The Making of Trials of Sensibility and Skulls

In an earlier post (located here) I mentioned that for my Game Design and Production I class we were required to make a prototype board game about a Jane Austen book and pirates. Now I know many of you are probably wondering what Jane Austen (if you are even aware of who she is, if not refer here for more information) and pirates has to do with Game Design (trust me you are not alone in this belief, many people in my class already freaked out and complained about this, while accepted the challenge since it catered to my inner literature nerd) but this assignment forced us to think a little differently in our approach to making our board games. 

Now my group (which originally consisted of the girls of game Dev but our friend Clement didn't have a group so we let him join us for this one) was originally going to choose Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (more information on the book is found here) but when we designing out game we decided to change books to Sense and Sensibility (more information on the book is found here) since some of us liked that novel better and because most people we talked to in our class were doing Pride and Prejudice and we didn't want to be similar to them.

 

The Beginning of Our Design:

 

 At first we weren't sure exactly how and what you would have to collect in our game that could be related to Jane Austen, but after extensive discussion we were able to figure out what the players what have to collect on order to be crowned the victor and that is a relationship (I bet all of you are thinking what on earth are we smoking, how can collect a relationship, I will explain it soon so don't worry, and what does that have to do with Jane Austen, if you are thinking this you have clearly never read her works).

 Our Design Meeting:

 Now that we had chosen our book, we had to choose what type of game we were making and our professor had mentioned a few things he wanted / expected, that he did not want a Race to the End game ( they are the easier way out and totally last week). Unsure of how a Territorial Acquisition game would work with a Jane Austen novel, we didn't really think that type of game too much and started to look at a type of game we haven't had a chance to explore in class or our assignments yet, a collection game (For anyone who is wondering what a collection game is I will post a blog in a few days about this type of game, so please be a little patient).

The Designing of Our Game:

Now Sense and Sensibility follows the lives and loves of the Dashwood Sisters, Elinor and Marianne (see how the relationships are important in the book now?) and we wanted to stay true to the plot (which was a request, more like a requirement, given to us by Dr. Nacke) so we decided that the players would play as one of the sisters and would have to collect relationship/ event cards in order to develop their romantic relationships with their respective infatuations. In order to decide who wins the game, we decided that you need to collect more of your respective character's cards than your opponent however this was changed slightly to include a points system to make the game more interesting.

The Designing of the Board and Cards:

When designing our board we decided that we wanted to make the board in an oval or circular shape (we ended up deciding on the oval shape as the final shape) since we wanted to change the board shape up from the regular, expected square/ rectangular shape of most boards. We decided to use foam board as the main material as it is a more sturdy and durable material which served our purpose. Originally we planned to cut out the oval shape however we ran into some issues when we had to cut the board out (The main issue that really interfered with our plan was the fact that we accidentally painted the board first before we cut out the shape. Knowing that if we made a mistake when cutting it would be next to near impossible to fix, we decided not to take that risk.).

 The Designing of the Character Pieces:

Since Sense and Sensibility follows the lives and romance of 2 of the 3 Dashwood sisters, During our design discussions we had decided that our game would be a two game; Players can play as either Elinor or Marianne and must develop their character's respective relationships with their respective men. Originally we had decided that if 4 people wanted to play, then they would play in teams of 2 however during play testing we realized that it was a little boring so we scrapped the idea.

 The Drawing of the Board:

Before we started painting or outlining anything on our board, Our Board Designer, Evelyn quickly sketched out her design in pencil, by doing this we were able to fix any sizing issues that had and were able to plan out what squares go where (I'm really glad we did this before w e painting because if we needed to make corrections to the board design it would be a lot harder to do with paint down).

Designing the Cards:

   While Evelyn was designing the board, the rest of us took a look at some objects found in Sense and Sensibility in order to figure out how to incorporate them into our game. We did this by creating object cards that you can pick up throughout the board, some objects that can be found are a lock of Marianne's hair (Which in that time was suppose to be a romantic act between lovers, however I think it's kind of weird), which Chrystal made very elegantly and efficiently. The objects can either help progress you/ set you back in movement  throughout the board or help you gather relationship cards. In addition to object card (as well as our attempt to stay true to the plot of the novel) we added Relationship cards for each character, which develop the girl's romance with their respective infatuations, which Keerthana made very artistic and efficiently with edits and assembly done by Zee.

