Pocket Civ Deconstruction

At first, I was hesitant to do this game for this particular project. Why, you ask? Because... Part of our project is to be prepared to explain the rules and demonstrate gameplay to the entire class. That... is going to be difficult. I accepted the challenge regardless, though! And here it is, my deconstruction of "Pocket Civ".

So I recently figured out through some d'oh moments and a couple of revelations that this game is basically a smaller, "simplified" version of the grandiose franchise "Civilization", which is available for the PC.
The game is incredibly similar in it's mechanics and terminology, but overall there is a different feel, since you are focused more on survival as opposed to expanding.

The goal of the game is simple... To survive. You must survive eight "eras", or rounds, in order to "beat" the game. You can also play off of things called "Region" cards, which have a specific goal and placement for all the regions in the game.

The game does not come with a board. I'd assume you have to kitbash it from another hexagonal-shaped strategy game (the purchasable version of pocket civ comes with one, not the PnP one), so I decided to use a whiteboard to make my life easier. I saw someone on a forum do something similar so I stole his idea. And it worked out great. The map would be the space of this game's play.

The core mechanic of the game is probably, or straight-up sheer luck. At the beginning of each game, after the player has either followed a region card or placed all of their tokens (Mountains, Forests, Tribes, Desert), the player draws three event cards. The number on the event card that represents the Era (for example, if it is the start of the game, it's Era 1. So the player would follow the corresponding number on the card) is the event that occurs in your empire. The events can be read on cards, which are in a deck that you can look through at your own will, or just keep in one giant sheet to check on to see the results of.

An Event card, a hand of advantages and a hand of event explanations. 



Your tribe tokens are the main objects of the game. Their attributes are their relation to the map, or the space, and how each card effects them. For example, a tribe placed near a fishing village is going to be destroyed by a Tsunami event. But a tribe surrounded by land will not be affected. The state of the token effects its attributes.

If your little tribes (and, or cities) survive all three event cards, you have survived an era. You add on an era for each round you win until you've reached eight.

More objects that effect gameplay are things like gold, resources, advantages, and glory. Unfortunately, this is where the game's rules get confusing. There is literally no clarification on these rules. I had to research a bit before I found a somewhat clear guide on how to gain and lose resources, gold and glory, but it still is confusing to me. So... I've tried to play without glory as a factor. This is definitely detrimental to gameplay, as it is a requirement to have a certain amount of glory to accept different advantages.

From what I understand from the rules, after each era you can build three more tribes. You can also combine four tribes to build a city, and after you have a city, you can start purchasing advantages. Advantages can help or hurt you (operative and resultant actions), (this is where luck and strategy plays an important role), based on how you use them. Advantages are bought with gold and resources. Gold is obtained through trading with other cities and expeditions (when you send tribes to search in frontier zones). Resources are obtained from the main empire zone (wherever your city is placed), based on the tokens that inhabit the same area.

So, as I said, the majority of this game is strategy and luck. The player learns how to carefully chose where they build their city in order to receive certain advantages to survive against events the longest. Cities cannot have over two advantages at a time, and in order to have more than one, the player must sacrifice another four tribes. The rules are also... very confusing. They take at least 30 minutes to commit to your mind, and ten minutes to read. It can be frustrating trying to figure it out, but in the end (at least in my opinion), it's worth it.

(Play zone.)

Each scenario has a different goal which spices up the game everytime you play it and encourages replays. I thoroughly enjoyed this game, besides its setbacks.

PnP Partay!

For an assignment-- yes, I can't believe it either-- we were required to print out some games and play them. AWESOME! So I tried three different games in my spare time, two of which frustrated the crap out of me and one that I enjoyed thoroughly for the brief time that I played it.

The first game that I played was a single player game called "Pocket Civ".

"Ooh, Ominous."

This delightful tree-destroyer (there are about 17 pages of cards and information to print out) was actually the most successful game I played, in my opinion. Even though I was playing by myself, I really enjoyed the strategy of it. You are given eight empires that you must keep from being destroyed by the most... random of tragedies. From famine, to lightning strike, to plain ol' misfortune... This game has it all. The catch of this game is the fact that it doesn't have an official board you can print out and play on, which I found to be kind of detrimental, but it does come with "scenario" cards with pictures of what your empire is supposed to look like. So I ended up drawing it on a piece of paper.

Now, I think I wasted around 3 hours playing this game by myself. Each game lasted around 20 or 25 minutes, and usually ended with my cities getting destroyed. There is an alternative way to win, however, which is your motive to keep playing. If you can survive all eight eras-- as the game gets more intense-- you win the game. You survived!

My favorite aspect of the game was managing resources. It is necessary to keep certain parts of the world alive in order to keep the resources from them incoming, so you can implement more cultural cards to benefit your society. Stuff like Laws to prevent your villagers from killing themselves, Farmhouses to keep the crops from totally dying off, etc. etc... Something I'd definitely like to consider implementing in my table top game... Oooh...

