Arkham horror analyzes

Introduction
For the second time I have analyzed a board game and this time my group and I choose to play and analyze the game Arkham Horror, it’s a game made by Fantasy Flight Games and was based and inspired by the horror writer H.P. Lovecraft.
The good things about the game
The thing I enjoyed most about the game was the freedom in the game you felt it never felt as thou you were forced to take a specific set of actions.
I also enjoyed the mechanic of the Mythos-cards that show if and where a portal will spawn, if and where the enemies on the field will move and if something will happen on the board such as removing all of the enemies in an area of the game or if there will be an effect in place such as it being harder to sneak past the enemies.
The upkeep phase of the game kept the player feeling like you could change things about what was happening in the game in this phase each player is able to modify their stats by as much as specified on their character card. This phase is sort of a set up for this turn where all the players discuss and prepare for the coming turn which is great that game has a built in planning phase.
The fight, sneaking, will and much more checks worked really well in the game they were easy to remember how they worked it was simply to roll a five or six if there wasn’t a modifier in place such as a curse which meant you could only succeed on a six or a blessing which meant a four would also mean success.
Then the last phase of the turn takes place, the Encounter phase. In this phase each player take their turn to take their action if they are standing on a square that is not lost in time and space or if they are down or on the street an Encounter Card will be drawn in the same colors the district that location is located in and this is a very interesting part.
Now, the reason I really liked how the each turn was set up is because it was split up in short phases that all meant a lot to the whole turn and could change the game in a massive way. This meant it never meant you were waiting for a very long time to get to you again.
Some bad things about the game
The thing I was the most disappointed about in this game was how easy the game felt, due to the fact that the last boss “The Great Old One” can be defeated in multiple ways and two of the ways are not in actual combat with The Great Old One, which is most of the time to be to be the hardest by far. The two other ways to win is; one: to close all the portals that is currently on the game board.
If you are lucky closing all the portals can be very easy since it’s the random mythos cards that decide when a Portal shall open and you could get multiple consecutive where a portal doesn’t open.
The second way to win is to seal six portals.
This was for the most part the most common one when we played and it seemed to be the most natural way to play the game for the first time for us new player since it’s just to be prepared and have some luck on your rolls.
One other thing regarding the difficulty; there is a huge difference in difficulty depending on how many people that plays, that is the game is way easier the more players there are because the game barely changes anything when there are more players. The only thing that changes is that there can be more enemies on the board at the same time, and the difference didn’t feel big enough at all.
This however is, from what I’ve heard, is only a problem in the base game and is fixed with the add-ons for the game.
One thing that I didn’t really thing was bad really, I just felt it was way less interesting than it could have been was the Sanity System. Sanity in this game is basically just another HP-Bar (the other HP-bar is your stamina) and the only difference when you lose it all is that you wake up at the Asylum instead of the Hospital and to regain sanity you have to pay the Asylum two dollars instead of paying two dollars to the Hospital. It just feels a bit like a missed opportunity.
One last thing to complain about was a sort of game-breaking strategy we tried.
Due to the fact that when a player dies, which doesn’t happen that often as you would expect, and when they die they will have to throw away all their gear, companions and start over from the beginning with a new character whit all of the new characters starting-gear.
This combined with the fact that you can trade and give how many items you want to any other player as long as you stand on the same location in the game makes it so that you can just die and die over again if there is an enemy on the field that will actually kill you completely instead of just sending you to the hospital like most enemies do in this game, just to stack as much gear on one player as possible and then just repeat this until the old one awakens and then the geared player can split her gear between all of the players and then The Old one becomes very easy to deal with since you most likely have all the best gear and companions. Sure this tactic isn’t very rewarding to use, but was still pretty fun to see how much gear you could get that way.
The Most Interesting System
To me the most interesting system in the game was during the Upkeep-phase when each player could change their stats a bit or a whole lot depending on what character you played as. In the beginning you moved a skill slider back and forth.
There are three different sliders with 6 different stats on them, and on each slider the more points you take in one that the less you will take in the other one. The starts are paired in this way Speed and Stealth, Strength and Will, and Lore and Luck.
Every character has different ratios of these and different maximum and minimum points and inbetween. The thing I thought was interesting about this was how you could modify your characters stats to fit your play-style instead of just have static numbers this mad the character feel fluid and you could change for what was coming.
This also allows players to change how your character plays during several turns depending what you character needs the most. It also allows the player to change their stats to a lesser extent if the notice that they don’t need will for this turn but need more strength.
The Core Game System
In the beginning of each round a Mythos card is drawn, this card decides if a portal will open or not and where it will open if that is the case, it can also have lingering effects such as stat-buffs and debuffs. Or it could start an event on a street in Arkham. This is important to make the game progress in a non predictable manner and to keep every round feel different, you might also have to play around this in the Upkeep-phase.
The way that rolling dice works in this game is that you get to roll several dice every time. Unless anything else is stated rolling a five and six means success. There are several things that decide how many dice you may use, such as your strength-stat, your weapon-damage and so on. Simetimes you might have to succeed with several dice at once.
You can either fight or try to sneak past enemies in this game. Every enemy has a Evade stat that modifies the number of dies you are allowed to roll in this game. If your roll was a success you may continue move your character as usual.
An Enemy may also have a Horror-stat which modifies your Will-stat. If you are facing have this stat you have to roll and see of you pass before you can fight it. If you lose the Horror-check you lose the amount of Sanity that is numbered on the enemy-card but you may still fight the enemy. If you pass you get to keep all tour sanity and fight the enemy.
The way you fight the enemy works pretty much the same as when you roll the Horror check, except this time the battle will continue until one of you is dead.
When you are standing on a building, if the building have a static encounter you may choose to do that encounter or draw a random encounter from a deck.
Demographic
The box says that this game is for people 12 years old and up and I do agree with that, I think that people of most ages can enjoy this game if they are playing with the right people that are interested in playing this game.
The Target demographic of this game is people that are interested in the H.P. Lovecraft books and mythos.
This game is for people that like to play social games that require teamwork to succeed in.
Summary
I really enjoyed playing this game, it was very fun to play a cooperative board game for once where everyone get along and plan strategies together to win the game.
It was really a breath of fresh air in the midst of all these competitive board games.
Even if there is a game breaking strategy it does not take away from the game as long as you agree to not use that strategy because it is really boring.

