[ TBS ] Naughty Virus

Wai · 2009-06-20T10:01:36

Naughty Virus This is an expanded reply that is a design in its own right. The topic was strategy/tactics and the mechanic was rotating hex cell. The following is the definition of the game. If you feel like it you could code it, although the game is designed to be playable as a table-top game, which you could physically create using some scrap paper. Story: Happy Birthday! Let's take over the world! <3 Overview: In this multiplayer game, the players take turn to spread virus or anti-virus to everywhere by switching connections. The Board: A grid of your favorite size and shape (orthogonal, hex, etc). The players: First player plays the virus. Second player plays the anti-virus. Additional players can play additional virus and anti-virus. Tokens: A bucket-full of virus and anti-virus tokens. You may use your favorite breakfast cereal as tokens. Cards: Prepare a deck of cards that can fit inside a cell. You could make them out of other stuff such as plastic caps for example. Select a handful of cards to be special cards: For each special card, draw your favorite thing in the center and draw a circle around it. Draw a line from the circle to one edge of the card. Draw more lines until you are happy. For each normal card, draw a line that connects one edge to another. Draw more if you feel like it. The lines could represent separate paths. These cards are called connection cards. Setup: 1) Select a number of special cards you like and place them on the grid. 2) Shuffle the deck of connection cards and give each player some. 3) Each player select a special card on the grid and place one token 4) Setup is complete! Playing the game: In each turn, a player will first do one of the following: 1) Draw one connection card from the deck, then either place a connection card to the grid or return a connection card to the deck 2) Rotate one existing connection card or special card the player controls 3) Spawn one new token at a special card that the player controls 4) Move one token to a new location anywhere on the connected network Then the player may remove all opponent tokens that are placed on cards under the player's control. Cards under the player's control are those that can be reached by a connections. A player loses when they have no token left on the board. The last player or alliance that remains on the board takes over the world! ~ fin ~ [Edited by - Wai on May 30, 2009 7:09:02 PM]

Game Design and Theory Game Design

Started by Wai May 17, 2009 08:12 PM

172 comments, last by Wai 14 years, 10 months ago

Wai

1,007

Author

May 22, 2009 02:36 PM

[Battle Angel Valerie]

Wai

1,007

Author

May 22, 2009 02:55 PM

Star Command:

Place Left Tile to G4, CCW x1.
Move to G4.

Day 12 1UP
[ NV032 (Image) ]
1UP's options:
1) Pick one: [ Spawn | Place | Rotate | Wait ]
2) Pick one: [ Move | Expose | Stay ]

Comments:

I think this game is good as a game that is played over a forum, so that the players could take breaks and to think about what they want to do. If it is a multiplayer game played over computers, I want an interface that allows me to write down notes at the locations (to remind myself what the plan is, and which tiles are especially important). Perhaps I would copy the image, color it and write on it, so that I do not need to memorize everything that I discover, or to have my brain rediscover something n times. But I cannot let the enemy see my notes.

This is what NV032 looks like if I were to color-code the network:
<"http://albatross.x10hosting.com/images/NV032Color.PNG">[ NV032 Colorcoded (Image) ]

This shows the connected paths and the tiles that a virus could rotate. If this game has computer assistance, when you rotate a tile or place a tile, and it would instaneously show you the effects, so that you could compare the effects of different moves and choose the best move.

But then would the game become a matter of clicking on each tile to see the effects, and the game renders into a few rules based on the clicking? Would it be less fun to play because your brain no long need to generate the interpretation on its own? You can tell that the color-coded version is a lot easier to look at, because your brain doesn't feel that it need to make sense out of it. It feels that the meaning is already there.

This are the immediate attack ranges of 1UP, Star, and Bunny:

[ NV032 Attack Ranges (Image) ]
(if I did not make a mistake)

[Edited by - Wai on May 27, 2009 4:55:48 AM]

[Battle Angel Valerie]

Wai

1,007

Author

May 22, 2009 06:06 PM

Comments on a physical set

For my set, I have 2 terminal caps and 20 hub caps. That was enough to play deathmatch. For the 20 hub caps, all of them are unique:

10 of them have only connected paths
10 of them have disjoint paths

None of them have crossover paths.

I intended the tiles to be unique by I did not plan to have this ratio. I just randomly draw new tiles and it just turns out that I end up with half of each type.

** A Math Question **

How many uniques hex hub tiles are are there if:
a) there are no crossover paths
b) crossover paths are allowed
?

[Battle Angel Valerie]

theOcelot

498

May 23, 2009 06:17 PM

Re Math:
For hexagonal tiles like we were playing with, 2^6 and 4^6 respectively, I think.

