Daniel Lepage on Sat, 12 Jun 2004 11:04:09 -0500 (CDT)


[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

[spoon-discuss] The Grid


I've been thinking about The Game, and I've realized that it's getting boring. Much as I enjoy writing props to fix small things in the rules and change little legislative procedures, we need to get a new subgame started before everybody gets bored and quits. Only four players have done anything other than vote in the past nweek.

So I got to thinking about The Grid, and what we could make out of that. I don't think we should bring back the original Grid - that was a mess of random activity that drove two players out of the game and almost did it for the Admin too.

But I have been thinking about some of the problems with the Grid, and what might be done in a new Grid to prevent them.

So here's what I've been thinking would make an interesting Grid-like subgame:

1) It's a partially cooperative game. The players would be divided into three teams, and various aspects of the Grid would encourage cooperation between the teams and within the teams, while other aspects would encourage competition between teams and between individuals within a team. 2) It's round-based: we define a 'starting map' for each round, which is an initial state of the grid, plus a list of 'goals'; when all the goals are completed, the round ends, and a new starting map is selected; the next round then begins. 3) It doesn't change suddenly. New objects, concepts, and abilities could be proposed, but unless special measures were needed, it wouldn't be possible to do anything with the new things until the Next Round (and then only of the starting map incorporates them). This means that everyone has a bit of time to consider what new things do before they get used, and gives anyone who might be trying to automate chunks of this a chance to code up objects before they need to handle them.

So, for example, we might do something like this...
We define the following objects as Grid Objects:
Spawn Points (S): this is where players can put themselves on the Grid if they're not on it. Players can only spawn at these points.
Walls (W): this is just a space that can't be moved through.
Blocks (B): These are walls, except that a player can push one out of the way if the space behind the block is vacant. Laser Death Trap (L): if a player enters one of these, e Dies and is removed from the Grid. If another object is pushed in, it gets destroyed. Gold Coin (G): if a player moves into a square containing a coin, the coin moves to eir possession. When the round ends, each player gains 5 points for every coin possessed by a member of eir team, and an additional 8 points for every coin e possesses.

With those objects, we make a map like this:
S - G B - B G - S
- W W - W - W W -
G W G G L G G W G
B - G - B - G - B
- W L B G B L W -
B - G - B - G - B
G W G G L G G W G
- W W - W - W W -
S - G B - B G - S

We define the following as the goal:
the round ends when all Gold Coins have been collected.


Then the game for the round would be a race to get all the coins, pushing through the blocks to reach them before other players do. You want the members of your team to get all the coins; but you also want to get more coins than the rest of your teammates. By pushing players into Laser Traps, you can cause them to die (perhaps they lose a coin every time this happens). OTOH, it's also possible to get a situation where the only way to get a certain coin (and thus to end the Round) is to die and respawn at a different point. In such a case, each player would want somebody on their team other than emself to die and do this, so you'd have fights within teams to see who can force a member to go after the last coins first.


While all this was happening, we'd also be proposing new Grid Objects and potential levels with those objects, maybe using some of the objects from earlier levels as well.


Does this interest anyone?

--
Wonko

_______________________________________________
spoon-discuss mailing list
spoon-discuss@xxxxxxxxx
http://lists.ellipsis.cx/mailman/listinfo/spoon-discuss