Citadel a board game analyzes

Introduction
I and my group have gotten assigned to analyse a Board Game for the course Advanced Game Design.
We had been divided in to play and help each other out with this task.
We got to choose what games to play by either choosing from the schools catalogue of games that were available or we could choose to play a game we had or borrowed from a friend.
We choose the game Citadels and it’s expansion The Dark City.
Citadel
Citadels with the expansion is a turn based card game from 2 to 8 player.
The game with the expansion contains 18 Character Cards numbered 1 to 9. The expansion adds 10 of these cards one new for each number except that it adds two cards numbered 9 that do not exist in the base game.
Before turn one of the game the oldest player becomes the King and receives the Crown, a small yellow marker that serves to show which player is the King at that moment of the game. The king is the person that gets to shuffle the deck and eliminates a few cards randomly depending on how many players there are the eliminated cards can’t be played that turn he also gets to pick from the remaining cards first.
All players choose what Character Cards they want to put in the deck during this game, there can only be one card tagged with each number. Each player gets two gold at the start of the game.
The main game cards are the district cards that are the main objective of the game, and each player receives a number of district cards depending on how many players there are.
These cards exist in five categories Military, Religious, Noble, Trade and Special.
All the categories except Special Districts for have a interaction with the character cards abilities such as if you choose the merchant character card while having some trade districts in play you will receive extra gold for each trade district you have.
But the special districts have their own special ability that don’t have to interact with the character card such as the district card ”Factory” that will make other special district cards cost one less gold.
There are three extra special district cards from the Expansion that can be added to the District Deck.

Stage 1
After the player that is the king have discarded the cards he is free to pick on the remaining cards then he passes the remaining cards over to the next player clockwise.

Then the player will just do this until it is the last player’s time to choose a card.
The last player is allowed to pick up the card that was discarded and placed face down in the beginning.
If there are only two players playing the game then the rules will change, the first player discards a card and proceeds to picks one for themselves, and then the second player does the same thing, and then the first player goes again and picks one and discards one and this repeats for the second player, So if there are only to players you choose 2 character cards.

Stage 2
In this stage the King announces whose turn it is by announcing the numbers from 1 to 9. As an example, some cards are balanced and their ability needs to go in the beginning of the turn such as the Assassin or the Witch whose number is one is played first.
“1 – Assassin – Announce a character you wish to murder. The Murdered character misses his entire turn.”
1* – Witch – After you take an action, announce which character you wish to bewitch, the immediately end your turn.
If your Character card does not state otherwise every player will have turns that begin with taking and action your action can either be to take two gold or look at two district cards then choosing one of them to keep.
After that you choose if you want to build a district card to build one you have to have the correct amount of gold and pay that to be able to play that district card. The cost of each district is displayed on the left side of the card and you are only able to build one district each turn.
Each Character Card has an ability that they are allowed to use at any time during there round.
Then the turn is over the current King will shuffle all the Character cards again and they start over from the Character Card selection phase.
The game ends when one player has built eight districts or seven in the card “Bell tower” has been placed.
After the turn where a player has placed the amount districts needed to end the game you continue the game until it’s time to shuffle the cards again.
You calculate your score by checking how much all your districts cost, if any district gives you extra score, if you were the first to get eight districts or you built eight districts on the last turn you can also get four extra points if you have 4 all categories of districts.

The Good sides of the game

Playing the game with less than four players is a much different experience then playing with four or more players.
The most interesting parts of the game is the mind games that develop also the planning which are present when choosing your character card are one of the best parts of the game because you have to choose cards that no one else will now you choose as well as what is good for you during that turn of the game.

The Bad Parts
The Character card the queen was very hard to play and very redundant when playing more than four players this card gave you three gold if you are seated next to the person who chooses the king card during their turn. This card wasn’t especially good and if you switched out the king card for the emperor card it was very hard to tell who were to choose it and it was almost always correct to choose any other card.
The cards numbered 1 were an easy picking for most players since it was either the witch or the assassin the witch. The assassin just removed a player from that turn of the game and it was not that interesting to play with.
While the witch card only stole the building and the character ability from the character card they choose you could still do some actions during that turn then.
There were also the problem when someone new joined the game and you could tell after just 10 minutes or so they were behind the other players so much that it would be impossible to get back in the race with the other players.

The most interesting mechanic
The game had very simple rules and the most interesting mechanic of this game was the character card choosing stage where the players is choosing characters each round, which is driven by looking at what the other players would be choosing and looking what is left to choose from so that way deciding on what characters the other players would choose, which often results in very interesting mind games.
When choosing what card to pick you had to think of what the others would think you had picked since the witch and the assassin would punish you if you they could figure out what character card you picked.
So you most of the time had to choose a card that isn’t very obvious that you would have picked.
All the character cards have distinctive abilities to choose from and you would have to decide what you were going to do during your turn before picking your character card such as if you needed to build a district you would maybe choose the alchemist card that would mean as long as you could afford to build a district card you did not have to pay to build the district or if you needed cards or gold you could choose the navigator card that would give you four gold or four district cards instead of building.
But by knowing that there is a Witch or an Assassin in play the other players could maybe figure out what character you were going to pick that round so you would have to either chance and still pick the card you would need and hope that the current Witch or Assassin would expect you to not pick the that card because they would rather kill/bewitch another player or that it would be too obvious and they would expect you to play the next best choice instead of taking the risk of being stopped.

