[spoon-discuss] The Grid

[Daniel Lepage <dpl33@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

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