Thursday 20 September 2012

Week 2 – Human Foosball and a fun game involving poker chips and cards!

              This past week has been pretty good for me, as we finally got divided into studios for our game development workshop. This was especially good news for me, as I was anxiously waiting to see if I’ll get grouped up with my friends, which is exactly what happened. We will strive to create an even better game this year! This week’s two lectures were also interesting since we got to design and play a ball game with the class divided into two groups, while in the other lecture we got to play with a very interesting card game.
                The ball game that my group chose to design was none other than “human” Foosball, which is very similar to the tabletop game except it is played with lots of people. We were not allowed to change the goal of the game, and the goal was to get the ball into a box that was placed on top of the table. The rules we came up with were pretty simple, players will stand in rows of 4 players, with the back two rows facing forward and the front row facing backwards (please see the diagram below):
 The black rectangles represent the tables in the classroom, and the blue and red dots represent the players, and their respective positions. The arrows represent the direction that each player should be facing, and the white box in the middle represents the goal.
Players can only use their hands to hit or touch the ball, and cannot grab the ball at all. Should the ball get stuck on a chair or touch the floor, the ball is “served” to the opposing team. At first the game was pretty chaotic as players were randomly hitting the ball in random directions, with some players even trying to hit each other with the ball. It was also hard to get to ball into the box to win, especially if players did not cooperate as a team, and especially if the enemy was adamant on blocking the way to the goal. I’ll admit this game reminds me a lot of volleyball mixed in with Foosball, but in the end it turned out to be very interesting and fun to play.
                The game the other group had come up with was similar to basketball, where players hold the ball, pass it to other teammates, and can only take a maximum of 3 steps before having to pass it on. All players stood on top of the tables, and can hold the ball as long as they want, but still must adhere to the rules. 

Goal cards
Plastic chips
                During the second lecture, we split up into smaller groups this time and played a game that involved several goal cards and plastic poker chips. The rules of the game were fairly simple, where players put a randomly picked chip (the “shooter” chip) on the edge of the table, and must tap it to hit other players’ chips. If you hit another chip on the table you get to keep it if it doesn’t fall off the table, otherwise it goes back into the bag. The meta-goal of the game was to complete as many goal cards as possible, and the rules that we used was for every player to pick a goal card and to complete that goal before anyone else can complete theirs. This game was pretty fun for us to play with, although it did have some issues. The biggest issue was the fact that the plastic chips provided were too light, and a lot of the time when a player taps their chip, it would jump over other chips and not hit them at all. In the end, we decided to change up some of the goals by adding our own custom goals, such as jumping over other chips or hitting 3 chips at once.
Custom rules and goals
We also added our own custom rules, such as if players jump over another chip, they can take it and receive double the amount of points, or if you hit another player’s chip you can actually take points from their total score. 



Scoreboard after the first game

Final scoreboard, with a winner

Overall I found this week’s lecture and activities to be fairly fun, and I hope that lectures in the future will be as enjoyable as the past week has been. Stay tuned for more blog posts next week!

 

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