Demographic
This game is a game I feel that you could play with any age group since there is no violence or adult themes but it’s still a game that could be interesting for older players so I would say that this game could be played at any age.
I’d say that this game is specifically directed to people who like games where the meta game and the mind games are half of the play, and always try to stay one step before the rest of the players.
Summary
I enjoyed playing this game a lot and I could absolutely see myself playing this game on a weekend with some friends. Since the rules are easy to learn but the intrigue during this game are extremely interesting and fun.

Summory

There are a few things that would need to be fixed about this game thou such as the rules with the expansion was quite fuzzy and hard to decide how to play with the new cards that had no specific rules that correlated perfectly with the main game such as the district card “Hospital” that made it so if the assassin killed you could still do your action but when playing with the witch where you were already allowed to do that the card didn’t do anything without making up your own rule about it.
There were many matches that ended up with people helping each other out even just so they would help to stop the person that was currently in the lead.

More sound effects and music

Well this week I have been continuing the work on the sound effects and music, hopefully this week I will be done with the sound in its entirety I have gotten all the sound artefacts that are left except for the music for when the guards are in the alerted state.

I’ve been getting a few different sounds that are atmospheric for the game and good indicators for what is happening, such as the sound for locked doors which is a rattling sound a sound I would describe as using and a door handle rather roughly since that’s the sound I’m guessing most people me included would associate with a locked door.
Speaking of the doors the idea of the doors were changed so the sound had to be changed the original idea was for the doors to be standard wooden doors but they were changed to sliding metal doors which is quite a different sound then the wooden doors.
But the most interesting artefact I have been working on this week is the win and loss screens.

Made by Ahmad Ali.

The trickiest one to find some fitting music for was the winning end screen were I had to find something that sounds jazzy but upbeat enough for a winning screen and I did not want any vocals in any music I have chosen to avoid any irritation and distraction from the game.
In the end I took a tune called minor swing which is rather upbeat and suppose to serve as sort of a happy atmospheric tune that really makes it feel as you just won the game and is now excited.
The loss music is a Kevin MacLeod Ambient song fittingly enough called Ambient.
It’s a sombre and slow paced piano tune that is perfect for something slow, sad or just calm.The music is suppose to be very low and not disturb you while playing it’s just suppose to be there to not make it feel so empty it makes the game come alive and not feel like a dead mechanical place.

I have been working on the sound effect that guards make when they see you as an indication that you have been spotted now and it is the sound of the guard going huh it is a deeper voice not very deep but it sounds sort of like some sort of stupid grunt getting confused over what that, who you are and what your doing there.

 

Sound effects

This week I’ve been continuing the work on the different sound effects such as a sound for doors and when the baton hits a enemy. I’ll begin by talking about the choices I’ve made with the sounds for the baton and why the sound is not by any means perfect but it will suffice. It’s really hard to make it sound as if some thing is hitting flesh and bone so I made it sound more like it’s the baton that clangs when you hit someone. And it I added a discharge sound so it sounds as if the electric charge is sparking into the unfortunate victim in the way of the players progress.

This image was made by Simon Brundin.
This is the futuristic looking baton that is electric and will make a loud sound that can be heard by the guards when it charges up to hit the poor guard that has stepped in the way of the protagonist of the game. The sound of the baton charge can be heard here this is part of the sound that fits better in with the game then the hit sound of the baton which can be heard here, I’m not to happy with this sound it’s got a much more high pitched. it’s got more of a stinging sound then the others used in the game, so if I’ve got enough time left over before the project is done I will revisit the sound and remake it.

I’ll go back now and talk about the Charge sound of the baton it’s suppose to make a buzzing charging sound that will be sort of loud since it will be quite quick to use when getting rid of the guards. So for balancing purposes it’s suppose to be quite loud so it will get guards to alert to your position. I’ve been working on the sound effect for doors opening and closing as well this was a easier task then the previously mentioned since there are good free sound effects of doors opening and closing of a wide selection of materials. I found a sound of a wooden door closing that I changed by lowering the pitch, I increased the speed of the sound, removed a small part on the end of the sound and faded out the few last seconds of the sound. The making of sound effects is on one hand very interesting but on the other hand it’s very tedious to be working on. But it’s something that has to be done to bring life into the game.

Sound effects and music

This week I’ve been working on making sound effects and finding some music fitting the theme of the game.
The sound effects take awhile to make since I’ve had to cut down the length of the sound while making sure it doesn’t sound choppy and at the same time making sure the sound effect blends in with the theme, the action that happens and the other sounds and or music.
I’ve been using audacity to work on the sound files it’s really simple to actually get into and learn how to use it.

This is the planned title screen made by Ahmad Ali.

The title screen music is one of the first things you will hear and so it will set the expectations of the theme of the game.
So I put some time into making sure it set the theme of the game and was long so it won’t be starting over before you’ve clicked the new game button and of good enough quality so that it won’t sound awful. Here is the title screen music before I edited it and made it fit better for the title screen in length and quality. It found this one quite quickly and put it as a maybe for the title screen.

For the in game music I needed a more ambient and something that would be associated with stealth and darkness.
This one took awhile to find I had to search through a lot of different ambient music to find a great piece of music to use for the game. I went searching through a lot of different websites such as incompetech  and soundcloud.
But I found a great track to use while searching over Kevin Macleod’s music I found the ambient music that I associate with stealth and darkness.
The music was called Lightless Dawn it’s got the perfect balance of not being complete ambience and still not being overpowering in the listeners ears.

The one sound effect I’ve been having problems with has been the sound effect for steps since I want it perfect a very low and deep sound effect that isn’t going to get so awfully irritating after a few minutes of playing the game.
But I’ll be working on making the sounds for the steps sound properly Friday and most likely next week when I will be continuing the work with the sound effects I will be needing such sounds as entering a locker, hitting someone with a baton and opening doors.

So this week has been mostly working for the pre beta and trying to get the world to sound alive.

Soundmanager in FMOD

You could read in a earlier post about my troubles with SFML and the sound which basically made it really annoying to use.
So this week I’ve spent making a new soundmanager in the library FMOD which was suggested to me by Tommi the programming teacher.
Using this library has been harder then I initially suspected since it’s very different from anything I’ve coded in before.

But there is very good documentation for the library even if it takes a while to find what I need and more so understand what is needed from the library to make a good and working soundmanager.
So I started to work with FMOD on Monday, It was a little rough in the beginning I was trying to get the initial phases off adding the new library to work which took most of the day and it was hectic that day so I didn’t end up with the library working or so I thought.

On Tuesday morning I got Jerry the assistant teacher to help me with the set up of the new library, it ended up being a minor miss on my part. To see if FMOD was working I simply copy pasted a code to see if it was working and I grabbed a code for a older version of FMOD that was now outdated.

Then on Wednesday I was excited to try this new library out and thought it would be a pretty easy task. So I started reading the API documentation and it was very different from any other library I’ve used thus far.
But the well documented API is making it the process of learning the library very much easier.

Today Thursday I’ve been working on the actual code the progression is much slower then I anticipated before starting with this artefact.
After I had a few lines of code in the soundmanager I tried to building the project just to see so that everything was working properly well it didn’t there was a linking error so after searching after what I had screwed up I noticed I had missed a slash in the additional libraries.
Felt kind of dumb when I noticed that but I guess it’s just a oversight.
But now I’ve come a long way with this artefact and I should have it working within a small amount of time.

But if there is anything I’ve learnt while doing this artefact it’s not to underestimate the work hours needed to complete some artefacts.

And now I’ll leave you with a tune that will most likely sound something like what will be in the end product of the game. Sorry that it’s a youtube link but I could not locate the music on soundcloud.

The timing is right!

