Pac Man on paper, pt 1.
When I went to the GDC earlier this year, I got to attend the 2 day game design seminar during the tutorial sessions. One of the cool exercises we did was to replicate an existing digital game with a paper game of some sort, be it card, board, whatever. The idea was not to simulate said game, but to analyze the aesthetic of the game and strive to capture it through the mechanics of the paper game. Another takeaway was the concept of prototyping rapidly, iterating as fast as possible and playing with the game as soon as you had anything that could be considered functional. The idea was that you'd find out what was fun or not earlier and 'follow the fun', culling out useless rules and paring your design down to a lean machine.
The team I was on worked on a Mario Kart 'port'. I thought it was pretty successful and will probably post the details of it here at some point. After I got home, I started working on Pac Man. The first thing that sprang to mind was the flow of the game. The whole premise is this tenuous balance of managing your distance from the ghosts while eating as many pellets as possible. The more pellets you eat, the emptier the board. The ghosts on the other hand are trying to corner Pac-Man, but are also each trying to be the one to score the kill.
The design I came up with is a 4 player board game with 4 tracks, each radiating from a center point. Pac-Man is at the center since the whole world is relative to his position anyway. The bottom track represents the pellets in the maze. The other 3 are for the ghosts. I could have made 4 ghosts and may still, depending on balance issues. This is a preliminary design, and hasn't been tested enough to make anything final yet.
The Board
Each ghost starts at the end of his (or her) respective track, and the bottom track is filled with pellet cards randomly drawn from a stack. The stack will exclude blank pellet cards at first. Pac-Man's goal is to eat all the dots in the stack without losing all his lives (starting with 3). The ghosts' goal is to take all of Pac-Man's lives, with the most kills determining the victor.
In the 4 player mode, each player has a choice of action cards to secretly choose from and play face down. All cards are revealed simultaneously and the results ensue.
Pac-Man's options
At the end of a turn, when all movement is resolved, the dots in the bottom track are moved up with a new one being placed at the end. If the draw pile is empty, the discard is shuffled. The idea is that the pellets will be thin near the end, allowing for more evasion and fewer opportunities for Pac-Man to get those last remaining pellets. Not sure right now if this will be an appropriate feedback loop. Another idea was incorporating walls into the dot cards. There would be 1-3 walls, and these would shield Pac-Man from those directions in the turn that dot card was on 'top' of the dot track. This would have to be played with to see if it would keep things balanced or not.
Fewer players would mean a slightly different ruleset. With 2 players, the ghost cards would be randomly drawn, and the ghost player would get to assign them. Solo play could be accomplished with the cards being randomly drawn and assigned.
I have a couple of alternate ideas for rules to try out. One is the victory condition. It could be like Pac-Man Vs in that players trade out PacMan each time he's eaten and play for the highest number of dots. Another is that some of the cards (like Flee) are state based, and do different things based on whether or not a power pellet has been eaten.
I will make subsequent posts on this as I test it with more people and modify the rules accordingly.
Cards
Board
The team I was on worked on a Mario Kart 'port'. I thought it was pretty successful and will probably post the details of it here at some point. After I got home, I started working on Pac Man. The first thing that sprang to mind was the flow of the game. The whole premise is this tenuous balance of managing your distance from the ghosts while eating as many pellets as possible. The more pellets you eat, the emptier the board. The ghosts on the other hand are trying to corner Pac-Man, but are also each trying to be the one to score the kill.
The design I came up with is a 4 player board game with 4 tracks, each radiating from a center point. Pac-Man is at the center since the whole world is relative to his position anyway. The bottom track represents the pellets in the maze. The other 3 are for the ghosts. I could have made 4 ghosts and may still, depending on balance issues. This is a preliminary design, and hasn't been tested enough to make anything final yet.
The Board
Each ghost starts at the end of his (or her) respective track, and the bottom track is filled with pellet cards randomly drawn from a stack. The stack will exclude blank pellet cards at first. Pac-Man's goal is to eat all the dots in the stack without losing all his lives (starting with 3). The ghosts' goal is to take all of Pac-Man's lives, with the most kills determining the victor.In the 4 player mode, each player has a choice of action cards to secretly choose from and play face down. All cards are revealed simultaneously and the results ensue.
Pac-Man's options
- Evade
All ghosts in play are moved back 1 square. The next dot track card is discarded - Dots
Take the next card in the dot track, place an empty dot card in the discard pile. There are a few different dot track cards with different effects. - Advance
Move 1 ghost 2 spaces closer
- Advance
Move 2 squares towards Pac-Man. Only one ghost can do this per turn, determined by rock-paper-scissors - Flee
Move 1 square away from Pac-Man - Team
Move 1 square towards Pac-Man along with other players that played Team. If no others played Team, don't move
- 1 dot
1 pellet. One of the many Pac-Man must eat to finish - 2 dots
2 pellets. - 3 dots
3 pellets. - Power Pellet
Changes the rules temporarily. If Pac-Man hits a ghost, the ghost is moved to the farthest point on its track. The power pellet lasts X turns, tentatively 5. Some added bonus might be added if Pac-Man eats a ghost as well. - Cherry
Pac-Man keeps the cherry cards, and can turn one in along with 10 dots to get an extra life. - Tunnel
If Pac-Man takes this one, all ghosts move back to the space of the farthest ghost from Pac-Man.
At the end of a turn, when all movement is resolved, the dots in the bottom track are moved up with a new one being placed at the end. If the draw pile is empty, the discard is shuffled. The idea is that the pellets will be thin near the end, allowing for more evasion and fewer opportunities for Pac-Man to get those last remaining pellets. Not sure right now if this will be an appropriate feedback loop. Another idea was incorporating walls into the dot cards. There would be 1-3 walls, and these would shield Pac-Man from those directions in the turn that dot card was on 'top' of the dot track. This would have to be played with to see if it would keep things balanced or not.Fewer players would mean a slightly different ruleset. With 2 players, the ghost cards would be randomly drawn, and the ghost player would get to assign them. Solo play could be accomplished with the cards being randomly drawn and assigned.
I have a couple of alternate ideas for rules to try out. One is the victory condition. It could be like Pac-Man Vs in that players trade out PacMan each time he's eaten and play for the highest number of dots. Another is that some of the cards (like Flee) are state based, and do different things based on whether or not a power pellet has been eaten.
I will make subsequent posts on this as I test it with more people and modify the rules accordingly.
Cards
Board
Labels: game design, paper prototype
posted by Rich Wilson at 9:47 PM
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