1101: Just Finish the Damn Thing

I’ve lost count of the number of “make my own game” projects I’ve started and abandoned over the years. I’ve started a new one recently which, theoretically, should be relatively straightforward to finish, so I will keep you all updated on its progress occasionally via this blog.

I’m no programmer, so I tend to gravitate towards solutions that allow you to flex your creative muscles and create interactive entertainment without having to, well, code anything. My weapon of choice for the last few attempts has been the excellent RPG Maker VX Ace, which is an immensely powerful tool capable of doing some really great things while at the same time allowing pretty much anyone to churn out a fairly generic top-down JRPG without too much difficulty.

It’s the “capable of doing some really great things” part that I often find myself struggling with. Y’see, the trouble with being presented with a wealth of possibilities is choosing which ones you want to pursue and which ones you want to ignore. The temptation is to incorporate as many of them as possible in an attempt to make something as awesome as possible, but inevitably if you do that — particularly if you’re working alone — you’ll hit a brick wall where something doesn’t quite work properly with something else, get disheartened and probably give up.

I’m talking vaguely. Let me give some specific examples. The new game I’ve started making as a means of proving I can take a project through from start to finish is simply an adaptation of the quests from MB/Games Workshop’s classic board game Hero Quest. Given that the structure and storyline of the Hero Quest board game is very much a generic sort of dungeon crawler, this shouldn’t be too difficult once I’ve done what I always initially think of as “the annoying bit” — setting up the characters, statistics, skills and whatnot, and finding some appropriate graphics for their sprites. (I call it “the annoying bit” but if I sit down and get on with it, I actually find this part quite fun after a while.)

Anyway, I’m about halfway done with “the annoying bit” — its initial stages, anyway — and already I’m finding myself torn in several directions. Do I stick with RPG Maker’s rather generic first-person battle interface? It doesn’t evoke the feel of Hero Quest that much, but then trying to adapt a board game and sticking too religiously to its rules can often ruin the “computer gaminess” of it. All right then, I thought, I’ll stick with this battle system, but I’ll tweak it so things like damage formulae are a little closer to rolling the dice in the game. Except when I thought I’d done that, I discovered that my ineptitude with composing damage formulae to accurately simulate dice rolls created a number of monsters that were literally impossible to hurt. Not good. I replaced the formula with its original one, which deals with much higher numbers than your average tabletop game. Will that ruin the atmosphere? Is “Rogar does 96 damage” somehow less powerful than “Rogar does 4 damage”? Probably not. That’s a stupid thing to think.

I’m probably overthinking it, I know, and should just get on with it. What I think I really need to do is just make the game with the default systems, and then tweak and fine-tune afterwards. Difficulty balancing and that sort of thing is an important part of testing, so I’ll leave that until there’s actually a game there to test — there’s no point getting hung up on problems that don’t actually exist yet.

So that’s the plan. Over the next few days I will be taking some time to plug in Hero Quest’s various spells and items into the game in a format that will work within RPG Maker’s style of play, then I’ll put the game itself together. Then I’ll show it to some select friends — this project probably won’t get a wide release, unless it actually ends up being surprisingly good — and then, flush with satisfaction at having actually carried something through to completion for once, I can embark on something a little more ambitious.

One step at a time.

#oneaday Day 897: Dungeon Crawling

I’m a big fan of board games, as regular readers will know. And I have fairly diverse tastes, too — I like everything from Eurogames such as Catan to theme-heavy Ameritrash like Last Night on Earth. Exactly what I want to play at any given moment is largely determined by my mood at the time, but I can pretty much always muster up enthusiasm to play a dungeon-crawling game.

I own several dungeon crawlers, but I’m planning on picking up the very interesting-looking Descent: Journeys in the Dark Second Edition when it releases, as it sounds like just the sort of game I want to play. It also sounds like it’s been improved significantly over the original edition, which could take up to 4 or 5 hours to complete a single quest. The new version reportedly keeps play sessions down to much more manageable lengths while incorporating a solid “campaign” system for character advancement and a branching narrative. I’m looking forward to it a lot.

As for the ones I already own, each of them have their pros and cons, and I like them all.

Starting at one end of the spectrum we have Games Workshop’s Dungeonquest, which saw a rerelease by Fantasy Flight Games recently. Dungeonquest is gloriously random and is best left on the shelf if you like to plan out what you’re doing well in advance, because progression is determined largely by the luck of the draw. Consequently, it is a very difficult game to “succeed” in — even the instruction manual helpfully informs you that players have approximately a 34% chance of survival in any given playthrough.

In Dungeonquest, players take it in turns to draw dungeon tiles from a pool in order to build the dungeon as they go. If it’s a corridor, they get to move again. If it’s a room, things happen, determined largely by drawing cards and making skill checks. If it’s a special room, super-special things (usually bad for the player) happen. Many of these things end in instant death for the player, meaning games can be over relatively quickly if you’re unlucky.

The aim of Dungeonquest is to make it to the middle of the board to raid the slumbering dragon’s massive treasure pile, then make it out again before the sun rises — the time limit in question being represented by an ever-advancing “track” at the side of the board. If players don’t get out before sunrise, they die. If they run out of health, they die. If the fall down a bottomless pit, they die. Hilarity (and, usually, frustration) ensues. It’s not a great game, but it is an entertaining one.

Moving up somewhat is MB and Games Workshop’s Hero Quest. This was my introduction to fantasy role-playing when I was a kid, and it still holds a very fond place in my heart to date. It’s an adversarial game where a team of up to four “hero” characters of varying classes take on the forces of darkness, controlled by a single “evil wizard” player. The evil wizard has a book of preset quests with which to challenge the heroes, and following these through in sequence provides a rather loose narrative. The game was later expanded with a number of additional packs that broadened the scope somewhat with new monsters, traps and additional rules to make things more interesting.

Hero Quest is good because it bridges the gap between traditional “family-friendly” board game conventions and the more abstract, strategic nature of role-playing games. It’s accessible enough for pretty much anyone to understand, has high-quality components and a wide variety of things to do — plus is very expandable and customizable.

Advanced Heroquest not only changed the “correct” way to punctuate the phrase “Hero Quest”/”Heroquest” but also revamped the game completely to be significantly closer to a Dungeons & Dragons-style role-playing game. It also incorporated rules for limitless replayability including random dungeon generation, character advancement and a heavy emphasis on customization. While the original Hero Quest released an expansion allowing players to create their own adventures, Advanced Heroquest practically demanded that the Games Master (or “GM” — effectively the “evil wizard” player by another name) come up with some of their own creative, fresh ideas. And it was up to the GM in question how far they wanted to take it — Advanced Heroquest’s rules catered for simple story-free “hack and slash” dungeons as much as elaborate, story-driven scenarios featuring light role-playing. The game even came with full rules for solo play, which was a godsend for me when I was a kid, as short on nearby friends as I was.

Then came Warhammer Quest. This is pretty hard to find now, which explains why I paid nearly £100 for a copy on eBay. Warhammer Quest takes the formula of Advanced Heroquest and shoots off in a different direction rather than necessarily making it more complex. Warhammer Quest has a lot more in the way of random elements, but also features a lot more rules to prevent the game from running away from the players. Where Advanced Heroquest often had dungeons that spiralled off into myriad dead ends, Warhammer Quest’s dungeon generation rules ensure that players move quickly from encounter to encounter on a much more linear path, giving the game a much faster pace. That’s not to say that either approach is “better” as such — Advanced Heroquest had the thrill of exploring the unknown, while Warhammer Quest always had something interesting through the next door — but it marked a significant difference between the two.

Warhammer Quest contains a fairly heavy degree of luck. If you were playing a campaign, after completing a dungeon you then had to roll repeatedly on a table to determine the events that happened during the journey back to town. These frequently got rather ridiculous, as demonstrated abundantly through the adventures of Kurt von Hellstrom and his friends.

Warhammer Quest has one cool thing over its two predecessors, however — it can be played without a GM/evil wizard. The base rules for the game include an artificial intelligence system for the monsters that determine how they move and attack, allowing all the players at the game table to cooperate and take on the dungeons together rather than one being forced to constantly be “the bad guy.” Rules were there to allow the game to be played with a GM, too, but for those craving a purely cooperative experience, Warhammer Quest was a great one.

I don’t get to play these games nearly as often as I’d like to. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to get Descent out regularly once I get my hands on a copy — and I’m also pretty curious about the Dungeons & Dragons boardgames, too. Full reports on each and any of those I get the chance to play will, naturally, follow.

Board Gamery

Happy December, everybody, and I hope all you vidyagames fans out there survived the November onslaught of awesomeness. I plumped for Fallout 3 and played it from beginning to end, loving every minute… but more on that another day. There have been plenty of “November games” blog posts all over the place so I thought I’d take a step back and blog about something different for a change.

I’ve mentioned board gaming before but I think it’s time we had a full-on post devoted to it. So here goes.

I’ve been a fan of tabletop gaming for many years, ever since my then-teenaged brother’s then-girlfriend introduced me to Hero Quest and Space Crusade, games which captivated me not only with their cool, super-detailed little Citadel Miniatures pieces but the fact that they told a story and did something far beyond games that I had played in the past had done. They had interesting mechanics that went beyond “roll and move”, they had an interesting twist on the traditionally competitive nature of other board games by pitting up to three players (the Heroes or the Marines, depending on if you’re talking about Hero Quest or Space Crusade) against one more powerful player (the Dungeon Master or the Alien).

I was so captivated by Hero Quest and Space Crusade that I managed to convince my folks to get me a copy of Advanced Heroquest for one Christmas/birthday/present-receiving opportunity – this despite the fact that I didn’t really have anyone to play with on a regular basis. AHQ took Hero Quest and took it to the next level, with a more “RPG” style system involving character statistics, equipment, hit rolls and all sorts of other interesting rules. More intriguingly, it featured both random dungeon generation, meaning a different experience every time, plus a comprehensive set of rules for solo play, so that my lack of gaming friends living nearby wasn’t an issue.