Well this week started off pretty badly with me feeling like I’ve got a flu. It turned out to be a little bit worse when I went to the doctor and now I have to pop pills that make me sleepy and stay away from people so I don’t spread the illness.
This couldn’t have come at a worse time either right before the alpha for the game is supposed to be done.
Needless to say I’ve not got much work done this week at all.

But I’ve been trying to keep busy now later in the week and will probably work on things I’ve missed during the weekend.
But today I’ve been working on the timer for the game it will be a part of the HUD so that you can see how long you’ve been playing.

This is an example of the ingame HUD made by Ahmad Ali
The making of the timer started with me reading up on how and with what “tools” to do this task.
But I quickly ran into problems while making this at first I tried to use the sf::clock class which is not ideal for what I wanted to do. Instead I use sf::time which got me further along but soon enough I had a new problem which was how do I get a float into a string.
Float in a string.At first I simply tried to brute force it in there by just trial and error but after an hour or so of doing that. I decided to call up a friend who had apparently done this already and there is a built in function called “std::to_string()” this seemed to work.

But after I thought I was done with the timer and started the game up I saw to my dismay that it didn’t work.

And I will continue with the work on the timer into the small hours of the night today.

What’s still needed and planned for the HUD.

• The currently held weapon or the noise maker. (The noise maker will be a two way radio that you can throw and it will attract the guards to it.)
• If you are in possession of a key card or not that allows you to open locked doors.
• And if you are carrying the mission objective a file that contains the secrets that you are after.

These will be pretty simple to add onto the game since it will just be different if() statements that say you can pick up the item or if you already carrying something in that slot.

 

Plans of Futura’s Soundmanager.

The sound manager for the game has been quite an annoyance since the development library has a bug concerning playing audio.
The development library we use for the game is SFML (Simple and Fast Multimedia Library) while simple it’s got its own sets of problems for game development.

The problem that I’m annoyed by is a bug that when the game gets turned off crashes the game because off a missing .dll that isn’t missing.

While not finished because of the bug and also it’s in need of tweaking.

Fixing the bug:
While the bug is a annoyance it’s not game breaking or very serious since it only affects the game while shutting down and not while playing or starting up the game.
So to fix this bug I have to use another development library, Tommi recommended Fmod and BASS I’m not yet sure if I will replace the code or leave it as is.

The Classes:
The Manager has seven classes
SFMLSoundManager which sets the volume of the sound/song. PlaySound(std::string filename) it plays a single sound file such as a gunshot or a step, gets the duration of the sound and turns off the sound if one is playing.
PlaySong(std::string filename, bool looping) This class plays a song and checks if it should loop. (I’m planning on using .ogg files for the size of the music file.)
StopAllSounds() as you most likely can guess stops all the sounds if they are playing.
IsSoundPlaying() which checks if a sound is currently playing in the game.
IsSongPlaying() it does the same thing as the previous class but for music.

What could I have done better?:
Possibility 1: I could have avoided spending so much time on trying to fix the previously named bug which only makes the game crash while turning the game off and is not interfering with the game play in anyway.

Possibility 2:  I could have read up more on SFML and seen this problem coming up before making it.
That would have made me make the entire sound manager in Fmod or BASS which would maybe have taken a little while longer to make but would in turn work without a hitch.

Possibility 3: I could have used a small part of the SDL library to make the Sound manager and in turn it wouldn’t have taken as long as it did to actually get the sound manager to work properly and it wouldn’t be crashing when the game ended.

Escape week 2 day one

Well for the past two weeks I’ve been working on mostly the scrum document, the design document and the prototype of the game. While now I get to start working on the inner workings of the game, I will begin with all that concerns the sound of the game.The game will be about a corporate spy in a sci-fi 40’s setting that enters a office building on a mission to steal “the documents”.

The programming on my part will to a larger part consist of the sound mechanics such as the sound manager and the sound positioning. I’ve read up on SFML’s sound positioning which seems to be much simpler then what I earlier suspected.

Space Shooter

In preparations for the  next assignment of making a space shooter I’ve been looking in on how to use unity in a space shooter.