Monday, September 13, 2010

Mobile Game Idea

Overview
My idea is to create a game called “Little Village”. This game will be a simple game to play as it will be designed for casual gamers. The main concept for the game is based on the sliding controls for the village. The village is constantly under attack by the enemy and it is the user’s job to keep the town centre alive until the villagers have reached the space age and can escape. There are three things that the user controls, these are Food, Research and Defence. The user adjusts sliding bars to set what percentage of the villages do what tasks. The user has to constantly adjust these to say in front of the enemy.

Defense
The more defence the user has selected the more soldiers that are generated and if no defence is selected then no soldiers are generated. If the user has too much defence selected then the soldiers maybe over run by the enemy as they would have more researched weapons. There is also the possibility that the soldiers may starve as there is not enough food being produced.
Food

Food is what feeds the defence soldiers and the researchers. The leftover food goes towards expanding the village, allowing the village to grow and more villages being allocated. Too much food and there will not be enough solders to defend or not enough research being researched. Not enough food means that the researchers and soldiers could starve.

Research

Research is what allows the village to go through the ages and eventually escape (win). Research also upgrades the defence soldiers so they are better at defending. An improved age also means improved food gathering and allowing for more focus on research and solders. Too much research will mean that there may not be enough food or not enough defences for the village. Not enough research may course the village to be overrun by enemy forces as they could be more advanced.

What’s different?
Most of the games out there that are like this game involves the user defending a castle or bunker and the user must shoot the enemy their self and are able to upgrade their weapons. In this game the user will be controlling the villages that do the defending for them. Unlike similar games the user will not be rewarded for every kill they get and will only be able to upgrade by allocating their villages to tasks.

Munchkin Cards!!!

These are my Munchkin cards! They don’t change the rules so I don’t think if will need to explain them too much.

(Click the image to enlarge it)

The images if used for them are from the following sites:

Hybrid

http://media.photobucket.com/image/vampire%20werewolf%20hybrid/stripes420/Werewolf3.jpg

Puppy Curse

http://ezdogtrain.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/cartoon_puppy.jpg

Monster

http://media.photobucket.com/image/werepanda/deathguy6/werepanda.png

Blood Goblet

http://www.clipartguide.com/_small/1386-0903-0314-1335.jpg

Smelly

http://images1.cpcache.com/product/90492941v4_480x480_Front.jpg

Wondering Hand

http://www.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve/8677996/2/istockphoto_8677996-cartoon-hands.jpg

Sunday, September 12, 2010

Narrative Structure of Two Films

For this blog I had the find key points in two movies.

Movie 1: WALL.E

1 Equilibrium
Everyone has left earth due to pollution and left behind clean up robots to fix the mess.

2 Disturbance
Eve, a robot from a ship who has come to look for life, she meets wall.e and he falls in love with Eve.

3 Protagonist
Wall.e, who is a cleanup robot left to sort out the rubbish problem on earth.

4 Plan
Wall.e Follows eve around the whole time she is on earth.

5 Obstacle
Eve is taken back to space and wall.e holds on to the space ship and follows her.

6 Complications
Eve is thought to be faulty when she reports there being life on earth but does not have the evidence.

7 Timeout
Wall.e releases all the crazy robots, that all have a kooky problem.

8 Crisis
The master commuter won’t let them go home because it received an order never to return to earth.

9 Climax
Wall.e and Eve work together to get the plant to the right place so that the ship will go back to earth.

10 Resolution
The ship goes back to earth and the humans start to live like they once did.


Movie 1: Monsters inc

1 Equilibrium
The Monsters work in a scare factory that scares kids to generate power but they have to work extra powerfull as the children are becoming resistant the scare.

2 Disturbance
A child from earth gets back to the scare factory and everyone is worried as they are thought to be deadly.

3 Protagonist
Mike and Sully are the two main characters in the movie.

4 Plan
Mike and Sully plan to return the Child back to its room.

5 Obstacle
They cannot get to the door without any one finding out what has happened.

6 Complications
A fellow scaring monster wants the keep the child to drain all the scare out of it.

7 Timeout
Sully starts to like the child and starts playing hide and seeks with it.

8 Crisis
The boss of the company is behind all the release of the child and won’t let it go home and banishes Mike and Sully.

9 Climax
Mike and Sully work really hard to get the child home and they get a recorded confession of the boss to get him arrested.

10 Resolution
The monsters start to use laughter to get energy as it is ten times more powerful than screams.

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

- - Week 2 - -

For this week’s blog we need to research the history of electronic gaming from the early 70’till present time.
I will go through and list some things that I found interesting and what i liked as well as trying not to make the blog to long.
Here is a link that lists the consoles of the 70’s, I had no idea that there was so many!
There was far too many to discuss with a 300 word limit, so you can look at it if you’re interested.
1971 saw the introduction of the first coin operated arcade machine:


In the early 70’suniversity mainframes were being used to make and play games. Most people found this as waist valuable equipment; it could also be argued they were behind the demand for cheap personal computers.

In the 70’s to 80’s home computer gaming stared and initially used the mainframe classics of the past.

The 80’s saw the release of the predecessors to some of my favourite games:
1980 – Pac-Man


1981 - Donkey Kong


1983 - Mario Bros.


1986 - The Legend of Zelda




The 90’s saw the decline of the arcade game and the rise of 3D and also gave birth to my all time favourite console the Nintendo 64!



The Two games I liked best were
Golden Eye:


Mario Cart:



In the pc world I found Civilisation, Lemmings and Starcraft to be the best games of the decade
Since most of your will be able to remember the start of this century I will compare the graphics and size of gaming devices. The biggest Change is that games are now every were and will continue to emerge in new places.

Civilisation I - V







Size:






Untill Next Time,


Saturday, July 31, 2010

-- Week 1 --

This is my first blog for the Victoria University subject ACM2007 Innovation technologies Research and Application. First I will talk about what is fun for me and then talk about my “munchkin experience”

Fun:
The online oxford dictionary defines fun as “enjoyment; pleasure; a thing that gives enjoyment or pleasure and makes you feel happy”.
So what is fun to me, I would have to say that fun to me is doing things that make me feel happy.
I feel happy when I am, Doing things with my fiancés, Taking the dog for a walk, Renovating the house, Playing computer games and going home from work. In relation to this subject my favourite games are strategy computer games that make you think rather that just action.


Munchkins:
This game had a very large learning curve and we only managed to go around the table once in one hour. The game had common elements of other games that I have played before both card and computer games. The fact that you needed to read the instructions and a flow chart before your could have your turn was a bit much. After trying to work out what was supposed to be happening for 15min I goggled the game to make sure it was not a joke due to the complicated nature of the game. I enjoy complicated games that involve some level of strategy to win but the complicated nature of munchins put me off trying to learn this game. I think that this game would be well suited to a computer format where the computer could give you control and guidance. Since there are so many versions of this game you could also download patched to add more types of cards .