Food Fight

So I'm sure you are probably wondering what on earth does a food fight have anything to do with making video games much less a board game (since that is what we have been heavily focused on this year). Now you are perfectly justified in thinking that because until I looked at my last assignment of the year for Game Design and Production I would have thought the same thing.

Now for this week's GDP assignment we were required to create Healthy Game Design, now before reading the assignment I was under the impression that my group and I needed to create a game with a good design but I was absolutely floored when I read the assignment to only find out that we literally needed to make a game based on when Fruits and Vegetables are in season. My first response was to start swearing and flipping out thinking 'How on earth are we suppose to make a game about Fruits and Vegetables!!' (this being the clean version of my rants).

Our research, design and development meeting for this assignment

Now after taking with my group members and other students in my class about this assignment we slowly started building ideas for our groups game and let me tell you this was definitely one of the most interesting and weird things my group has ever needed to discuss. Some of the ideas we came up for this were just bad and were scrapped so fast we didn't even start developing those ideas. Eventually we finally came up with our current idea that divides the fruits and Vegetables up into 5 sections based on what season they local and fresh in, the five sections are Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall and All Year Round. We researched intensely what Fruits and Vegetables were in each section in order to create our game. Below you can find some pictures indicating what fruits and Vegetables are in each season:

 Deciding that we couldn't include every single Fruit and Vegetable (cause there are way to many, some of them aren't even shown in the pictures above) we decided to use 3 fruits and 3 vegetables from each season only. We created Cards for each of them and made cards for the different seasons as well. Our current idea for this game was that it was going to be a battle game using cards where certain cards would be stronger than others, and you could make cards more powerful by changing the season with the season cards.

Example of some of the cards(Incomplete designs)

 

 

Now these cards were yet to have the text place on them that would indicate what Fruit/Vegetable they were and I believe any info about the fruit/ Vegetable or what they were string against (I can't remember exactly what was going on the cards because we changed our idea around so much).

While we were designing we tried to decide what the winning condition of our game would be and what type of game it would be, now we came up with a lot of different conditions and types only to scrap them since either it was too much like a race to the end game or we just didn't like them. Our most current idea was to make our game an anti-collection type game, where players would need to have the least amount of cards in their compost pile (the pile where the defeated cards would go) in order to win. However that was a tentative winning condition since we have been constantly changing our game design whenever we find something we don't like or feel doesn't work. The finalized winning condition and game design are in the rules outlined below:

How to Play

There are two decks, Vegetables and Fruits and 4 categories of each divided into Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter.  The objective of the game is to destroy the competing farmer’s land.  A mysterious scientist has provided you with a growth hormone to create warriors from your produce.

There are 6 plots of land that each farmer owns.  If they are all destroyed the farmer will be forced to retire.  Each season is two turns for a player.  There is a maximum of 5 fruit or vegetable fighters at any time; however they can still be grown on a plot of land.  Each Category of fruit and vegetables can only be grown at the start of the season, and at the end of the season they are ready to fight and move to No Man’s zone.

If the produce cannot be moved to the zone after maturity, they will decompose after half a season and be shuffled back into the deck.  There are exceptions such as the mushroom. 

There are 4 phases in a turn: Draw, Grow/position, Battle and End phase.

Draw

You can draw one card per turn.

Grow

You may place produce down on a plot if it is the start of the season if it corresponds to their type.  You may also move grown Fighters to No Man’s Zone if there is space.

Battle

Fighters have attack and defence points.  The defence points deplete as they are being attacked.  If they die, the side effects of the growth hormone infects a growing produce and decomposes it or if there is none then a plot of land wither aways and dies.  The destroyed fighter is sent to the compost.

End

If you have more than 7 cards in your hand, discard one card to the compost.

If the previous step does not apply or has been done, you may draw one additional card on your next draw phase if you have destroyed one or more plots of land this turn.

How to win

The game ends either of the farmer’s 6 plots of land is destroyed.  One of them then sells their land because they cannot live off it anymore and it is turned into a new mall.

MY THOUGHTS

At first I thought that making a game based on when Fruits and Vegetables are in season was the dumbest assignment I have ever heard of in my life. However after completing this assignment I realized that it really forced us to think outside of our normal thought process and I know for me it really expanded what topics or ideas I thought could be made into games. This was an interesting assignment to say the least but I don't think I want to make another game based on produce for a while.