King of the Apocalypse

[working title]

Concept Document

Group 2: Jon, Stephanie, Green, Rohit and Andrew

Table of Contents

King of the Apocalypse Design Concept

Style

Story

Gameplay

Tech Issues

Summary

Apendix A: One Minute in King of the Apocalypse

Introduction:

Kings of the Apocalypse is a two player strategy board game pitting teams of fantastic creatures and heroes against each other in a nightmarish post apocalyptic setting.  Each character type brings unique strengths and vulnerabilities to contribute to a player’s objective of bringing magical fire to the opponent’s base.  A player must dodge obstacles, both movable and fixed, capture intermediate strongholds that lead to the final goal, and resist an adversary bent on defending his home and bringing his enemy fire to your base. 

A player will use strategy, intuition, and even luck to reach the goal of bringing fire to the opponent.  Starting at his home territory, the player must bring a short-lived flame to strategically placed torches in-between the bases.  The player must defend these torches from the opposing player long enough to ignite torches further down the board.  As the player relays torch to torch, the opponent is doing the same, and the player must decide a clever strategy that more efficiently balances offence and defense with a limited team.

The intensity of game play is mirrored by the richness of the game board, with illustration of a post apocalyptic nightmarescape, and game pieces with fantastical creatures such as dragons, ninjas, zombies and robots. 

Concept:

Kings of the Apocalypse pits player versus player in a combination of capture the flag and a relay race.  Players take turns trying to advance their team’s fire to the opponent’s stronghold, while fending off similar attacks on their territory.

Style: 

The game board is 2D-styled.

The design of the game is grid-based.

Players move across the grid, starting from their territory towards the enemy's territory.

The grid based visualization, enables the players to have a complete picture of the territory that they need to move across along with the the obstacles they might encounter.

Players' characters like (Ninja and Wizard.. still to be designed) are very intuitive and symbolize the powers that are bestowed to them .

                                                                                                                            (Moment Capture of the game)

Along with clear navigation, the grid also gives players a fair idea of the enemy's location. Knowledge of enemy location along with entirely visible territory-map lets them plan their moves ahead and respond to enemy's moves tactically.  

The grid also shows the relative positions of all the characters of the team, the intermediate flames (which are mini-goals ) and movable obstacles (which can be utilized to execute the movement strategy. )                                                         

                                                                                              (Stretch of the whole territory

Story:

In the year 2123 a meter crashes down on the earth and destroys every last trace of humanity. Practically overnight, the Earth has turned into a desolate, destroyed wasteland filled with the ruins of a once great society. What the humans had failed to realize during their lengthy occupation of Earth was that they were not alone. Hiding deep inside the Earth’s core were two colonies of mythical, magical creatures. The humans thought that these creatures were figments of creative minds of centuries past. Now that humanity has been destroyed, the creatures are able to rule once again.

Each colony believes that they are the sole survivors of the apocalypse and have resurfaced to claim the Earth. But upon resurfacing, discover that they are not alone! The creatures no one though existed now must battle it out to see who will be left to rule the Earth.

The adventure begins when the first colony, Atlantis resurfaces. Comprised of a zombie, ninja, wizard, dragon, and robot, they start to build a home base in a desolate area of a destroyed city. On the other side of the city, the second colony, El Dorado is also resurfacing. Comprised of the same five creatures, El Dorado builds their own base at the opposite side of the city.  The trouble begins when Atlantis realizes that they are not alone in the world...

The colonies decide that there isn’t room for both of them and attempt to destroy each other to determine who will get the Earth.

Gameplay:

“King of the Apocalypse” is designed as a hybrid between a turn-based competitive strategy game and a puzzle game. We aim to de-emphasize traditional notions of battle in strategy games, where the goal is to build armies and direct strong offensive characters against the opponent’s armies in an attempt to overpower them. Instead, we use a mechanic of having movable obstacles strewn throughout the playfield.

The premise of the game is simple: Each player is trying to deliver an exhaustible payload to the other side. Because the payload (e.g., a torch flame) runs out over time, the player must replenish the flame at checkpoints along the way. The opposing sides have different-colored flames, and they may pick up a flame only from a checkpoint-torch with the same color. However, a unit currently holding a flame can change the color of the checkpoint-torches. To make the task more difficult, the players are able to rearrange the obstacles on the map to deter the other player and force their unit-held flames to burn out. Hence, the tactical strategy components of the game focus on cutting off the opponent’s movement while trying to locate feasible routes for your own units.

