Remixing Ant Hill

So a few posts back (actually I think it’s more than a few considering that it was one of the first ones about the games made in Game Design and Production 1, our second assignment and our first group game) I talked about my tutorial group’s Territorial Acquisition game, Ant Hill ( you can find the blog about it Here).  Now since this was (at least in my opinion) my group’s best game, I felt that it would be one of the best ones to use for part 2 of this week’s assignment, Remodeling and Remixing. Now for the first part of my assignment, we were required to take the classic game of Tic Tac Toe and remodel it. The goal was to take that game, which is a skill based game and change it to be purely back on chance and luck, the blog about my Tic Tac Toe modifications can be found Here.

Now before I explain what the second part of my assignment challenged us to do, I am quickly going to give a short overview of our Territorial Acquisition game, Ant Hill. Now in Ant Hill you play as an ant trying to collect resources for winter, these resources come along with certain territories along the board. In order to determine who starts first players must roll dice, with the player with the highest score going first. Players must draw a general card every turn and must claim territory by forming chains of ants to go from flower to flower (the resources). In order to claim the flowers players needed to claim each layer of the flowers (the leaf, the petal and the nectar) by rolling a dice to roll the appropriate number that corresponds with the number required to claim that space. 

 

After looking back at Ant Hill I saw that our game was purely based on chance and luck rather than skill, which for some is exactly what they like but what about players who want a more skill based game, well that’s exactly what I focused on in the second part of my assignment. Now for part 2 of the Remodeling and Remixing task, we were asked to remix either one of the games we made for class or someone else and change it to be either completely chance based or entirely skilled based. Since we were required to change Tic Tac Toe to be chance based I decided that if I were to remix a game I wanted to make it entirely skill based (I mean I do love a good skill challenging game). I choose my group’s Territorial Acquisition game since I liked it the most and had the most fun playing it as a chance game so I thought why not see how it does as a skill based game.

I did this by first identifying the chance based elements in our current game and then changed them or just completely removed them in order to turn Ant Hill into a game of skills. First I will quickly list and explain the chance mechanics then I will explain how I changed them or removed them and what I added to make Ant Hill a skill based game. 

Luck Based Mechanics:

• Roll dice to determine who starts the game
• Draws random cards from pile (general and Resource)
• No telling what card you get, meaning you could get the same cards repeatedly
•  Rolling to capture a part of the flower (the resource)
• each section of the flower had a different dice roll associated with it, You need to roll the corresponding dice roll in order to capture that territory
•  Rolling to determine whether an attack is successful

Changes to Mechanics (from Luck to Skill):

•  To remove this luck mechanic I changed it so that who goes first is decided mutually by the current players (while this is not a skill based mechanic it does get rid of some of the chance in Ant Hill)
• I completely removed cards from the game (no matter the game cards always add chance to the game since you never know what cards you are going to get) 
• I didn't want to remove mechanic of bonuses (the cards gave you bonuses and sort of power ups) so instead after removing the cards I added Skills based on the general cards
• The Skills are as followed:
• Attack - Allows you to attack another players ant chain twice as hard, you do twice the damage (you have 5 attacks)
• Defend - Allows you to double your defense against another players attack (you have 6 defends)
• Utility - Allows you to add an extra ant to play for your current turn (you have 4 Utilities)
•  Players start with 15 consumable skills at the beginning of the game, once used skills are used they cannot be used again unless they have been replenished by an occupied resource
• The resource cards were completely removed as they didn't work well with this mechanic
•  Since the point of the game was to capture the resources (the flowers) I needed to leave the mechanic of capturing resources however I completely removed the dice from it and changed the way you capture them
• Since the different tiles on the board are color coded I decided to implement that in how you capture both territory and the resources
• Each different colored tile has a corresponding number of ants that a player must have either out on the field or in a certain area in order to acquire them, as well as a corresponding number of unused skills needed.
• The requirements for capturing tiles is as follows:
• Brown (dirt) tiles - Players do not have a required number of ants or skills need to capture these tiles. Players can place up to 3 ants at once on these tiles.
• Green (leaf) tiles-Players must have at least 5 ants on the dirt tiles and 4 out of 15 unused skills in order to begin acquiring these tiles. Players can place up to 3 ants at once on these tiles.
• Purple (petal) tiles- Players must have at least 6 ants on the leaf tiles (or control all leaf tiles in the event there are less than 6 leaf tiles at a resource) and 8 out of 15 unused skills in order to begin acquiring these tiles. Players can place up to 2 ants at once on these tiles.
• Yellow (nectar) tiles- Players must have all petal tiles acquired and at least 12 out of 15 unused skills in order to acquire the center of the resource.
• Players can only acquire 1 color type tile each turn, meaning that if a player begins acquiring dirt tiles they cannot acquire leaf tiles in the same turn.
• Acquiring the Yellow (nectar) tiles replenishes all used skills as soon as it is captured. While in your control a yellow (nectar) tiles replenishes your used skills every 2 turns.
• I completely removed the aspect of rolling to determine if an attack is successful.
• Now all attacks are successful if the defending player only has a ant chain of a width of 1 ant, defending players can use their defend skill to strengthen their defense which would make the attack unsuccessful only if the attack strength of that turn is weaker than the defense strength
• players can increase their attack's strength to break thicker chains of ants by utilizing  their attack skills, attacks can be increased in strength if the attacking chain has a width of 2 or more 
• A players attack and defense strength depends on what skills they have used and how thick their ant chain is

 Play Testing:

To test these changes I played a quick game with my brother, who never played the original version, so I could see what he thought about the game mechanics without having him be biased. Unfortunately we didn't record our play test of this because our cameraman started freaking out and swearing (My dad started freaking out and swearing while he was recording the play test of the modified Tic Tac Toe [I had to end the video to remove the swearing] and he refused to record our play test of the remixed Ant Hill). In a way I'm glad we didn't record the play test because the video would have been unusable since while playing my brother and I were yelling at each other, swearing and threatening each other when the other broke our ant chain.

 My brother found the game mechanics interesting and enjoyable, since the remixed mechanics force players to think about every move and how to use their skills, since they must be used carefully. After playing with the remixed rules we played another game with the original rules and while he enjoyed the original rules he much preferred the skill based version (he is really into skill based games which is probably why he was a little biased towards the skills version).

MY THOUGHTS:

Personally as one of the game's creators I like both versions since different aspects of both make the game fun in different ways and I'm glad I choose to remix Ant Hill although doing this assignment was the most stressful thing in the world (not because the assignment itself was difficult to do but because I've been having serious issues with my computer this past week and a bit and I keep losing my assignments; this one, my computer graphics one and my concept art for our game. This is the third time I've had to rewrite this particular blog and it better be the last time I lost my work otherwise I think I might actually break my computer out of sheer frustration).