Crigg have an increased health.

The character cards also have the species name of the creature, as well as their personal name, and their home planet, which is where you will start the game. I also found some cool alien pictures to put on the cards. So, without further ado, enjoy:

Interstellar Pig version 2.0

So my brothers came the other weekend to play games with us here in Provo.  One of the games we were planning on playing was Interstellar Pig, which I had made years and years ago, back when I was still in Jr. High or High School.  We had a 4-player game and it was pretty fun, but there were definite flaws.  Flaws which I had an itch to fix.

For example, each character has an IRSC, which is the game's fancy way of saying IQ. The problem was, some characters had really high ones and some had really low ones, and they didn't really balance out, and they in the end really didn't matter too much.  So I worked on fixing it so that all of the characters were balanced. Part of that has to do with the number of planets they're naturally comfortable with, part of it has to do with their agility during battle, and part of it has to do with certain special abilities they have.

The game board from my version 1.0

Also, there were four different atmospheres and 15 planets, which was too many. I chanced the game to have only 12 planets, and now there are only three different types of atmosphere: Oxygen, Hydrogen, and Flundonium. With the temperature, instead of having all these random numbers of temperature that you had to keep track of and try to mathematically figure out if you could survive, I just changed it so that there were four main temperatures: cold, cool, warm, and hot. Each planet has one or more of these four temperature listings, and each character does as well of where they'll be comfortable at.

Another thing was that the number of spaces in-between planets was much too high. It would take you three turns just to get from one planet to another. During our game night the other night I recognized this even before we started playing so I quickly just through in a third die to roll so that we rolled three instead of the normal two.  In the new version I fixed it so that we can play normally with two dice, and the distances between planets is much more manageable.

In the old version, if you wanted to know if you can land on a planet, then forget about looking at the board, because that thing had no information. You had to find the planet's corresponding card somewhere on the outside of the board to look at that. That seemed a little silly to me, so I added right on the board the planet's atmosphere and temperature.

Here is the new version of the board (which is super awesome):

In regards to rules, is that when we were playing the other night, when you wanted to land on a planet, you had to check to see if the atmosphere was right, if the temperature was right, and if you could see on that planet.  Well, I got rid of the "Light" category, so now you can see on any planet, because that part was just obnoxious, and wasn't even really part of the book (there's one instance where Zulma has to wear glasses to see in a dark cave). As for the atmosphere and the temperature, I noticed something that happened in the book: "Zulma landed on a blinking star, and took an instruction card which ordered her to land directly on the surface of Ja-Ja-Bee, where she would have to spend her next three turns. . . . I understood Monya's glee at getting the dangerous intelligent spider-lady so quickly out of the game. Would the atmosphere poison her before she had time to freeze to death? I was curious to see. But Zulma wasn't perturbed. She had brought portable breathing equipment with her. And, since Ja-Ja-Bee had been one of the planets she had chosen at the beginning, she had stashed a powerful heat pump there, as well a cache of . . . food" (Sleator 92).

What does this tell me? First off, a card can tell you to land directly on a planet. And if you are instantly out of the game if you can't live on that planet, then that would be super crappy. Losing just because of one bad card is a dumb way to lose. Secondly, it appears that Zulma was actually able to land on the planet and go through its envelope even though she couldn't survive on the planet, because she was able to grab her heat pump there to keep her temperature comfortable.

This, added to the fact that the other night during our game night we agreed that it was super tough not being able to land on any planets at all if you couldn't breathe or be comfortable, led me to an idea. This idea also crept up the other night when we kept running into each other and battling. In the book, a player is out of the game if they lose just one battle. But I'm not a big fan of player elimination in games. We didn't play it that way last night and had a lot more fun. So I decided to have a health system: Everyone has four health, and if you reach zero than you're out of the game.  Every time you lose a battle, you lose one health. Plus, you can choose to land on a planet that doesn't have the right atmosphere or temperature; all it does is decrease your health by one as well. (Decreases it by two if the atmosphere AND temperature are both wrong for you.) The nasty Lanthrococcus molluscans, which killed off Ryan last game, now only does 2 damage to you.

In regards to battles, in the book Zena says, "You may be in direct combat and have to sacrifice a card" (50). Therefore I made the rule that if you lose a battle, the winner gets to look at the loser's hand and steal a card from it. The loser then has a one-card-less hand limit size for the rest of the game.

Anyway, those are the basic rule changes that I'm writing about in this post. As for getting it published, I don't really have high hopes. After all, Chaosmos is already out, plus I don't even know how to get started on working with the intellectual property rights. No, working on this game is mainly just for fun, for the challenge of it. Publishing is just a by-product, developing games for the thrill and challenge of it is my hobby and passion.

Games night with a visit from my brothers!

This weekend my brothers Eric and Ryan came to visit my family here in Provo!  And what else would we do except play games of course!  The plan was for them to arrive Friday afternoon, but that ride never got back to them, so they were stuck with a ride that came in on Saturday instead: at 2:30 in the afternoon.  In Draper.  Heather and I went to pick them up from the Loveland Aquarium, and went back to our place.

The first game we played was Interstellar Pig, which I neglected to get pictures of.  Heather almost won, she had the Piggy until one of the last turns of the game, and then Eric stole it from her and ran away from everyone until time ran out.  Ryan, meanwhile, died on Earth. Sad day.

We played a game of Elysium next.  We started with just the beginner's suggested set: Zeus, Poseidon, Hephaestus, Hades, and Athena. I ended up winning.

Saturday night playing Elysium. Eric is reading White Sand between turns.

After that, we played a game of Istanbul, and then another game of Elysium, with different god cards.  Heather won both.  That last game ended up taking us way past midnight, but everyone had a good time.  Too bad we had 8 am church.

