UntitledMIT OpenCourseWare http://ocw.mit.edu CMS.608 / CMS.864 Game Design Spring 2008 For information about citing these materials or our Terms of Use, visit: http://ocw.mit.edu/terms.Clara Rhee Sarah Sperry Tiffany Tseng 17 April 2008 CMS.608 Roller Derby Skates. Speed. Getting smashed face first in to the wall. What could be better? For our project we decided to build a board game on the awesome sport that is roller derby. Translating the awesome and fun aspects of roller derby into the comparatively slower (not to mention less physically challenging) realm of board games, however, actually turned out to be a bit of a challenge. Some parts of the design process, such as the general design of the board as a round track, were easy. On the other hand, how to treat the parts of the game, like fouls and assists, that bring a lot of the life and action to the real sport proved to be a bit of a struggle. In the first iteration of our play, the rules were extremely simple. All we had really decided was that it would be a two player game where each player would control five pieces (one jammer and four blockers) in their effort to gain the most points over the course of two sessions or “jams” composed of fifteen turns each. At the time we had also decided upon the movement of the pieces as counter clock-wise around the board where the number of spaces moved was determined by the roll of one dice for the blockers and one for the jammer. We hadn’t really decided what we wanted to do with fouls and assists other than we did, indeed, want to incorporate them into the game. However, we felt that playing the game as soon as possible, just like we discussed in class during the Robot vs. Tank exercise, was important to get a feel for the game.It quickly became clear that even though we did have a good base mechanic, there was a lot lacking in the interaction between players. As one of our readings indicated, games should be able to be treated as systems of conflict and our game at the time did not have many ways to interact with the other player and, as a result, was really not a strong game (Salen and Zimmermann, 2006). We needed to create a way for drama to naturally occur between the players. In order to facilitate the drama, we placed foul spaces randomly around the board and decided that a player would be fouled if they landed on or passed through a foul space. After play-testing, it turned out that the second part of that rule was actually just as important, if not more important, than the first part because it resulted in a slight emergent strategy: if a player could block using their pieces just right he could actually force the other player to move through a foul spot and take a foul. For example, in Figure 1, if all of the blue pieces have already been pushed once, the red piece is forced to move into the foul space. F Figure 1: Forced Foul Once the players realized they could do this, they often combined this with the action of splitting up the opponent’s pieces such that the opposing piece also got a penalty for being too far away from its fellows. In this way, if played correctly, one player could force another to take a lot of fouls. The next step with fouls was relatively easy. We knew from normal roller derby that if enough fouls were accumulated by any one team, then they went to the penalty box for a set period of time so it was not verydifficult to make the jump from that real-world action to putting a piece in the penalty box for a few turns after four fouls. The next item we needed to implement to help out with the player conflict was the assist cards and the normal interaction between pieces on the board. We decided early on that there should be some sort of physical interaction between the pieces that was simple enough not to require an assist card – after all, not all physical interaction between roller derby players is intense enough to warrant special attention. Some of the interaction is just a bit of jostling between players. We decided the perfect way to implement this was a simple pushing mechanic between pieces that made it so that blockers could push blockers on their own team, blockers on the opponent’s team, or the jammer on either team forward one space given that the piece being pushed had not been pushed once already. Pieces can be pushed one space diagonally to another track or may be pushed one space forward. Since the movement of the blockers on a team was constrained to the value of the dice rolled, adding a mechanic under which a player, if clever, could get a good amount of extra moves proved to be an awesome addition because it added a lot of strategy to blocker movement. The assist cards, on the other hand, ended up being a little more difficult to decide upon. Making it so that the players only got assist cards when they landed on a certain place on the board was our first idea. However, we eventually dismissed the idea as lacking if implemented alone simply because it would make it possible for one of the players to never get an assist cards. Since we were aiming for a sense of player interaction and conflict that mimicked real roller derby matches, having it so that the aggression was only one sided did not fit. As a result, we decided to implement the ideathat in addition to the ability to get assist cards by landing on certain spots on the board, players would also receive one assist card every three turns with the exception of the first turn when they would receive two to start off the game. Initially, the assist cards themselves were decided to be Brake (resisting a push), Carry (blocker carrying a jammer), Hard Push (push an opposing player out of bounds for one turn), and Swing (blocker swings the jammer from behind them to any open space in front of them). After play testing it again with our rule-changes to fouls and assists, we found yet another change that needed to be made: the speed of the jammer. At this point the jammer movement was calculated by the roll of one dice and the cumulative possible movement of the blockers was also determined by the roll of one dice. With only one dice, not only did both the blockers and the jammers move slowly, but the jammers had an extremely hard time passing the blockers. What this meant was that we ended up with a really slow (and boring) progression of pieces around the board with no points being scored. After realizing that this was a fairly large