The Writing of the Rules:

 

After creating the cards and deciding what their purpose was in the game, Clement (Who isn't pictured because he didn't want any so he would continuously move out of the way) sat down a flushed out the rules on set up, game play, and battling. After Clement finished writing the rules Zee quickly looked over and edited some that were slightly inaccurate (mostly because we changed them when we realized that they weren't working well while play testing it). For a full overview of our rules you can find them below:

Trials of Sensibility and Skulls

Game dev girls + 1

Objective

You start at Dock Sussex, where pirate captain Dashwood has recently died; Of scurvy.  He hated eating vegetables.  His successor suspicious of crewmembers trying to usurp his position has banished anybody with the power to do so.  Marianne and Elinor are included in these banished crewmembers and now find themselves  traversing the lands and seas plundering as they see fit while trying to find a person worth their time to settle down with.

The main objective of the game is to score as high as a relationship score as possible by the end of the game.  This is achieved by collecting relationship cards.  In the event that the scores are identical, the amount of treasures hoarded during your adventure of glamour and love will be used to settle the score.

Set-up

1. The game is played with two players; one player plays as Marianne and the other as Elinor.
2. Place the Object cards, Marianne and Elinor relationship cards in their respective spots face down on the board.
3. To determine which player goes first roll 1 D6, the player with the highest roll goes first.
4. Both players start in the green space and continue forward, choosing a direction if the paths split.

Playing the game

1. Roll a dice to see how many spaces you can go.
2. If you land on a relationship tile, draw from the relationship pile that corresponds to your character's.  Do the same for an object tile.
3. Resources are gained through object cards.  Object cards are used immediately and turn into resource cards afterwards.  If you lose a turn(s) from that object card it cannot be counted as a resource; discard it after use. If you draw an object card you cannot use, (i.e. Draw from opposing character’s relationship pile) reshuffle it into the object deck.
4. If you land on the same tile as another player, a battle is fought and the loser will have to give up a random resource card if they have one.
5. The game doesn’t end until all players reach the endpoint. The winner is determined by tallying up the score.  Relationship cards are worth 1 point each.  In the event of a tie resource points are used for the tie-breaker.  Each object card is worth 1 point unless otherwise stated in rule 3 of this section.

Battling

A battle is fought either through cannon, net, spear (rock, paper, scissors) or by rolling dice.  The person who was on the tile first gets to pick the choice of battle.

  The Board Design:

Once the board design was completed,  the cards were designed and made, Evelyn and I relocated to paint the board and make the Character pieces, since the study room we commandeered (Ahaha see what I did there) wasn't the best place to paint.

 The Making of the Character Pieces:

The Completed Character Pieces:

The Character pieces were designed to somewhat represent pictures and picture frames, with both the shape and design of the pieces. The Pieces were made out of foam board and coloured with markers, as well as covered the backs and sides with black paper.

The Making of the Board:

We decided on a very bright, soft and cool colour palette for our board, and tried to avoid using clashing colours which could be distracting during game play. Each square on the is a different colour which has a specific meaning when playing. Below is a quick explanation of what each colour is:

• Blue - These are normal movement squares
• Purple- These are relationship card squares, Players must pick up their character's specific relationship card
• Yellow- These are object card square, Players must pick up an object card and must follow any instructions on them
• Green  - This is the start square
• Red - This is the finish square

 Adding the Finishing Touches:

We added the name of our game, sections for the cards to be placed, a duel area for battles and a legend (Unfortunately the legend was not included on the picture below, we actually almost forgot about it since it wasn't as important as the other pieces).

 The Finished Product:

MY THOUGHTS:

This assignment was quite an interesting and fun challenge that taught my group and I that when making a game you do not necessarily need to have similar or nearly identical themes or topics. Sometimes you can take two totally different ideas, like Jane Austen's Sense and sensibility and Pirates, combine them and make them work. It was an interesting assignment that forced us (even if we liked it or not) to explore something many of the people in my program have little to no knowledge about. I think it was a great experience because when you are game designer you may be required to make a game on something you do not know or understand, or two things that don not seem to work well with each other. 

Jane Austen, The Pirate Tales

That's right people you read the tittle correctly, the subject of this blog post is Jane Austen and Pirates. Now you are probably wondering what Jane Austen and Pirates has anything to do at all with a Game Design class, well that's actually my Prototype assignment for this month. Now a lot of people in my class started freaking out about how on earth they were going to incorporate pirates into a Jane Austen novel, or who on earth was Jane Austen. Now having studied Jane Austen in high school and read her novel, Pride and Prejudice, I was extremely excited to be doing a game based on her works (I really love Jane Austen and her novels, in my opinion they are very well written and a definite must read).

Now for anyone who doesn't know who Jane Austen is (I have a feeling a lot of people don't since if you aren't a big reader and your English teachers in high school were not pro Austen you probably didn't have to learn about her) I will be providing  a quick overview of Jane Austen's history and her novels along with a few summaries of her works.

