Christmas Recess

Over the Christmas recess I managed to keep active on the Game Design path through the following:

• I added more of the DOOM Board Game mechanics to the Machinations framework here by including the Invader play.
• I managed to play Settlers of Catan with my newly found American cousin and her husband over at PlayCatan followed by a video tutorial by the husband explaining the board game and the pieces involved as they have one.
• Having never played World of Warcraft much, I managed to get a free month of play thanks to Blizzard rewarding my Diablo III play, and thus got first hand experience of questing and raids, leveling my human Paladin character Ludus up to Level 31.
• Spawning off from the paper researched for the assignment, I developed a level generator for the DOOM Board Game which is limited by the finite number of board pieces available. This includes a level visualiser (see screenshots below) and will now be considering axis-aligned bounding boxes (AABBs) algorithms to detect overlaps.

First Semester

The first semester has gone by and with it the first Module which focused on Game Design history and e-learning techniques. The initial task of identifying which questions I had on Game Design were paramount to give a direction to my studies which mainly involved game mechanics and board games. Indeed for my assignments I chose to focus on the work in the area of game mechanics by Joris Dormans, whom I had met at the DIGRA Conference in Utrecht, Netherlands in Sept 2011.

In the meantime I also managed to acquire four board games each of which were built upon a native digital game: DOOM, Warcraft, World of Warcraft and Starcraft. In order to get acquainted with the Machinations framework developed by Dormans I attempted to implement the game mechanics of the Board Game using Dormans' online Machinations tool. Here's what it looks like.

For my assignment I decided to tackle Dormans' PhD thesis, particularly Chapter 7 which addresses game  generation techniques using formal grammars and rewrite rules. It was quite a challenge to not only summarise 12500 words into 1500, but also to make it accessible!