ADP_week4._Bingqian Guo

APD Week 4 -- Hunting Game

Create by Bingqian Guo (s3622056)

Theme : Play and Place

video: https://youtu.be/xNtvy6OpBqY

I remember playing a game called hide-and-seek as a child (a game where a player plays the role of a boss and needs to find all the players in hiding within a time limit), in this game the choice of location is very important for the player who needs to hide. This way of finding the right place and integrating oneself with it is what I call "protective color". In this week's class, I will try to design an outdoor game by analyzing the phenomenon of "protective color" in games and artworks, which happens to be "Play and Place".

Context:

Human beings are a race of learners, and when they learn something from nature, they design and adapt it into a game to warn future generations and develop their thinking about it. "Protective color" is one of them. Most of the small, weak and non-aggressive animals in nature improve their survival rate by blending into the environment. For example, there is a butterfly called the dead leaf butterfly, which is famous for its front and back wings overlapping and its wing shape and pattern resembling a dead leaf, through which it escapes capture by natural enemies in the cruel nature. Humans have adopted this method to improve their winning rate in many games based on this protective coloring feature. For example, in the famous shooting game PUBG, there is a certain probability of opening a ghillie suit (a kind of clothes that looks similar to grass when you wear it) in the drop box dropped by the plane, and the probability of being found by the enemy will be greatly reduced after getting this suit. For example, in LOL there is a very classic escape clip, the czar escaped the opponent's pursuit by imitating a wild monster. So is there any way to design a game about protective colors in the hope of teaching younger children the usefulness of protective colors?

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Method:

According to the characteristics of the protective color: itself through the shape of the color change and the external environment to blend together, so as to achieve the purpose of hiding themselves.

The game design is as follows:

1. the game participants are divided into two camps: hiders and hunters.

2. Hiders are allowed to carry tools and create their own camouflage environment within a specified time period. Once the time is over, hiders cannot move again.

3. The hunters need to find all the hiders within the time limit

4. If the hiders are not all found, the hider wins.

The above is the first version of the game design, but during the design process, many problems were found (the problems will be listed in the next part)

According to the problems, the game was improved accordingly:

1. the game participants are divided into two camps: the hidden and the hunters (the identity is drawn when entering the game site, and only they know)

2. The game is divided into three stages

Phase 1: to create their own protective color according to the environment within the specified time

Phase 2: the hidden person needs to use their own protective color to hide in the game field, the hunters needs to find the hidden person within the specified time (the protective color made by the hunters before is for the process of the pursuit, not to be found by other hidden person's true identity) If the hidden person is found by the hunters that is, the hidden person eliminated. If the hunters does not catch all the hideouts within the time limit, the player will enter the third stage.

Phase 3: All players vote for the hunter by speaking in order and by voting. The player with the highest number of votes is eliminated.

If all of the hunters are voted out, the stash wins. If not all are voted out then they need to return to Phase 2. The game is tied when Phase 2 and Phase 3 are repeated three times and there is still a Hider and a Chaser on the field

Considering the epidemic, the game has been transformed into a tabletop game

At the beginning of the game, players will be assigned an object

Within a time limit, players need to hide the object in the environment (players can use the environment to build their own hiding spot)

At the end of the time limit, players will search for each other's blocks and the first player to find another player's block wins

Reflection:

According to the suggestion of not using the same exploration method more than once, this time we adopted the way of getting inspiration from art, games and nature, and designing the game according to the inspiration

The reason for providing materials for players to make their own protective colors is threefold: 1. to improve the fun of the game 2. to improve players' hands-on skills 3. to intentionally guide players to raise the importance of protective colors

After the first version of the game was implemented and opinions were collected, it was found that the game was not very balanced, and the hider was always passive after entering the game, and there were no countermeasures for the hunters, which made the hider's game experience single. And for the hunters does not have a good experience to protect the color process, but also contrary to the purpose of the game design. Therefore the game needs to be improved.

This is the first time I designed this kind of multiplayer game, and I thought it would be easy (after all, there is no need for modeling and programming), but in practice I found that the need to consider the players' emotions in the game seems more complicated than modeling and programming.

Reference:

En.m.wikipedia.org. 2021. Ghillie suit - Wikipedia. [online] Available at: <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghillie_suit> [Accessed 14 August 2021].

En.m.wikipedia.org. 2021. Kallima inachus - Wikipedia. [online] Available at: <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kallima_inachus> [Accessed 13 August 2021].

https://youtu.be/xNtvy6OpBqY