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Contents 1 Games 1.1 Demon's Souls 2-D 1.2 SnowBALLZ (or Snow Day) 1.3 Glass Game 1.4 Think Tank 1.5 Dance-a-Brate 1.6 Jazz Dogs 2 SGC Testers 3 First Iterations of Major Games 4 Games We Like 5 Game Editor 6 Behavior Editor 7 User Interface Creator 8 Business Models 9 Distribution Methods 10 Other 11 Gallery

Games

Demon's Souls 2-D

• Platform: Flash Game / Web Game

• Genre: Side-Scrolling Platformer

• Premise: This game seems like it is large and expansive, but it is actually comprised of a single, impossible level. The player is a sword-wielding warrior in a bleak and terrifying land. There are 15 enemies placed evenly throughout a side-scrolling map, and each one requires the most intense skill, concentration, and luck in order to beat them. Randomly, one of the first 14 will drop a key when(if) you kill them. The final enemy, which is 99% impossible to get to, is invincible, although this is not obvious to the player, who thinks he has just finally gotten to the end. Behind this monster there is a locked door, and with key in hand, the player assumes that there is some way, if he keeps trying, to get through to that door. However, there is not, and the player will never actually be able to avoid death to this enemy. Each time the player dies, he must start a new game.

SnowBALLZ (or Snow Day)

• Platform: iPhone

• Genre: Arcade / Duck Shoot

• Premise: Expecting another snow day, you wake up early to get to work on your snow fort. You soon notice, however, that your neighbors are all out and about and ready to start their day! The snow day has been cancelled! Or has it? Keep your neighbors from leaving the neighborhood and maybe you can keep the town shut down! Chuck snowballs at them from the safety of your snow fort. Gain bonus points for stringing together combos! Different units take different amounts of hits to make them turn around and go back inside. The faster they move, the more points they are worth. Don't hit the cops, or you're in trouble! Clear stages by sending all the neighbors inside. Each neighbor that gets away will lesson your chances of enforcing the snow day! Simpsons arcade style animation, heavily physics based snowballs that take advantage of the touch screen and fast paced action are the focus.

• Upgrades: Upgrade your snowball production facilities to churn out ammo. Each 'perfect' level, receive 1 upgrade tokens.

Warm Gloves --> +25% Snowball Making --> 3 tokens

Little Brother --> +50% Snowball Making --> 5 tokens

Snow-Matic 1000 --> +100% Snowball Making --> 10 tokens

Glass Game

Pane of glass, realistic physics, iphone, simple controls...

Think Tank

• Platform: iPhone

• Genre: Multiplayer Puzzle Game

• Premise: Beware the advice of the Think Tank. A brain sits in a large glass cylinder inthe center of the room. Through a network of wires, it communicates with you through your helmet, asking you to perform certain tasks or answer questions. As your relationship with the Think Tank progresses, the tasks and questions get vastly more complicated and poignant. The Think Tank will pit friends against friends, suggesting problems that you have encountered, wrongs that have been committed, and lies that have been exposed. The Think tank says something to you, but has it said the same thing to everyone? The Think Tank does not always mean what it says, does it? You will never be sure... But what if the Think Tank wants you gone? Who can you trust? THINK TANK!

• Upgrades: UNKNOWN

Dance-a-Brate

• Platform: iPhone

• Genre: Rhythm / Music

• Premise: Make your avatar dance to music played from your itunes library! Initially users will press either hands and feet to a rhythm when instructed. As the game progresses more body parts are made click able and new combos are added. So quickly tapping a hand, elbow then hand would perform a wave. The game could feature both following instructions like clicking combos as instructed and a free dance mode where users chaining combo's together to earn high scores. Could also be a useful code-string to have for Mass-Collaboration games.

• Upgrades: Build your avatar, unlock new dance nodes for more complicated dance maneuvers. Perhaps earn new hairstyles, clothing, backgrounds, etc. for your dancer.

Jazz Dogs

• Platform: Unknown

• Genre: Questionable

• Premise: The Jazz Dogs are an E-lectric, EC-centric, and E-clectic quartet of cool cats! ... err... dogs! Take part in the musical misadventures of Rex, Rover, Rusty, and Ringo as they play sold out shows at Spot's Lounge and avoid the wiley schemes of the corporate nightclub owner Ken Keniff. It's a FUR-ious HAIR-raising PAW-fectly told TAIL!!!!! If you don't play it, you will WHISKER!!! you did.

• Upgrades: A mystery within a conundrum

SGC Testers

In order to test many of the concepts laid out in Mass Collaboration Gaming, we will create a series of small arcade games which will be built using a simple graphical editor. These games will share art styles and user interface (cute-ish and touchscreen tracking and tapping. respectively), and are intended to show people what can be made using our editor. The games themselves will be released for free on the Apple Store, while the editor will cosr $4.99. Using the editor, players will be able to create their own games from the templates and either release them on the Appstore, or release them somehow through our website or other distribution channel.

All of these may be able to function as flash games too, at which point the players will be able to submit them to our site and we would post them for free. An interesting note about the editor system is that players will be able to open any of the games that were made using the editor (including those made by NBS), and fiddle around with them, hopefully creating more exciting or challenging content. Though this is only a small step towards testing the ideas of Mass Collaboration Gaming, it is fundamentally important to begin work on an editor, and even more importantly, we need to SHIP titles soon.

• ==Busy Beaver==

Top-Down Frogger Clone

Swim across the river to your lodge. Avoid being pushed downstream by the logs, and chew through the branches that get in your way. The river motion constantly pushes you downstream, so you must guide your beaver with your finger against the current. recharge your stamina by 'eating' branches. Look out for the Mad Otter King Vince the Pince!

• ==Hoppin' Hares==

Isometric(ish) 'Jumpy' Sidescroller

Run away from the angry farmer, leaping barriers, collecting vegetables, and looking cute as heck. Run down tunnels to get to different areas.

• ==Eagle Eyes==

Arcade 'Shooter' ... sort of

You are an eagle soaring through the skies! Swoop down and grab mice, hares, and even beavers!!! Don't crash into trees, though. Gather enough food to regurgitate into your babies mouths before the level is over, or your babies will die (you lose 1 life).

First Iterations of Major Games

• ==MiPet==

• ==Caravan Light==

Caravan light is a simple interation of the overall game designed for the iPhone. The focus is time-management and unit upgrade, wherein a player slowly amasses wealth by assigning tasks for the carts in his caravan to do while he is not signed in to the game (or, while he watches, if he is very bored and patient). These tasks take the form of gathering, crafting, and selling/buying/trading.

For example:

At level 1, a player might start his caravan with a single woodcutter's cart. His first assignment is to tell the woodcutter to gather wood from the pine forest nearby. The player is informed that this will take 5 hours. When the player accepts this, the woodcutter will move out of camp and head to the pine forest, steadily gathering logs until his cart is full, and then returning to camp. This action can be cancelled at any point during the process, and the woodcutter will return to camp with whatever he has in the cart at that time. When the woodcutter returns, the player, opening up the game application once again, will tell him to bring the pine logs to town and sell them. The player is informed that this will take 15 minutes. The woodcutter sets off to town and sells the logs for 50 gold, bringing that moneyback to camp. Using this money, the player upgrades the woodcutter's tools, buying a Hefty Axe, and a Board Cutting Saw. The next time the woodcutter goes out into the woods, chopping logs will only take 4.5 hours, because of the Hefty Axe upgrade, and he will be able to cut the timber into lumber using the Board Cutting Saw. Lumber sells for 100 gold, and now the player is well on his way to making enough money to buy his second gathering cart (which could be another woodcutter's cart, or perhaps a hunter or mining cart).

Eventually, the player will be upgrading the carts themselves, making them travel faster, hold more materials, contain more facilities or workers, etc. When carts are upgraded (or when certain items are purchased), new materials become available to the player. In the Woodcuter example, as his cart is upgraded, he can beigin collecting Spruce, Yew, Oak, Walnut, and Cherry wood, which will be useful for the second level of carts for the player's caravan, the Crafters. Crafting carts, which can use the raw materials produced by the gatherer carts to create high value items, can make many different items, even cart upgrades! Crafting carts include tinker's carts, alchemist's carts, haberdasher's carts, etc.

Games We Like

http://www.patkemp.com/wp-gallery/games/puji.html - Simple and very fun

Game Editor

The Game Editor is where the user actually builds the look and rules of the game that he is creating. Here, he can decide whether the game will be a top-down space invaders clone, a side-scrolling platformer, or and isometric RPG. He can build the level and set the rules for navigating it, as well as the way that the character interacts with it. He can build player characters, non-player characters, monsters, and objects. The Game Editor will require the most of the user's time when creating a game, and therefore must be one of the most simply laid out editors. While there should be options to work on every detail, generally, a person should be able to make a game without too much stress or confusion. To aid in this, the Game Editor is in many ways a 'sticky' one, in the sense that it binds the work from the other editors together. Players pull in the UI from the UI editor, and attach behaviors to creatures and objects in the Game Editor.

World

• Display
  • View Angle
  • Graphics Type
  • Size
• Features
• Map
  • Tracking

Models

• Characters (Player Characters, Non-Player Characters)
• Monsters (Enemies)

Social

Behavior Editor

This editor is where the player creates the behaviors of all the different computer controlled elements in his game. Assigning random generation to logs flowing down a river, for example, would be one of the behavior choices. This may have to work in conjunction with an Asset Editor

User Interface Creator

Using the UI editor, a user would determine a number of generic assets that are to be used in the game that they are creating. It is here that he sets up the look of the different types of windows that will be in the game, for example; dialogue boxes with options vs. dialogue boxes without options, shopkeeper windows and inventory displays. These are generic in that they contain the space for certain assets (text or images), but do not require one to be set to it. This allows the player to reuse the same window for similar events, changing and replacing the text and images on the fly in the Game Editor. The UI editor should pick his UI quickly and fluidly. He can select what the theme, colors, and borders of his windows will be all at once, so that he does not have to do that for each new type of window that he creates. Exceptions, of course, can be made if he so desires, by simply changing the parameters and checking a "this window only" box. Next he can choose the same features for his buttons, and this way, whenever he drags and drops a "button" component onto his editing screen, the button looks like all of the other buttons.

These will be done across all editors, which are all tabbed and accessible during the creation of the game.

• Load and Save Assets and Projects
• Search for Socially Generated Content

Heads Up Display

• Bars (experience, health, skills, money, etc.)
  • Size
    • Variable (Click-and-drag to scale)
  • Shape
    • Rectangular
    • Rounded Rectangular
    • Elliptical
  • Theme
    • E-Meter
    • Liquid
    • Bubbles
    • Squares
    • Upload
  • Border
    • Colors
    • Thickness
    • Spacing
  • Image/Text
    • Preset or Import
    • Image/Text size (S,M,L)
    • Drag around perimeter of bar
• Buttons (actions, menus, etc.)
  • Size
    • Variable (Click-and-drag to scale)
  • Shape
    • Rectangular
    • Rounded Rectangular
    • Elliptical
  • Theme
    • E-Meter
    • Liquid
    • Bubbles
    • Squares
    • Upload
  • Border
    • Colors
    • Thickness
    • Spacing
  • Image/Text
    • Preset or Import
    • Image/Text size (S,M,L)
    • Drag around perimeter of bar

Windows

• Menus (abilities, system options, etc.)
• Shopkeeper Windows (Buying and selling)
• Message Window (Text box)
• Dialogue Windows (Text box with or without clickable responses)
• Inventory (Player backpacks, enemy corpse, etc.)
• Paperdoll (Character profile and/or equipped items)

Controls/Interaction

• Key Bindings

• Behaviors

Business Models

Distribution Methods

Other

Gallery

Some notes on SGC Test games.

Some more notes on SGC Test games.

Quick sketch of Caravan's travel interface.