...I also played a few quick games that took under 10 minutes with my good friends Kevin and Hugo. These games were... frustrating. We understood them, but the rules were so oddly explained and vague for BOTH that we just... gave up after three games or so.

First of all, a game called "Shape Up." For the most part, this game made sense... until the end game. Scoring was DIFFICULT. It was hard to wrap our heads around.

"As you can see, Hugo just got three points! Or... two points?... One?... Ten? Do we even know?"

The main problem was how the symbols were repeated on each card. It would be a little easier to score if we had some design-oriented way to tell what associations gave us which amount of points... Which goes to show design is key! Make sure your game is designed CLEARLY, please, thank you!

And, finally, a game called "Bad Grandmas". This game was... alright. It was quick. The directions were a little vague, but the visuals were hilarious and entertaining for all of... 15 minutes. The point modifier was an interesting way to try and spice up the game, but since it only took a few minutes to play it would get boring fast. I mean, I totally understand the guy made it for his friends as a joke, so that's cool. Hope they had fun with it!

In conclusion... I really enjoy large-scale single player survival/adventure-esque games. Yes.

Maya Adventures (Part one?)

In 3D class, recently, we've started doing some relatively difficult stuff in Maya. And by difficult stuff, I mean UV mapping... which still makes no sense to me.

It makes WAY more sense than it did a few weeks ago, but, still... I have no idea what I'm doing. Teachers and Upperclassman reassure me that it'll make sense soon, so... I'll take their word for it.

Unfortunately, I am still not allowed to post screenshots (I wish, though!) so I'll just use this as a way to complain about some Maya functions that absolutely piss me off. That way, I can come back to this post a year from now and laugh about how stupid I was. Great.

First of all, ALL of my Maya hatred manifests in the "Unfold" tool. Now, I understand there are different ways (and yes, I have used them successfully so don't worry), but... this tool seems like it's trying to simplify the process. But all. It does. Is make it. WORSE. Ten times worse. It RARELY ever works, and when it does, it usually screws your UVs up, and you have to undo or remap them completely. God, I /REALLY/ hate this tool.

Not exactly a specific tool this time, but something that straight-up pissed me off was when I was working on a cloth piece... and an upperclassman showed me a tool called something like "sculpt polygon tool". What. The. %(#^. If I would've known about this tool before, I wouldn't of spent four hours trying to model a fluid piece of cloth out of polygons. Jeeze.

Well, that's all the rage I have today. Stay tuned for more infuriating lectures later.

Steve Hickner Stuff

So, about a week or so ago, I was lucky enough to sit in on a Steve Hickner lecture. Who is Steve Hickner you ask...?
Well, Steve Hickner is a relatively well known storyboard artist and story director who worked previously at Dreamworks. (I don't know if he still works there or not, by the looks of his IMDb he hasn't worked on anything in a while.)

Anyways, apparently every year Steve comes and recreates a few Computer Animation student's storyboards. Since he has a /ton/ of freetime on his hands (as he claims), he is able to make them around thirty times better.

I took notes during the lecture and there are a few important things I'd like to remember about storyboarding for the future. As a GAD student, I'd like to be flexible with what I do, so learning about every aspect of game art/design is important to me. So, here are some key points from his lecture that I consider important:

- Don't go too tight with zooms. Make sure you draw everything in the shot at a comfortable distance.
- Have at least 3 frames for action shots (while storyboarding). It's difficult to communicate the action to an animator in less than that.
-Make sure the characters are within "the golden egg", or the halo around the shot.
-Don't be afraid to use follow shots. Following the character's action can be interesting and should be used more often.
-Reptitive eye level shots are boring and uninteresting.
-Watch the perspective in your drawings. (Always important)
-The eyes are going to go to whatever is moving in the shot, so be careful as to where you place the energy.
-Go crazy with sound effects. Worry about the emotional impact over the realism. (I.e. how he used bacon sizzling to emulate lava burning)

...and those are the important points I wrote down from what I witnessed in his lecture. I look forward to taking those into mind when I work on my own storyboards soon.

Project Pitch and Concept Art

So... for 3D class, we had to propose and pitch an environment and/or narrative that the class would work on modeling for the rest of the semester. My idea was a little risky and didn't get chosen, but the idea that was the grand majority had similar elements to mine which is fantastic for me!

A piece of concept work I did for my idea- a native american theme.



Another piece I made to show some tapestries that could relay the narrative a bit better.

I'm seriously looking forward to incorporating some of my themes that I developed into the new idea. Unfortunately, I'm not allowed to talk about our project until three months from now, so you'll have to wait until then, internet! (Or whoever is viewing this.)

I can, however, share you some pieces of my concept art to peak your interest:

Oooh, what's this?

What are theeessee?

Lots of learning's gonna happen in the next three months. You just wait. If I don't make it out alive... tell my parents I love them. But I'm pretty sure I'll make it.