The next day after church we played a quick game of Temple Escape.  This is one of the games that my Game Design class did last Winterim, which ended up being one of the three best, so we sent in the files to a print and play website to get the pieces professionally made.  Check them out at printplaygames.com. The tiles and pieces are totally legit.

Not sure what Ryan is doing with his face.

The whole crew!

After playing Temple Escape, which Ryan won, we played another game of Istanbul with a different board layout.

Notice how the game is on the other side of the table from Henry?

Ryan's face is like: Whhaaa--!? 

Then there was only a half hour before my brothers had to go, so we played a quick game of Blokus. When Eric and Ryan took off, I gave them Elysium and Istanbul to borrow, so that they could take them down to Fallon so that they could play at Thanksgiving.  So if you're in Fallon for Thanksgiving, be sure to give them both a try; they're both super awesome games.  Istanbul won the German Game of the Year award, and Elysium was nominated but didn't quite win.

I totally won this game, fyi.

It's too bad their visit was so short, but we had a blast.

P.S. We also discussed how to play Seafall without bingeing it, and we decided that we should play over Christmas break, one game a day.  I wasn't sure if one game a day was bingeing it too much, but Eric said that the number of other games we would be playing would dilute it, so that that was fine.  We might have to play two games a day for a couple of days just to be sure that we finish it during the vacation.  I also hope to play Elysium, Istanbul, Castles of Burgundy, Five Tribes with expansion, Ashes, 7 Wonders: Duel, Terra Mystica, and a ton of other games as well.

Interstellar Pig and Chaosmos

Interstellar Pig is a book by William Sleator. In the book, the main character Barney goes on vacation to a beach house, where his new neighbors befriend him and, throughout the course of the novel, play many games with him of the board game Interstellar Pig. A game inventor as I am, I had to create it in real life to play.  And so I did.

In the game, everyone is trying to get the Piggy card in their hand by the time the game ends. If they have the Piggy card, they win. The board consists of different planets, and planets can have different atmospheres, gravity, light, and temperature. Everyone gets a hand of cards, which could include weapons, thermal suits, light sources, breathing apparatuses, and so forth. And one card out there is the Piggy.  When you land on a planet, you can look at the cards there and even exchange some of them for the cards in your hand.  You take turns moving around, and you can combat other players to get their cards, all trying to find the Piggy.  If you have the Piggy, you can either keep it in your hand, or hide it on a planet and hope that no one lands there and takes it, in the hopes that you can get there later to get it back.

There are the equipment cards as mentioned before, but there are also event cards which trigger if you roll a certain side on the star die, and character cards. At the start of the game you choose a character you want to be, and that determines your IRSC (your IQ) as well as what atmosphere you breathe and what temperatures you can stand.

It was fun, and my brother Ryan is super excited to come visit so that he can play it again.  Because of this, I decided to look at it again and maybe tweak some things.  So I looked up Interstellar Pig again on Wikipedia, and saw near the bottom this: "A board game released in 2015, chaosmos, seems to have the same premise as the game from the novel."

What the wha?  I wa planning on maybe sending in this game to publishers.  But now it looks like there's a game that has already been published that IS Interstellar Pig?  So I looked it up on Board Game Geek.  The game, Chaosmos, is rated fairly high.  But check out the description of the game from the website:

The universe is about to collapse, and your final hope lies in an ancient mysterious artifact, the Ovoid. Whoever controls this "cosmic egg" can shape the birthing of the next universe according to their own agenda. Players are secret agents from a handful of surviving worlds, zipping from planet to planet in special “amnion suits” that allow for interstellar travel, space combat and planetary landings.

Each planet has its own envelope of cards. When you arrive on a planet, you decide which cards you want to take and which to leave behind. Knowledge is the most powerful resource in the game, and being able to predict the cards your opponents possess at any given time is a powerful advantage as you build up a handful of weapons, tactical gear, vaults and traps, as well as cards that counter your opponents' cards. The best players will keep their hand fluid, constantly changing tactics while they search from world to world for the Ovoid or find a safe place to stash it.

Balance your hand of cards, spend your turn actions wisely, and cleverly use your special alien powers to stay one step ahead of your opponents. When the Chaos Clock reaches zero, only the player who possesses the Ovoid will become master of the new universe.

Sound familiar?  If you scroll down on that page, there's even this: "Chaosmos is unofficially, but faithfully, based on a fictional board game described in William Sleator's novel Interstellar Pig."

So... Somebody beat me to it.  Somebody had the idea, implemented it, and got it published.  What does this mean for me?  It means: a) I want to play Interstellar Pig right now.  b) I also want to try out Chaosmos. c) I need to get on the stick when it comes to getting my game ideas out there.  I have a lot of good ideas, but I need to get them play tested and sent out to publishers.

Now, is that the only reason I make games?  No.  Why do I make games?  Because I can't help it. I can't stop myself. I love it. It's my passion, my greatest hobby.  Even if I never sell a single game, I'll still make them, and play them.  There's an inherent joy to it.  But on the side, yeah, of course it would be good to get some of them published.

In a few weeks when Heather and I have a free weekend and when Eric and Ryan come down to play, my version of the Interstellar Pig game will be one of the ones we'll play (as well as Elysium and Istanbul, which neither of them have played yet).  I am also hoping to play the latest version of Cosmere, which is a card game I created based off of Brandon Sanderson's epic fictional universe, which he calls the Cosmere.  Look forward to it.

Next week: I talk about my game Cosmere, and give a bit of back story and details about it.  Plus, some files for the latest prototype cards. For now, here's a video of Tom Vasel of The Dice Tower doing a review on Chaosmos: