Board game analysis: Arkham Horror

Hello Peons.
I ask for forgiveness in this late Post. By attending to dreamhack i lost the time to post this so here goes.

Arkham Horror.

It’s a game based of H.P. Lovecrafts universe created with the object to work together against the ancient ones. In the game the players play as investigators that work against the different cults and to stop the ancient one from entering the world. There are several ways for the player to prevent these disasters from happening. During the game several rifts will open where monsters pour out and take over the city. To do this the player collects Clues, fights monsters, travel to other worlds.
Arkham Horror is the game where you fight the ancient ones from the books basically.

The Rules
representing the players in the game are the investigators. The investigators have premade a sheet that describes abilities, skills and the starting equipment. There are several different variables that comes into play with the investigator sheet. Many variables who influence the outcome of decisions made throughout the game, for example the speed/sneak variable influences how fast a character can move. By making a character faster he’s ability to sneak becomes harder and vice versa.
Representing the health in game are sainty and stamina tokens, they represent the mental and physical health of the player.

The enemy in game is represented by different monster cards throughout the session and finally by the ancient one sheets if it awakens during the game. The players choose before the start of the game what ancient one they would like to battle. Depending on what ancient one is chosen the players the ancient one has effect on gameplay from turn one. For example Cthulhu affects his worshippers with innsmouth look that gives his Cultist a horror rating of – 2 and a horror damage of 2 sanity. Cthulhu also invokes on the investigators during the gameplay by reducing their maximum Sanity and stamina by 1.
All Ancient ones affects the gameplay in different ways to give different difficulties.

There are several ways the Ancient one can be awaken, the two most common is that the doom track gets filled. For each round that passes a doom token is places upon the ancient one’s sheet. The amount of doom tokens needed for ancient one to awaken varies, between 8 to 16 doom token is needed. When the doom track is full and the ancient one awakens.

Other ways that the ancient one can awake is trough to many gates being open, if there are seven gates open with four players the ancient one will awake the moment the last gate is open and the game will enter the final battle.
Final Battle
Before the final battle begins the players will discard any active environment cards or rumor cards. Additionally the systems for money, bank loans and retainers stop being accounted for.
The final battle consists of several phases that each fighting round includes. It starts off with the investigators refresh which enables the investigators the refresh their skill cards, use abilities and adjust their skill sliders. The investigators may also trade their items as if they were on the same tile.
The next phase is the Investigators attack phase, during this phase the players use combat check against the ancient one with the combat rating as modifier. The ancient one, unlike normal monsters can’t be defeated by one attack. If the players accumulate enough successful attacks equal to the amount of players. If this happens the players may remove one doom token. The ancient one is defeated when there is no more doom tokens.
After the players made all of their combat checks it is the ancient ones turn, it unleashes attacks on each of the investigators once. The attacks varies for the different ancient ones some makes the investigators make a sanity check others may give the investigators to lose a sanity or one stamina. After the ancient one has attacked each investigator once the round restarts. By defeating the ancient one the investigators has saved the city and the day. There are also other ways that the game can be won trough, if the investigators managed to seal enough gates before the last doom token is place the ancient one can’t enter the world and the arkham is saved.

System
What makes this game go forward? and what it’s the most important system working at play?
During the game there is a card called mythos card, the mythos card acts for the monsters in the game. There are three major categories of the mythos cards and how they affect the game.
The environment mythos card that gives a description of an ongoing event in Arkham, the ongoing event may be positive or negative for the investigators depending on what modifiers the mythos card is holding. The environment card will stay in place until the next environment card comes into play.
The headline mythos card is a one effect card and the most common type of mythos card in the game. These mythos cards do different things depending on card but they may be beneficial, harmful or neutral. When the cards text is done the rest of the mythos phase is complete, the card is discarded to the bottom of the mythos deck.
The rumor mythos card has an ongoing effect (much like the environment cards) but also consist of a pass and a fail condition. For example the mythos card “Disturbing the dead” will have the ongoing effect that a die will be rolled at the end of every mythos phase. If the die lands on a 1 or 2 the terror level in the city is increased. For the card to reach the pass condition a player need to discard two gate trophies in the rivertown streets during the encounter phase. The fail condition for this card is when the terror reaches 10, if this happened every investigator will be cursed.

The mythos card also has two other important uses for the game. Firstly it spawns clue tokens around on different areas of arkham each time a mythos card is drawn.
the other use the mythos card posses is the monster movement. Each monster that is summoned into arkham have different signs and the arkham map have two different paths, white and black. These mythos cards tell monsters with a certain sign to move one step on either a white or a black path.

Good
the game focuses on having investigators with big differences, this opens up for the player to support each other through their different strengths. The game encourages its players to work together to achieve the victory against the ancient ones. This creates a sense of competency with the other players. Every player need to feel that they are contributing towards the common goal the team in the game. The game does that trough the different strengths and weaknesses. For example there are investigators that have great strengths in fighting monster but in sealing gates or traveling the other worlds have great difficulty. This can create scenarios where a gate needs to be sealed and the gate is guarded by a great monster. In order to seal the gate one investigator needs to kill the monster before the greate sealing investigator steps in and seals the gate for good.

Bad
The bad part of the game is related to the best part of the game, and that’s because it’s a NPC based game. The fact that everything the ancient one does is automated makes every encounter highly predictable. Though the mythos card section is randomized in what mythos card that will be drawn but for an experienced player the mythos card is a known part and not a hard part to deal with. This is something that is hard to avoid when creating a game where it’s the boardgame vs its players. A way to avoid this could be to have 1 player play as the ancient one and the rest to play as the investigators. This could create a more unpredictable experience but the difficulty could sky rocket. For this to work there would be a lot of limitations of what the ancient one could do and not, but it could prove out to be a more interesting way of playing the game.

Audience
As the game is centered and designed around the Cthulhu mythos and H.P. Lovecraft. It’s pretty understandable that a fan of the universe would enjoy playing with a game that offers the players to battle and banishing the ancient ones. Otherwise, the other player who knows vaguely about H.P. Lovecraft would more think about the mechanics that the games provides. The type of player who enjoys this would arguably either be a killer or a socializer who thrives on working together against a common goal.

Conclusion
I see Arkham horror as a great game where the first couple of times can be really tricky to get into but as the players understand more about the game and the mechanic the game will provide a great joy. I understand that the game is possible to play alone, controlling several investigators and working against the horrors that lay within Arkham.
I personally think that the game was very hard to understand and to get into. It may have been a problem that one of our team members was a big fan of the game and told us more what to do than why we did it. There were several occasions where I was told to roll a die but did not understand why and what numbers affected the outcome of the roll.
I enjoyed the game from what it was but I openly think that a design revolving around one player controlling the Ancient one and the rest playing as the investigators could provide a more interesting gameplay.

 

Weekly post. Sound Design

 

Hello world.

This week I’ve focusing on creating sound and fine tuning the last on the design document. The sound for this week have been growling sound that indicates that the character is low on hunger, showing that the avatar is close to death. The idea is to start playing the sound at 50% hunger at really low volume, then increase the volume as the players hunger is decreasing. As well as that I am working on a way to make the growling noise go faster as the hunger is increasing.

Other sounds I’ve been working on is the power up sound and growing sound. The growing sound is trying to be something instyle with the growing sound from pokemon. I don’t want to use the sound but I want it to be in style of it. I have been using an website for creating the power up sound as well as the growing sound without any bigger progress. Can be that I should try to get a programme in style of 8bit sounds. Going to look further into it during the evening.

The point of the growing sound is that it’s going to be a three part sound where the note gets lighter and louder, to indicate that the avatar have been empowered. The hard part is that I don’t want the sound to sound too much bit, I want the sound to feel believable and keep the same standard as the rest of the game. If the game isn’t made in Bit inspired graphic the sound will feel misplaced. The challenge is to find what sound creates the illusion of the sound I want to create. Maybe I am lack the knowledge to create the sound for this particular cause. The only thing I really can do is to continue to try and find the sound I am after. In the end it’ll work out.

Meanwhile I’ve been trying to work out the MDA for the game.  During the afternoon today I worked with the MDA in the design document. Trying to find what empowers what troughout the game and what is really important. Looking back at the important part is giving me a feeling that our attention has been a bit misplaced. Maybe that is an experience I can carry with me too the next project.
Speaking off, now that the project is going towards an end, the feeling of these two past weeks have been tiered, that people are looking towards the final project this year and don’t really care what happens now.

Well, with one last push I am sure that we’ll make it.

Over and Out
Adam

P.S. The SGA Report is comming up with picture and “post mortem”
Stay classy 😀

Level design and Experience

Hello Minions

This week I’ve been focusing on the design for the game, that includes design document, level design and experience curve.
I want to start talking a bit about the experience curve and numbers. There have been a lot of numbers, and then I mean a lot. Experience curve is something that the player will never notice if it’s done properly, done wrong and the game will do a lot of damage.

So, with no experience (game design wise) about curves and progression with game design, I set out to construct a table to inform how much experience is needed to progress the avatar to the next size.
in the games both the avatar and the fishes have 9 different levels to achive, 0 – 8 for the enemies and 1-9 for the avatar. This is so the avatar has something to eat when starting the game.
At writing moment I’ve choose to take a sequence with an increasing level that makes sense, the so called Fibonacci sequence.

With the Fibonacci sequence it feels like a natural rising order. I studied the leveling curve of the wow but it changes a lot trough out the leveling, one to ten is a simple second grade function, but remaining levels uses more complicated functions, I ended up with Fibonacci’s curve for the experience and  for the gained experience per enemies, I choose numbers that fit in-between for the scope. (Subject to change)

I have a fear that the curve will be too big for the game itself, making it too long between the levels. Meaning that the player will find a grind in-between level, but making the gap to narrow in-between will make the player bored, no challenge. The line will have to get tested during the coming week. Now my focus is to get it implemented and to get the core loop into the game.

I want to take a small bit and mention the level design. As it is right now I’m making three different stages that seamlessly fit together, the first level is formed like an open world with a few cave systems where you can find a entrance to the second level, and some without a precise purpose, just deformations.
For the second level I’ve gone with a large cave system that branches out. I did a lot of reading for the level design. I am still unsure on how the third and last level is going to work. Either it’ll be really open as the first level or it’ll be a larger cave system. I’d appreciate any feedback good or bad.
I WANT TO IMPROVE.

Over and out

Adam

Game Development Week 5, Graphical Work

Hello people.

This week I’ve taken a minor step back from the design part. I am still lead design but I’ve been focusing on the graphical parts. I’ve been taking care of environment and power up icons, Speed, energy and light power ups. Each power up increases the speed, energy or light. The Game is going to contain three of each type, making it possible to upgrade the character speed, light and energy three times. It exist one of each type in every stage trough the game. Making of the icons was quite simple. The task was about to create something that fits into the universe that the game is made into.

I made the icons as a bubble holding the upgrade. The idea is that the bubble is going to pop the moment it’s colliding with the avatar. I am founding it to be a problem with the icons, to form it as something that belongs in the world.
The icon I am most dissatisfied with is the speed icon, it’s made to resemble an arrow that increase speed as well as I tried to make it resemble a simple fish fin. I think it’s a lot more detailed than the other two, I have slight concern that it either is going to stand out to much from the rest of the art work or that it’ll convey a different feeling from the rest of the upgradable.
I am concern if the bubble’s is holding the standard that the rest of the art is keeping, that it feels out of the picture. I hope that they hold enough standard to convey the message of what they do and that they need to be collided with to be activated.

I feel that I am finally starting to get to terms with the making of the game and the routine of being in the production.
The oncoming week I’m going to focus a lot more on graphical production and keeping the design in mind. Hope fully we’ll pass the Alpha that goes off tomorrow. The team has been doing a lot crunching the last couple of days. Today the whole team sat together and really worked on getting parts of the game up and running. Last thing before I left was that the fish can now eat and die of starvation.

That would be everything from me.
Adam
Over and out.

Game development week 4, Design Document writing.

During the week i have been writing the design document for the game i am working on. In the start of the week the design document was containing around 800 words and a lot of unneeded material. During most of my monday i spent reading trough the Design document and commented on what was in need of cleaning and rephrasing. Throughout the rest of the week i have been reading others design document from earlier project to understand the structure of the document, how they formulate each section and the general feel of the document.

the design document in its purest form is the team’s go to guide for how stuff will work in the game. For example
there is a section called States in the design document, the section explains every state in the game such as Start menu, game, options, pause, game over and winning state. Even if i think every state is really self explanatory they needed to be written down. All state still needs an explination of what they contain such as buttons that leads to other states. Not that i am not writing the code for the states, i am simply explaining how the states is going to work with each other.

This picture explains the connection between each game state and modes. How the program can change between the different states and what state it can change to with the current active state. For example when the program is initialized you can either go in to the option mode to change settings or start the game; from Game state you can enter the pause state or you may activate the Game over/winning state, from both Pause state and Game Over/winning state you can enter start state again.

With the design document as a whole artifact i think my work could have been a lot more effective, to start writing the design document this week may have been a mistake. During the earlier weeks of production this document may have saved us a lot of time. in sens that everytime we discuss something and how it’s going to be, when that is decided it should be documented into the design document, that way whenever the production never needs to take the same decision twice. i’m as the designer is going to try and update the design document from now forward at least once a week. I believe that a updated design document is really healthy.

Over and Out Adam.
P.s there has been some problem with people unable to comment on the post. Hit me up with a private message or similar and i shall try to sort it out.