The Making of Ant Hill

So in an earlier post (found Here) I mentioned that the second assignment given to us in Game Design was to create a Territorial Acquisition game. Unlike last week, we are required to make this game in groups of 5, which definitely adds some challenges to designing and developing a game since you have five people all with different ideas and personalities. Now working with a group can sometimes be disastrous since conflicting opinions and personalities can sometimes cause little to no work to get done, however groups can also be a good thing because you have multiple new viewpoints that may be able to see a problem that you yourself may not have caught or come up with a solution to a problem you couldn't solve. Fortunately my group was the second of the two options I presented, which let us get our game done quickly and efficiently.

To start we looked at some of the Territorial Acqusition games as a reference however the only one we all had seemed to either play or know was Risk, so we had a lack of resources to look at when we were developing our game. Risk, however, did give us the starting blocks of our game since we understood some of the general basics of this type of game.

The begining stages of our Territorial Game:

Unfortunately Since one of our members was in class when decided the time to meet up we were not able to discuss our ideas directly with him, but modern technology allowed us to stay in contact with each other so he wasn't left out of the planning stage (modern technology is such a beautiful thing really it is and anyone who says otherwise needs to be quite). This turned out to be essential since our group member Clement, the one who had class, was the one who actually thought up the idea of our current Territorial Acquisition game, Ant Hill (Yeah yeah laugh all you want at the name it's pretty weak but I actually enjoy the name and it makes sense with our game).

The idea Clement pitched via Skype went as followed:

Clement Choi: you play as an ant queen, lay a certain amount of "soldiers/workers" per turn until you gather enough resources.

Clement Choi: there's nodes (or flowers? trees? whatever) that you have to adquire
Clement Choi: and that gives you territorial control of the tiles surrounding it.
Clement Choi: where you can build defenses maybe?
Clement Choi: back to the ant queen. (before you can upgrade)
Clement Choi: her and lay more workers/soldiers?

Now while we all had different ideas (some of them not very good or well thought out) our group mutually agreed that we liked Clement's idea the best and decided to roll with and surprisingly ideas about the game mechanics came esaily after our concept was decided. We started deciding what we would use to allow the player the ability to move, we decided on dice (we clearly are all fond of dice, I mean WHO doesn't like dice!!) but that was later changed slightly so it would work with our game. Next we decided on how the board would look like (while we were doing this we were 'arguing' on how we would impliment resources, some of us would like to call it having a creatice discusion, but it was arguing) and decided on making the tiles hexagonal in shape (Gianluca really wanted to have hexagons, not sure why though but they worked with our game so no one question it. I feel like should have though, not sure why though.) which i think made the board look quite interesting and different than having regular square tiles.

To do this we used a flower template to make both the hexagons and the flower nodes, which we decided on (inbetween our arguing on the idea of resources). You can see the template in the picture below.

Designing the Game Board:

After we drew out about four rows of this weird hexagon flower shape and filled in the tiles along the board, we had finally made a decision on how to impliment resources before someone realized that our plan had a flaw, so we scrapped the idea and focused on the task at, figuring out how players would claim area and territories in our game. Originally I believe Jesse threw out the idea of having pieces that represented supply lines, these supply lines would be use to connect the different captured resources/ nodes in order to move across the board, which we ended up scrapping as well since we couldn't decided on the material to make this piece out of and how the player would use them in the game among other issues that were brought up when discussing it.

Some how the idea of making the flower give players a resource when it has been conqured was thrown out in the sea of ideas and we jumped on it right away. Making resources a card that you recieve when conquring a specific area fixed the issues we were having with implimenting resources into our game. The only thing was figuring our how many resources to design and what they would do. While we were debating what to do with thee resource cards Evelyn thought of an idea on how to set up the flowers on the board (She's actually trying it out in the picture below) and how to make it a little more challenging to receive resources by placing a certain condition that players must meet to conqure that level before moving to the next. Basically what Evelyn did was she made each level of the flower (the leaves, Petals and middle) require a specific dice roll in order to conqure that area before you can make it to the middle and receive a resource card.  

Designing the Tiles:

We ended up including a general set of cards as well that players would recieve in addition to the resource cards, however how you would obtain the two types of cards is significantly different. These general cards can help you in conquring the board and defending your territority. You can see an example of these cards in the picture below: 

Designing the Cards:

 While deciding on the tiles, we came up with the idea to make the tiles colour coded, which actually helpped us when we decided what the winning condition for the game was along with differentiating betweent the different types of panels and the rules for obtaining the nodes/ flowers (As you can see from the picture below Clement's class had finished around this time and he joined us to help make the board).

Choosing a Colour Scheme for the Board:

Once the game board was well on its way to completion Gianluca and Jesse sat down and decided on what resource and general cards we will have and they will do. They also started to flush out the rules for the game. Some of these rules ended up getting scrapped because they either didn't make sense or they weren't working with our game.

Making the Board:

With the rules and cards on their way the only thing we had left to do was name our game (Yes people we waited until we were pretty much finished to name the game, we figured we had more important things to do than come up with a name). We ended up choosing Ant Hill since it seemed like an appropriate and accurate title at the time. With the title done, we started putting the finishing touches on the board, like the title for one as well as a legend for quick reference to to what the different coloured titles meant.

Putting the Final Touches on:

For anyone interested here are the rules for our game:

Anthill

2-4 players

You are a queen ant: A Fat greedy baby pusher with a rear end larger than a megabus. Through your feelers of little minions you sense that winter's coming. The hive scurries into action, gathering food and other supplies for the coming frost. But Wait! Your scouts have determined that there are other anthills with the same agenda! Well, too bad for them! They want your resources? They will have to fight for them!

Required/included
Tokens
2 decks of cards labelled Resources and General
2 D6

-Each player starts with an anthill, represented by the spots on the board.
-Roll a dice to see who goes first. The highest roll goes before everyone else and the turns go in a counter clockwise format.
-On your turn, draw a card from the general pile. You may place an ant adjacent to your anthill or another ant of your colour.
-Your hand size may not exceed 5.
-When placing ants, if you place one on a coloured square, refer to the legend to determine if the space requires a roll in order to capture. If it does, roll the appropriate dice. (Usually a D6)
-If you capture the center of a flower, known as a resource point, you may draw a resource card. These cards are powerful and valuable and can only be drawn every three turns, to a maximum hand size of 5.
-You can only control a resource if there's a straight line from your anthill to the resource consisting of ants of your colour. if the line is broken, the ants on the resource are lost and discarded.
-Any ant trail must lead back to your anthill. If any ant becomes separated from his trail, that ant is lost.
-If you place an ant on a hex that borders an ant of another colour, you may elect to have the ants do combat. During combat, play any cards you wish to play to alter combat, then roll a d6 to determine if the attack is successful or not. If it is, remove the defending ant. If not, do nothing. Discard any cards played during combat.

The game ends when a player controls all resources, or when 60 turns pass. Normal squares count as one resource point, flowers count as 5 resource points if the center is captured. The player with the most wins

MY THOUGHTS:

This assignment was quite an interesting and fun challenge that taught my group and I to think out of the box a little, as well as some of the challenges designers face when developing games in a group. As a designer and a member of a team you need to be able to look at everyone's ideas and pick the one that it going to improve your game not the one you thought of or the one you liked best. My group also learned about how difficult it can be to meet and discuss our game idea and how modern technology is such a great advantage we have in order to be able to work from anywhere. Personally I think this assignment was a little harder than our last one since my group was definitely more familiar with Race to the End games, so having to make a Territorial Acquisition threw us off a bit.

 

The Finished Product: