More thoughts on my game based on Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

Image via Wikipedia

I've decided to make it more of a straight card game, no board.

There are ride/exhibit cards that tell you how much whuffie (respect) you need to update, what skills you need to have to update, and how much whuffie you get each round just for controlling it.

There are skill cards - painting, animating, robotics, etc. Some rides (E ticket rides maybe) take more than one skill to update and extra whuffie because people don't want you to mess withe classic rides. It might be interesting to let people spend whuffie to buy a specific skill.

Whuffie is in the form of chips - I'm thinking each player has a different color so you could watch your respect move from player to player. You get a stash of whuffie at the beginning of the game. You get whuffie each round for the rides you control. It costs you whuffie to rehab/update a ride. Once you update a ride it might be worth more whuffie (like putting a hotel on a property in Monopoly - still thinking about that.

When you have the whuffie and skills you can update a ride that you control. You have to update a number of rides to cause the end of the game - I'm thinking one in each land of the Magic Kingdom but that might take too long. There are 6 lands - so maybe gotta rehab rides in 4 of the 6 lands.

The winner is whoever has the most whuffie wins (assuming that the more rides you update, the more whuffie you will have).

There will be unexpected event/wild cards - sometimes you lose a turn, sometimes you get to take their whuffie or take over a wide they've put out to control

• downloading the character's memories for safe keeping (since you can get cloned/reborn pretty easily) - lose a turn
  
• get shot/killed and have to be cloned - lose a turn
  
• accident on one of your rides -you have to give up a chunk of whuffie
• your best friend starts dating your significant other - lose a turn
  

I'm playing with the idea of cooperation - so if 2 people had the Space Mountain card, they could share ownership of it and pool their resources to rehab it (and split the whuffie that ya get for hte rehab. Cooperation would be even cooler if players were eliminated one by one - players could cooperate to gang up on another player. Not sure of the benefit of cooperation if it's a winner take all game.

Right now I think everybody will be dealt a small number of cards to start - say 5. They will get a stash of whuffie chips. They can claim a ride by laying the card down in front of them and putting up some whuffie as collateral that they will treat the ride with respect. Each round you can rehab a ride, draw a card, play a wild card, buy a skill - do one of those things. Each round you get a new stash of whuffie. If you decide to rehab a ride you have to lay down your skills and take the right amount of whuffie out of your stash and put a marker on the map of the kingdom (hmmm - forgot to mention there's a map didn't I ? Well there's a big general map with the areas marked out like frontier land and fantasy land)

Image by sanctumsolitude via Flickr

Lands & Rides (in order from the main gate to the left on the map except for toontown fair which isn't part of the classic Disney Magic Kingdom that I grew up with)

Main Street USA 4- railroad, horse drawn jitney, double decker bus, parade - all A tix so easy one to start with

Adventureland 4 - treehouse - B, enchanted tiki room - E, jungle cruise - B, pirates - E

Frontierland 4 - tom sawyer island, country bear jamboree - E, splash mountain, big thunder mountain

Liberty Square 3 - hall of presidents, riverboat - D, haunted mansion - E

Fantasyland 5 - it's a small world - E, peter pan's flight - C, show white's scary adventures - C, dumbo - C, carousel - A

Tomorrowland 5 - speedway, space mountain - E, wedway people mover - D, carousel of progress, astro orbiter - D

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• My game idea for Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom (profkim.blogspot.com)

Info about publishing analog games

In my freshman class this semester we're making games - analog games. That means board games, card games, dice games, dominoes...No computers, no keyboards, no programming. That comes next year.

The board game industry in this country is small. But it's there. Here's a great blog post from Jackson Pope on Boardgame News about getting your game published. He owns Reiver Games. Notice he points out the importance of clear well-written rules and having a prototype for hte publisher to test out. Be sure you've play tested the heck out of your game before sending it in.

Image by lavenderstreak via Flickr

Here's an article from Wired about the guy who created Settlers of Catan as a hobby. Board games are much more popular in Germany and the rest of Europe than they are in the States. And here's the webpage for the game.

THinking about the summer internships and jobs

I just read a great post from Darius Kazemi on his Tiny Subversions blog about writing your resume if you're applying for a job in game development. It has specific advice.

http://tinysubversions.blogspot.com/2009/04/writing-resume-for-game-company.html

He recommends you work on game projects - what you learn from that is worth more to the game company than most things you learn at a part time job.

So this summer - don't just lay around - even if you are reading great literature or playing all the new games. Create games too. Find some people to work with. Get some experience worth putting on your resume. Because you want to go to the Game Developers Conference and South by Southwest interactive (SXSWi).

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• GDC09: A look at Dead Space's renegade roots (joystiq.com)

Research Presentations at the RIT Undergraduate Research Conference in Communications

Two groups of students from a section of Qualitative Research last year presented their interview papers at the 2009 Communication Undergraduate Research Conference. Here's a link to the schedule - as you can see there were a wide variety of topics and many posters this year as well. One group presented about dating in SecondLife and the other about communication in world. They had to answer a lot of basic questions about SecondLife as well as about their topic. Most attendees (college students nad professors) seemed to have never heard about or gone into SecondLife. One presentor (who's paper was also about SecondLife) seemed to have never gone into SecondLife either since there were some factual errors in her presentation.

Building in SL

The students in the Critical Analysis of Games class started building in SecondLife on Monday. Whew - 26 students spread over our 2 islands trying to line up shapes. They came up with some interesting stuff tho. Here's a pic with a couple of their builds - one student built a table and a childs stacking toy. There's an ice cream in the background and several of our early experiments with shapes and texturing.

Here is a link to photos of the things they built (on Flickr) - http://www.flickr.com/photos/kgregson/sets/72157616413802019/

We will be building more things on the island. I think today we will pair up and try to build checkerboards. They'll have to think about the overall size and the size of the individual squares and they can use the position numbers to line everything up. Still trying to decide what to build next week - I want it to be something with a bigger group working on it . Any suggestions? Leave them in the comments - thanks!