[game_edu] Looking for articles, books or other stuff based on porting board games to videogames

[Ian Schreiber]

Hi Carlos (and anyone else who might be interested),

If you were talking about making a board-game version of a video game (digital to physical), I should shamelessly plug "Challenges for Game Designers" which has a chapter devoted to that topic.

If you're going the other way, making an online version of a physical board game, I don't know offhand of any articles but I do know a few basic concepts:

Basically, the design of the game mechanics is already done, but that doesn't mean you can fire your game designers :). Rather, it means your game design tasks must focus on UI.

What makes a good digital UI for a physical board game? In general, it mostly involves simplifying the game interface with the goal of making gameplay faster and more streamlined. Examples:
* Automation of non-decision-based tasks (e.g. setup, cleanup, upkeep)
* Simplification of physically complex tasks to single button-presses
* Where applicable, AI opponents to allow single-player play of a multiplayer game.

In my classes, I like to use case studies. My two favorite examples:

1) "Hey, That's My Fish!" is a very simple tile-based tabletop game for 2 to 4 players. In short, each player places several penguins each on their own hex tiles. On your turn, you select one penguin to move in any direction, any number of spaces... but it can't jump over another penguin or an empty space. After moving, you take the hex you started on off the board and place it in your score pile. If a penguin is isolated on its own tile, it is removed from the board and you score that tile. Game ends when all penguins are removed. The strategy involves trying to isolate other players' penguins on small islands while trying to trap your own penguins on large areas.

The beginning of the game requires a bit of setup, as you have to shuffle 60 hex tiles and lay them out in a roughly-square configuration, rearranging them as needed to prevent too many clusters of high-scoring tiles. At the end of the game players must count their points (each hex is anywhere from 1 to 3 points). The actual play of the game takes maybe 5 minutes, and frankly the setup and scoring takes as long as the play.

Now, take a look at the game on www.brettspielwelt.de (there is a treasure trove of other board games there, and all free). Indeed, tile setup is automated, instantly making the game better. It also counts points for tiles automatically, so scoring at the end of the game is instant. At first, it would appear the online version is now superior to the tabletop version.

But then, as they say, the designer grasps defeat from the jaws of victory. In end game situations where individual penguins are all isolated on their own multi-tile islands (which happens in most plays), in the tabletop game, players just manually collect all of those tiles. However, in the online version, it offers no "pathfinding" for islands and therefore forces players to manually click and move until all penguins are on single-tile islands. In other words, after the game is already effectively over, the players still need to spend 2 or 3 minutes just clicking and moving, over and over, to manually let the computer figure out that the game is over. Oops!


2) Compare several computer versions of the classic board game RISK. My favorite version, though you'll probably have to find an emulator these days to play it, was the version for the old Apple Macintosh. In the settings, you could tell it to keep rolling on an attack until you succeed or fail, and you could also place all of your armies in a single location by Shift+Click. Between those two things and AI opponents (with 3 difficulty levels) that take their turns instantly, you could finish a complete game in about two minutes... and while you may not have the satisfaction of trouncing other people across a table, you make up for it by having a game that takes minutes instead of hours, making it a great coffee-break time waster.

Now, compare to a more recent version of RISK, on PC or console. Many of these have much nicer graphics, but do not offer the shortcuts that allow for play that the old Mac version did. These games still may take shorter than the original board game... maybe 10 to 30 minutes per play... but they still feel slow to me because I know there's extraneous things like cut scenes of armies attacking or showing the virtual dice rolling, which make everything take longer. Console versions in particular lack point-and-click functionality, forcing you to wait for a cursor to move around the map using analog sticks.


Note that some mechanics translate better to digital versions than others. In particular, games where players act asynchronously tend to work better than those where play is simultaneous. Negotiation and trading mechanics tend to feel slow online compared to tabletop play; compare trading resources in person with Settlers of Catan, versus the XBLA version (and mind you, the XBLA version in particular did a stellar job at streamlining this aspect of play... but even still, nothing is as fast as just asking "anyone got grain for sheep?", having someone respond "no, but I've got brick", then saying "sold" and swapping cards). Games like Brawl or Pit that have everyone acting all at once are so difficult that it would make a pretty extreme challenge as a port. Magic: the Gathering is also challenging, not only because of the overly complex mechanics and card interactions, but because of all of the phases during play where players can interrupt one another to
 take an action in response to another players' action; note that with MTG Online they go to great lengths to streamline this, allowing players to turn off their response prompts to certain types of events and having a Chess-like clock to prevent players from stalling the game too much.


Hope this helps!

- Ian



________________________________
From: Carlos Contreras Peinado <erwaitin at gmail.com>
To: game_edu at igda.org
Sent: Thu, April 15, 2010 6:57:20 PM
Subject: [game_edu] Looking for articles, books or other stuff based on porting board  games to videogames

Hello,

I'm trying to learn about porting board games to videogames from a game design perspective. Anyone knows about good books, articles or any other stuff about this? Thank you!



      
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://seven.pairlist.net/pipermail/game_edu/attachments/20100415/f86feba3/attachment.html>