Physical Prototype - Game Programming Lab '11

Group members: Daniel Bucher, Etan Kissling, Jan Rüegg, François Serre

Team 2: Reign of Darkness

Game Description:

The goal of the players is to collect lights, increasing the players vision, and to try to find and shoot the opponent.

Players

We need three players to play the game:
  • Two opposing light players
  • The Game Master

Game Material

  • Three hexagon boards (two for the players, one for the Game Master)
  • Two player tokens per player
  • Many hexagonal light - chips
  • A pen for painting the obstacles
  • Two shoot indication - chips

Definitions

  • Light Points: The number of lights a player has collected
  • Game Master: The player that supervises the game. He cannot win or lose, as he is just a helper of the other players.

Preparation

  1. The Game Master chooses the map.
  2. Each player starts with one light point.
  3. The two player tokens get placed by the Game Master on free fields on his own map. Also, the Game Master places copies of the player tokens on their map, so that the players know their own position.
  4. The Game Master updates the field.

Winning conditions

To possess more than two-thirds (rounded up) of the total amount of light, this can be achieved by being the last survivor.

The total number of lights is the sum of:
  • The light points of both players plus
  • The number of collectibles lights left

Rounds

In each round, both players can do one of following things:
  • Move one field and shoot
  • Move two fields
  • Move one field
  • Shoot
  • Do nothing

Then the game master moves both players on his field. After that, he decides if one of the player was hit and updates the light points_ of the players and the board.

Moving

The player can move at most two fields, or at most one field if he is shooting at the same time.

The players can not move through obstacles. If a player lands on an obstacle with his second move he is pushed back and stays there for this round.

Shooting

Players can shoot at any target location that is not hidden by an obstacle.

To shoot, the player indicates the field he wants to shoot with his shoot indication - token. He can move at maximum one hexagon in this turn if he decides to shoot.

The other player is hit if he is on a field that is crossed by the shooting line.

Updating the field

  1. On both player maps, he indicates all the obstacles visible in the players Ranges with obstacle chips.
  2. On both player maps, he shows the players all the yellow light - tokens in direct vision and removes hidden light - tokens.

Growing / Shrinking

  • Each light a player collects makes his light points increase by 1
  • Each hit a player takes makes him loose 1 light point regardless if he was directly hit or just touched.

Range

  • The range is the radius of the number of hexagons the player can see and is seen. That means, in this radius, the player can see obstacles, but the other player can also see the light that is cast there.
  • The range is one at the beginning. To increase it by one, he has to collect 1, then 2, then 4, and then 8 lights. So, for example with 4 collected lights, he has a range of 3.

Bar.png range.png

Impressions

First Iteration

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Second Iteration

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Third Iteration

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Changes

Move and/or shoot

In the first iteration, the game was very unbalanced: When the two players met for the first time, the stronger just kept shooting at the weaker one, and because he didn't have possibilities to hide, he lost very quickly.

Increasing of light

In the second iteration of the game, we have seen that the light grew much too fast. We changed it in a way that the light radius grows only logarithmically.

prevent from always shooting

Since we had a damage which was proportional to the player's light points, the game resulted in a speed-run to get some lights and then just keep shooting at the opponent. Since his power is diminished, an optimal strategy involved just keep shooting at the opponent, since he cannot counteract this behaviour. The countermeasure we have taken is to make the player's weapons all equally strong: a hit now does take one light point away in any case.

Differences to the Video game

  • We have only two players
  • 2-D only

Page URL: https://twiki.graphics.ethz.ch/bin/view/GameClass/RodPrototype
2024-03-28
© 2024 Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich