The Making of the Atari Card Game

So in an earlier post (found Here) I mentioned that for this week's Game Design and Production I class assignment we were required to make a card game based on a retro Atari game (You have no idea how much I freaked out when I found out about this assignment, I love Atari and all the old retro arcade games!!!).  Since Thanksgiving was this past week (for us Canadians anyways, if anyone doesn't know about Canadian Thanksgiving click Here for more info) my group and I all went home for the holiday and weren't really in communication (or the same cities for that matter) with each other, which made planning and making our game a little hard (and put us a little behind). However fortunately our obsession with the computer and the internet actually helped us decide what game we were using before the holiday was over (we ended up choosing Elevator Action which I was really excited about).

Our Skype Planning Session

After deciding what game to use many of our group members went to research the game (and play it as well in some cases, like me since it had been so long since I last played the game) and planned a meeting for the day we were all back. Unfortunately due to a miscommunication we ended wasting time when we met up (Jesse, Evelyn, Gianluca and I had been in our previous classroom discussing and planning the game while we waited for Clement, while Clement was under the impression that we were meeting at Gianluca's house like we usually do) however while we where relocating we were constantly bouncing ideas back and forth about the game and the possible game play (we got some weird looks on the bus, it was kinda funny).

After arriving at Gianluca's we started to develop our previous idea, fleshing out the details and editing when something didn't work (at one point we even scraped all of our ideas and redesigned them). After a few hours of designing and redesigning we finally came up with a final version, that had everyone satisfied with the results. Below you can find some images of us planning, designing, and starting to make our card game (there aren't as many pictures as usual because we changed locations 3 times):

The Planning, Designing and Making of The Elevator Action Card Game

 Now Elevator Action has some interesting mechanics that my group and I were determined to try and implement, which I think we did an okay job of doing. We tried to keep some of the objects, like the lights, the secret documents and the get away car, etc, found in the original Elevator Action and adapt them to fit our card game, which fortunately worked well with what we decided to do. For our game we decided to make it a collection game, where players must collect Floor cards, which includes secret documents, agents and the get away car, by battling it out with other players using the General and Effect cards. Other than the general cards, every card has a different number available in the game, and the floor cards have different values that must be added up at the end of the game in order to determine the Winner. Below you can find both the game rules and an explanation of what the cards do, what the cards are worth and how many cards there are available:

The Card Details:

Floor Cards

• Secret Document -> 3 points    -> 8
• Agent -> 1 point    -> 20
• Getaway Car -> 5 points    -> 2

General Cards 

• Falling Light -> Beats Kick    -> 20
• Gun -> Beats Falling Light   -> 20
• Kick -> Beats Gun    -> 20

Effect Cards

• Elevator -> Remove stack     -> 3
• Elevator Crush -> Lose a turn     -> 6
• Duck -> Wild card     -> 4
• Blackout -> Draw an extra card    -> 4
• Alarm -> Only play General cards for 4 turns  -> 3
• Red door -> Play at any time to negate persons card -> 5

The Rules:

Elevator Action The Card Game

• The object of the game is to gain as many floor cards as possible, through playing general cards and effect cards.
• To play, separate the cards into two decks: Floor cards, which consist of three card types: Secret Documents, Agents, and Getaway car.
• All other cards are shuffled and put into a separate deck.
• Each player then draws 7 cards from the non-floor deck.
• One player, determined by a rock paper scissors contest, draws a floor card and puts it face down on the table. The player to his or her left then has their turn.
• On a player's turn, they can play one of two types of cards: General cards or Effect cards.
• General cards play like rock paper scissors and Uno. You can play a like card or play a card that beats the card in terms of the strength triangle of:
• Falling light->Kick->Gun->Falling Light
• Falling light beats kick and so forth.
• If at any time a player can't play a card, he skips his turn.
• The objective is to be the last person to play a card while making sure his opponents can't play cards. If an entire round goes with no cards played, the person who last played a card takes the floor card and gains the appropriate points determined by the card.
• Game ends when all floor cards have been played. The player with the most points wins. 

Floor Cards:
- Secret Document are worth 3 points 

- Agent are worth 1 point 

- Getaway Car are worth 5 points

  

MY THOUGHTS:

This assignment was the most interesting one yet!! Personally I think making a card game out of an Atari game, which are digital arcade games, really forced my group to pay close attention to what limitations a card game has when adapting digital games. My group and I had to figure out what game mechanics of Elevator Action would work and what wouldn't in our card game and then had to figure out how to implement the adapted mechanics. This assignment was a great teaching tool for us as game designers, not only because we learned just some of the challenges game designers can face when they are required to adapt a game in one medium to another (not only that but we got to learn more about Atari which made me happy). I am super excited to see how my other classmates took on this challenge, what game they choose and the methods they used to adapt it to a card game, and what they think of our game.

The  Finished Game Cards