Fast forward a few years and we reach the present. At some point last year, my buddies Sam and Tom and I decided to sit down and play some board games. We started with Risk and then, following some lucky victories on eBay, we dug out Hero Quest and Space Crusade.

This was the beginning of things – that and discovering Board Game Geek, a site with a big, lively community that discusses board games in great detail and offers excellent, articulate community reviews. (Board gamers seem to be typically rather more articulate than many video gamers, I’ve noticed.) Over time, we started to amass a collection of interesting and out-of-the-ordinary board games. I’d like to share my thoughts on a couple of them with you now.

Pandemic

Pandemic is a peculiar game from the off in that it’s not competitive at all. It pits two to four players against the game itself. The premise is that the players are all members of an elite disease-fighting organisation and have been tasked with curing four deadly diseases that are sweeping the planet. Each player has a unique “role” which gives them a special ability – the Medic, for example, is better at “cleaning” a city of disease, the Scientist discovers cures easier than the other characters, the Dispatcher can move other players on their turn to put them into a strategically advantageous position, the Researcher can exchange information (coloured cards that have to be collected as a set to discover a cure) with other players easier than the others and the Operations Expert can build a Research Facility (a location where cures can be discovered, and also a means of “fast traveling” between locations) anywhere at no cost.

It’s the balance between these roles and the strategy which you have to develop that makes this game so interesting… and it’s the random element thrown up by the fact that the diseases spread a certain amount each turn that makes it exciting and difficult. It often seems relatively easy to get to the “halfway” point with two of the four diseases cured before an epidemic sweeps through an area which had looked somewhat “quiet” before, leading to a situation difficult or even impossible to recover from.

Pandemic is simple to learn and encourages a huge amount of communication and strategising between players. I really like it, even though the “Heroic” game we’ve been playing recently (which makes the game more challenging by throwing more “Epidemic” cards into the mix) kicks our ass every time we play it. It’s the kind of game where you think “well, next time if we do this…” every time.

Our worst game lasted two turns. That’s two players’ turns, not two rounds of the table.

Check it out on Board Game Geek.

Agricola

I mentioned this on the recent Squadron of Shame podcast (see links to the right if you want to listen or subscribe) but it’s worth mentioning again. Agricola is currently one of the Geek’s top-rated board games. Players take on the role of a 16th-century German farmer struggling to get by in difficult times. Throughout the course of the game, you have to try and feed your family, grow your family (more family members means more actions per turn), plough fields, sow crops, breed animals and ensure that your farmyard is as full as possible.

The difficulty comes in the fact that all this has to be done in the space of 14 turns, which never seems to be quite enough time.

Each turn, players use one of their “family members” to take an action from the “action spaces” on the board in the middle of the table. This could be anything from taking resources, required for building pretty much everything, to actually building said structures, to baking bread to produce food. The interesting way the game works is that as it progresses, more and more action spaces become available so it gradually increases in complexity as time goes on – that and the fact that once one person has taken an action, no-one else can on that turn.

I am shit at Agricola. I’m not sure what it is – perhaps it’s an inability to look as far ahead as my buddies – but I enjoy it nonetheless as it’s satisfying to put together your farm, however feeble it ends up looking at the end of the game!

Check it out on Board Game Geek.

Mystery of the Abbey

Describe Mystery of the Abbey to someone and the first thing everyone says is “Oh, that sounds like Clue(do)“. Try it – here’s a description.

There’s been a murder at the Abbey. The players have to discover the identity of the culprit by gathering information, eliminating suspects through questioning and deduction before finally revealing the identity of the perpetrator.

It’s more interesting and thought-provoking than Clue, though, in that it requires you to spend a little time formulating your questions. Rather than simply “calling Colonel Mustard into the library with the candlestick”, you have to actually ask your fellow players questions, being careful to phrase them in such a way that reveals information to you and not to others. Players that you question can either take a vow of silence, in which case no information is exchanged, or answer your question, which gives them the automatic right to hurl a question straight back at you.

The Abbey setting provides scope for a number of interesting rules, too. Every four rounds, the investigative monks have to tromp back to the Ecclesia to take Mass. At Mass, as everyone knows, monks gossip, so players have to pass a particular number of cards (each card representing a monk who DIDN’T commit the crime) to the next player on the table. In this way, it becomes another challenge to conceal certain innocent monks from the other players for as long as possible.

Then there’s the Penance rules. These are some vaguely-defined but incredibly harsh rules that punish not following the way of the Abbey. If a player moves out of turn, or breaks a rule, or forgets to move the little bell that marks progress towards the next Mass, then the other players can call “Penance!” (by common agreement) and send the monk back to the Ecclesia to miss a turn atoning for their sins. The Penance rules are particularly harsh, especially given the fairly mild-natured manner of the rest of the game, but it gives the whole thing a slight air of tension which is enormously entertaining.

Check it out on Board Game Geek.

So there you have it. Three great games that I highly recommend you check out if you’re the slightest bit interested in going beyond what more “traditional” games like Monopoly can offer.