THE HISTORY OF JANE AUSTEN

 Jane Austen (16 December 1775 – 18 July 1817) was an English novelist during the age of romanticism (for more info on the romanticism period click Here) whose works represented the lives of a largely historical British social class called Landed gentry ( this basically refereed to people, land owners, who lived entirely off rental income. For more info on this click Here). She earned her place as one of the most widely read authors in English literature, and is known as one of the pioneers of the romance novel genre (you can read more about this genre Here).

Austen lived her entire as part of a close-knit family located on the lower fringes of the English landed gentry (basically Jane wrote what she knew and many scholars believe that many of the heroines in her novels are loosely based on her life) and was educated primarily by her father and older brothers as well as her own reading.

Some of her most notable works are Sense and Sensibility (written in 1811), Pride and Prejudice (written in 1813), Emma (written in 1815) and Persuasion (written in 1916).

Sense and Sensibility:

 

This novel is a work of romantic fiction set in southwest England between a span of seven years, from 1792 - 1797, which portrays the life and loves of the Dashwood sisters, Elinor and Marianne.

Pride and Prejudice:

 

This story follows the main character Elizabeth Bennet as she deals with issues such as manners, upbringing, education and marriage among others in the Landed gentry society of early 19th century England.  Although Pride and Prejudice is set at the turn of the 19th century, it retains a fascination for modern readers (which means even people today can relate to the topics presented in this book) which has contributed to it becoming one of the most popular novels in English literature, as well as one of the most loved books (Guys this book is really good, I love it and in my opinion everyone should read it at least once in their life).

Emma:

This book is about the youthful hubris (which means excessive pride or self-confidence) and the perils of misconstrued romance (misconstrued means interpret wrongly). Austen's goal when writing this book was to create a heroine who no one but herself will like.

Persuasion:

Persuasion was Jane Austen's last completed work before she passed away in 1817, and marked a break with her previous works, since it was both more biting, even irritable satire directed at some of the books characters and in the regretful, resigned outlook of the admirable heroine.

Now that you know a little bit about Jane Austen I will quickly speak about pirates (if anyone doesn't know about pirates I'm going to assume that you were forced to live under a rock all your life, no offense).

THE HISTORY OF PIRATES 

  Now the first thing that anyone probably thinks of when you mention pirates is either Captain Jack Sparrow from Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean or Captain Hook from Disney's Peter Pan. 

Captain Jack Sparrow:

 

Captain Hook:

Now these are the generic type of pirates we think of; Jack Sparrow, a cool, Suave, and slightly ethical pirate, and Captain Hook, a silly, obsessive pirate, who are always looking treasure or gold, however actual pirates were very different. 

Piracy is defined as the act of robbery or criminal violence at sea (it also can include acts committed on land, in air or in other major bodies of water) and those who engage in acts of piracy are called pirates (you can find more info Here).  Now many people believe that pirates where bloodthirsty, ruthless murders who stole and buried their treasure, however most pirates rarely buried their treasure or killed those on the ships they captured. Often the treasure they would steal would be food, water, alcohol, weapons or clothing. They sometimes stole household items like soap and gear such as rope and anchors. 

While it was believed that pirates ruthlessly killed those whose ships they commandeered that is not actually the case. Pirates tended to kill as few people as possible aboard the ships they captured, since if it became known that pirates took no prisoners, their victims would fight to the end since they knew they would be killed anyways, making victory very timely and costly. Therefor as long as the ships surrendered the people on board would not be injured, which actually make ships surrender quickly because they knew they would be spared (What a bunch of nice guys, they take your stuff but spare your life, only for it to possibility happen again).

I'M SUPER EXCITED TO COMBINE THESE TOGETHER!!

I know this may seem like my inner literature and history nerd is showing but I'm really excited to combine both these topics to make a game because I think the people in my class can come up with some seriously interesting ideas. 

In case You Were Interested

Here are some links for info on the books and movies I mentioned in my post.

Jane Austen:

• Jane Austen Wiki 
• Jane Austen
• Austen
• Jane Austen Information Page

Sense and Sensibility:

•  Sense and Sensibility Wiki

Pride and Prejudice:

• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen 
• Pride and Prejudice Wiki

Emma:

•  Emma Wiki

Persuasion:

•  Persuasion

Pirates of the Caribbean:

• Pirates of the Caribbean Wiki 

 Peter Pan: 

•  Peter Pan Wiki
•  Peter Pan (1953 film)

 

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: