Week 1 (Ludology & Design Work)

Monday
During Mondays lesson we were told we were going to be presenting our character designs, once I'd finished presenting I was told I hadn't done enough design work, and had skipped straight to the Photoshop work and a final design which isn't how it should be done. Once everyone had finished presenting the whole class was told that none of us had nearly done enough work as we should have and need to work more on our designing, and to start drawing our character orthographic.

In the second half of this lesson we were shown a slide show of how to draw our characters in proportion by using the size of the head to measure out how many heads long the body was meant to be. Here are the drawings I did using this method.

During the afternoon lesson we learnt that Ludology is how games function, and how we react to games. 
We were first told the two main principles of games; Randomness and Uncertainty.
Random being set field of outcomes for given input, for example rolling a dice would be random because you don't know what number its going to land on. Some games contain no randomness such as chess or connect 4.
Uncertainty, may be predetermined but is unknowable by the player. So in some cases the only uncertainty comes from what the opponent will do.

When talking about randomness though there are different kinds for example;
a dice is a Binomial Distribution meaning each input has same possible chance of output each time, Whereas pack of cards which is a hypergeometric distribution meaning each time a card is drawn the probability of other cards been pulled out is altered, for example if you take a card out the pack, it means if you go to take another one there is less cards to chose from as one has already been taken out.

Tuesday
During Tuesdays lesson we were given more time to come up with designs for our character and draw out our orthographic. Using another template to work out how to size our character using the size of the characters head. I managed to draw out and finish my characters orthographic.

 

 As well as designing my character orthographic for my stance/pose.

Thursday

In today's lesson we started learning how to sculpt using epoxy putty, epoxy is like a glue when mixed, and has a chemical reaction, its exothermic, so it gets warmer and hardens.

First we started sculpting a blanket roll, with straps and buckles, we did this by rolling out the putty and cut it into a rectangle, I then rolled it into a roll, left indents for the straps, cut the straps from more putty, attached them and then sculpted the buckles to fit on top of the straps.

Next we started sculpting a backpack, we rolled a ball and placed it on some card, then rounded it into a tear shape, I then cut out two straps to add onto the top of the bag, then next I covered the top of the bag with another piece of putty to look like the cover of the bag, then added indents around the bag to look like stitches and finally added a strap and buckle across the front of the bag.

Finally we started to sculpt a head, this time we put a ball of putty onto a cocktail stick and using the tools I sculpted detail onto the putty to make it look like a face, I then cut out strips of putty, and layered them next to each other on top of the head so that they look strands of hair.

Friday

On Fridays lesson we talked about player dynamics and character classes and archetypes, we then had to put our character into an archetype and give it balance by giving it a strength and weakness, such as the game, Rock, Paper, Scissors has, for example; rock's strength is beating scissors but weakness is paper, and scissors and paper also each have a strength and a weakness. We then got back into our groups from our previous lessons, this time we needed to put a set of rules together for our game, first off our group decided to put all our character archetypes together so we could work out how to make them different and what each characters strength and weaknesses were against other players. We gave each player a fair amount of health and a strength and weakness against each player, such as a ranged character strong against a melee character but weak against another ranged character.

We then came up with a way to play our game, first off we decided every character is unable to attack on their first go, but could still move, but movement varies for what type of character you are; ranged characters can only move one step whereas melee can move two.

After moving, melee characters can attack other characters which are one square away, and ranged can attack from three steps away from another character.

After moving the player would then roll the dice, depending on what number the played rolls, its tells whether the character can attack or not (1,2,3 would mean a hit, 4,5,6 means your character misses). 

If the player gets a hit, they roll the dice again, this determines the strength of the hit; 1 been 10 damage, 2 been 20 damage, 3 been 30 damage and so on.

We then decided to add a twist to our game by changing the outcome when a 6 is rolled, instead of been 60 damage, the player would use a special attack, we then had to decide which each characters special move;

Rob's special attack is "Seduce" which means that if he rolls a 6 the character one step away from him would be seduced which allows him to control the players character for 2 rounds.

Safina's attack is "Health Drain" meaning if she rolls a 6, a character within 3 steps will have 50hp taken from then and will be added to her own characters health.

Jacks attack is "Fire" he is able to burn a character one step away for 3 rounds which take 15hp each round.

Jamies character's attack is called "Copycat" which allows his character to copy another characters special move to any character within the radius of 3 steps.

Chris's character is able to cause 60 damage to multiple characters within the radius of one space(in other words he can attack more than one player if there next to him)

Finally my characters power is "Critical Hit" this means that once I've rolled a six to gain this critical hit, I roll the dice against, and depending on what number I roll i hit double to figure, for example if I roll a 3 which is 30 damage i will do 60 damage instead of roll a 5 I do 100 damage.

Once we'd finished coming up with our game rules, we then need to test our game out, we first used the board from a classic board game, we found this worked well as it allowed our characters to move in many directions, but a negative was that the board was too small meaning our characters couldn't move far.

Our next idea was to use the same kind of board but we drew it our bigger so that our characters had more room to move. We found this was a good design for our board, but decided to come up with a few more designs before we decided our final board decision.

Our next board was rectangle shaped, this had a few problems, first off the board was too big, and took a while for characters to get close to each other, also the characters were unfairly placed because some characters were closer to others, whereas using the star board each character was equally far apart from each other.

Finally our last design included buildings to make our game a little more tricky, as ranged characters couldn't hit you if you were in a building, we thought this would make our game more interesting, and fairer for melee characters, but decided it made our game to complicated as we all couldnt grasp the idea of escaping players by moving through buildings and getting trapped in buildings.