Claire Smyth AAD010 Introducing Studio Practice : Games Design (Redesigning the Board Game of Battleships)
Games design is in which the art of applying design and aesthetics with the main aim of successfully producing / creating a game structured for entertainment, or in some cases for the likes of educational, exercise or experimental purposes. Increasingly, common elements and principles of game design are also commonly applied to other interactions, such as in the form of gamification. Games design tends to create / emphasise thing such as goals, rules and challenge to efficiently, strategically and intellectually define the likes of a board game, card game, dice game, casino game, role-playing game, sport, video game, war game or simulation that produces the desirable interactions among its participants and possibly, spectators.
For the AAD010 games design workshop and assigned task we were in which given the brief, considering bling decision making and other aspects regarding positive game designs to effectively re-create the board game of Battleship ensuring that is contains rules and mechanisms that lead to more interesting player choices when playing the games, through adding, changing or taking away the current rules, but ensuring that is still resembles and is recognisable as battleship.
The late 60’s vintage board game of battleship is in which a game where two players face off to destroy each other’s ships. Players start the game by placing their ships on a gridded board hidden from view of the other player. The two players then take turns naming out grid co-ordinates, if the other player’s ship or part of their ship is lying on that area, you score a direct hit. The battles ships each have different hit points, and each must be hit by the other player to sink that ship. A player then wins by / when they have destroyed and sunk all the other players ships.
However to redesign this battleship board game through enhancing it features, overall I have in which added in various aspects of good decisions regarding effective game design through the introducement of updated rules and extra challenges or rewards to assist in help to win through being the first to sink all of the other opponents / players ships.
As a result when now playing this / my updated version of battleship, player 1 and player 2 are in which given a 10 by 10 square grid with the coordinates A – J and 1 – 10, along with being given 3 big and 3 small ships, correlating to six in total, each having a different coloured range of ships. Unlike the original game of battleship, before beginning and once / after secretly placing each players ships on random coordinates in an attempt to play the game to sink all of the other players ships in order to win, I have in which included 4 different colour coded ‘trick or treat` cards (risk or rewards cards etc) to enhance the process / progression of the game up a bit, either making it easier or that little bit harder by sad default. For these trick or treat cards and to effectively implement them within the game, players are to also randomly place the four coloured squares onto the coordinate grid without the other player knowing, where both cards for each player are the same, including their colour but it may just have to be the luck of the draw to see who got a trick or a treat as well as how many times as there is 4 chances with 2 tricks and 2 treats. To implement this new concept into the game and after the players have randomly placed the squares they will use a dice to see who goes first through the person to role a six and continuing it along with each go as players will have to roll an even number to have a turn in guessing the correct coordinates to sink their opponents ship, which adds increased competitiveness to the game through always wanting to land on an even number as it may mean that you might have a better chance in winning or sinking the ships much quicker than the other player. However, when going along and continuing in a blind attempt to guess the right coordinates for the other opponents ship, if they choose / say a coordinate that has one of the 4 coloured trick or treat squares on it, it means that they have lost / hit one the cards already in which they have to fulfil what it say. For these trick or treat cards:
Purple means that you are to get another go.
Green means that you have to miss a go, allowing the other opponent to have two goes before you can go again, unless the other player has guessed a coordinate landing on either the green or purple trick or treat card.
Red means that you have been granted with the free opportunity to sink one of the other players ships, but the opponent is to decide which ship they are willing to let go.
Blue means that you are able to receive a clue for one coordinate that an opponent’s ship is sitting on, however, to ensure that it is fair, the first half of the chosen coordinate is only aloud to be given out.
As the game goes on to where both ships and cards are being hit it is not until the all of an opponents ships are sunk until there is a winner, meaning the other player has at least one ship still at sea, but once you land on a trick or treat card you cannot be affected by it again as they are to be turned over after the player has fulfilled its command, meaning there could be a possibly of winning / losing the game through hitting hardly any of the cards or hitting near enough all four.
Furthermore, to / making my redesigned battleship board game as pictured below, I had in which used a wide variety of materials and techniques to in where I digitally produced a 10 by 10 squared grid in Microsoft Word to ensure that it and the contained squares where evenly measured. As a result, to structure the boards, I printed out using a Dymo label maker of the letters A to J and the numbers from 1 to 10, where I then stuck them at each side of the board to symbolise the coordinates, along with differentiating between player 1s and player 2s boards. To make the ships, I used an origami paper folding technique to form the shape of a general boat / ship after practicing it a few times from following a YouTube tutorial until it was right, resulting in me having two equal quantities and sizes of ships for both players. When designing the cards I wanted to ensure that they stood out and was easily recognisable if a player had hit it through choosing one of the cards coordinates, I decided to use four brightly coloured shaped cards corelating to the square colour that would be randomly placed on the grid / board and in which to spell out the commands (tricks / treats), I used my label maker again through feeling that the black against the bright colours really stood out and in which I am to believe that I am quite overly pleased with the outcomes of my battleship board game (including its new rules etc) and its 3D paper prototype.