The main risk of our game:

The main risk of the game is the ability to move obstacles around the map. In the vast majority of strategy games today, maps are designed carefully to force players to favor certain strategies depending on the layout of the map. Our maps, too, will have the feature where certain maps will cause players to opt for particular strategies, but at the same time it is fundamentally different since the layout of the map can ultimately be transformed to the players’ wishes.  Therefore, a large amount of time for our game development will be spent doing path finding algorithms and designing maps that would make sense. “Make sense” means that they are difficult to break—low probability of stalemate or one-sided victory. Inevitably, some players will have the motivation to study particular maps very thoroughly and break them. Our job is to make this difficult, while maintaining an interesting level of complexity per map.

Movement and Combat:

At the start of each turn, the player will roll dice designating how many action points he will have at his disposal for this turn.  Action points can be distributed among his units in any way, so long as each unit receives no more than its proscribed maximum (usually two).  Action points so not carry over to the next turn.  Each unit can use these action points to perform moves or push/pull obstacles.  Each action takes a certain number of action points (usually one), but may be different for certain units.  Keeping the number of actions a player can execute per turn forces the player to keep his plan flexible and to improvise.

Units can move in one of the cardinal directions, North East South West, except when an obstacle, wall, or another unit is in that direction, or if the player would move off the edge of the map.  Most units can move one square per action point.

Units can also move a mobile obstacle, but must move in the same direction as the obstacle.  See diagram below:

The unit, the blue circle, cannot move the obstacle into positions 1 or 3.  The unit can push the obstacle into position 2 and move himself into the cell the square is currently on, unless an object is already in position 2.  The unit can also pull the obstacle back, such that the unit is in position 4 and the obstacle is in the square that the unit is currently in, unless an object is already in position 4.  Moving an obstacle usually costs more action point than a pure move. 

Combat occurs if two units are within one square of each other.  Combat is going to be nondeterministic such that players cannot depend on a conflict resolving one way or another for plans to succeed.  However, when a unit is defeated, it is not removed permanently.  A defeated unit is removed from the map for a number of turns and returned to a few “respawn” points in the center of the map, or the closest cells around there if not available.

This non-permanent conflict resolution removes the ability to defeat an enemy permanently, but provides enough incentive to attempt conflict as a way to disable the enemy enough to succeed at the main goal.

Different units will also have slightly different set of statistics, such that some units would move further per action but take longer to move an obstacle, while others may receive a combat bonus but move fewer squares, and some may even move obstacles that are 2 squares away or move them side to side.

Tactics:

With the non-permanent combat resolution, the game is more about neutralizing the obstacles and less on forcing a confrontation.  Given the high obstacle movement cost, it is also about cooperation between units.  At the same time, clustering units together risks letting another unit run by.

With the different unit powers, a different local situation calls for different plans.

Figure 1

In Figure 1, suppose the Red 1 is trying to go north, while the Blue X is trying to prevent that.  The red player cannot move Red 1 north through A.  Red 1 has a variety of strategies available based on its exact type.  It can try to move obstacle A north two squares so it may move around it, but that will take a large number of action points, and Blue X can move right to intercept.  Maybe that’s a justifiable risk if Red 1 has a decent chance of winning the combat resolution, or if Red 1 has the speed to outrun Blue X.   Red 1, if it is telekinetic, can move A aside and move forward, but that will reveal that Red 1 is weak in battle and encourage Blue X to intercept.  Instead, Red 1 may first move A north, but then use telekinesis to use A and B to keep Blue X at bay.

Another strategy would be to move the block A south and out of the pass, which would make it more difficult for Blue X to block that pass again.  However, in most cases, there would be more obstacles on the board, such that one missing may not be very interesting. 

Technical Issues:

Our game presents few technical issues, since we aim for a low-tech game. Something that must be considered, however, is that different pieces on the map each have their own counters for various actions. For instance, each unit has a maximum number of steps it can move per turn. Units can hold a flame for a certain number of rounds before it is automatically extinguished. Such counters may prove difficult to translate directly to a physical board game format. In a computing environment, however, these are hardly challenges.

For the physical board game, therefore, we would need to simplify some of the numerical attributes, including unit stats and rules regarding moving around.

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