Re Turn structure: I mean open up the options for what I can do in one turn. For example, it's a little annoying to not be able to spawn and place/rotate in one turn, and I'm not sure moving and exposing should be mutually exclusive. However, you don't want to make each turn too influential, as allowing a player to do too much in one turn would. The game is already highly sensitive to whose turn it is when certain conditions are met, a little like Dots or Pigpen, which is not too strongly correlated with the strategy of the path connections. You can see how the situation between bunny and 1UP, specifically Bunny's ability to eliminate 1UP, is highly sensitive to the order in which things happen, and what the situation is like when Bunny's turn rolls around. That sensitivity is something else that should be lessened with further iterations of the rules.

Re Interface: I don't think that highlighting the paths will make it too easy. It will certainly make the board easier to comprehend, but you still have to think at least a few turns ahead.

What exactly do you mean by attack ranges?

FWIW, I wouldn't highlight the backgound of the whole tile, but instead I would highlight the path itself, since it looks funny like that, and because of tiles like H3.

My Project: Somnopatru (SVN Repo) | Single Responsibility Principle | Other OOD articles

Wai

1,007

Author

May 23, 2009 09:47 PM

Re: Number of possible tiles

You numbers sounds too high. 2^6 is 64. I think at the moment I have only generated about 39 patterns including tiles with crossover. When I will have exhausted my existing patterns, we can see which ones I missed.

Batch random tiles

In the actual game, I want a rule such that, suppose there are total of 40 unique patterns, the game will not generate a duplicate pattern until the first batch of 40 has been all used once. I think that some of you were probably trying to use the expose feature to get simple tiles to form good defense. But that is bad for the game as a whole so the game doesn't support that.

The current game did not follow this rule as first, and therefore we got simple duplicated tiles that were exploited: E3 and F3, G1 and I5. As you see those single segment tiles are really powerful.

The game is supposed to feel risky and dangerous. To attack an enemy is to get close to the enemy but maintain one step ahead of the enemy, but at the same time also opening vulnerability such that if you make a mistake, you could suddenly die: You thought you had been having the upperhand, but in fact your enemy had been having the upperhand--you had just paved the path to death yourself. This is a very important experience of the game--the avalanche of shock you get when you discover that your plan has a fatal flaw that is too late to fix, and the excitement and anxiety before a multi-turn attack.

Did I considered everything? Am I killing the enemy or am I killing myself?

This experience does not exist in many games.

Re: Turn Structure

Expose

I don't think it would do much harm if I allow Expose to be its own option set. So in every turn, you could decide whether to expose a tile independent to the rest of the action. But you still only get the replacement tile at the end of your turn.

Spawn

Spawn needs to be a very costly action, otherwise, the network will turn into a sea of disconnected tiles, each has a virus just waiting to attack. I don't want the netwrok to be full of virus, but I also don't want to have a hard limit. At the moment, spawning a virus is a pretty significant action. This helps to make spawning a clue into the strategy of the opponents. For example, Star has such a big network, but still hasn't spawned, so the players could infer that Star must think that there is something more important to do than to spawn, evern though spawning usually increases the overall chance of winning.

I think making the player choose between spawning, placing, and rotating forces the player to do more risky business. And that is good. Let's revisit this topic after some casualties.

For the 1UP Bunny situation, I believe that the problem is not the turn structure, but that the board has a border. If I were to choose between two options, I would choose to let the board be infinitely large, so that Bunny would have a much harder time creating an absolute defense, and 1UP could always go around. This is the first time where I use a board, and to me it seems that having a board introduces too much problems.

Re: Displaying controlled tiles and paths

I agree that it won't make the game too easy. But at the same time they seem kind of distracting and misleading. I also agree that it is easier without coloring the tiles, it is unnecessary to color them.

Re: Attack Range

Those are the locations that a virus could attack if it is their turn, if the conditions are right. For example on 1UP's attack range, 1UP could attack one segment of C6 by rotating E2 or F3; 1UP could also attack E4 by rotating E3; and C3 by placing its right tile at D3 if the tile at C3 has the correct orientation. The attack on C3 is moot because no one can be at C3.

[Battle Angel Valerie]

theOcelot

498

May 24, 2009 04:11 PM

Upon reflection, you're right that 2^6 is a bit large. Here's how I got it: Generating a hex tile with no overlapping paths can be reduced to randomly deciding which of the sides are connected to each other and which are empty. This can further be reduced to an array of six cells or choices (not sure of the technical term), which can only be in one of six states. This is exactly equivalent to a six-bit binary number, which can have 64 unique values (including one-bit numbers, which correspond to host tiles). However, this fails to take rotation into account: Tiles which are congruent when rotated are not unique. I have no idea how to account for that, as dividing by 6 obviously won't work.

I do think that the board should be much bigger, around 1.5 to 2 times larger, at least. You'll need some kind of board for having scattered landmarks like in this game, to keep the spacing. The boarded and boardless versions are certainly fairly different, but don't give up on the boarded one.

Back the the game at hand. Star pretty much has everyone by the neck. If anyone connects to the dishes, all Star has to do is C6 and wipe them out. Oh well.

Star command: [edit: I mean 1UP command]
Place right tile to D3, rotated 1xCW. Stay.

[Edited by - theOcelot on May 24, 2009 6:11:05 PM]