Custom Dice Matchup

August 16, 2024 by Ethan Leave a Comment

Jump down to the custom die generator

Stone Librande teaches game design in addition to being a professional game designer. He has an exercise in which he has his student create custom six-sided dice.

The rules for the custom dice is each side should be numbered with an integer that is 0 or greater and the sum of the numbers on the six sides should add up to 21 (which is the sum of the sides on a standard six-sided die: 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6). Then the students pair up and have a matchup between their two six-sided dice, higher roll wins.

Rolling two standard six-sided dice against one another would give both players a 15/36 chance of winning and a 6/36 chance of having a tie:

Custom dice, however, changes the odds. For example, the blue die in the following matchup would win 58% of the time:

As an exercise, create a couple of custom dice (or use the dice generator below) that follow Stone’s rules (the sides are numbered 0 or greater and add up to 21). Roll the dice against one another a few times. Once you have a feel for the dice, try to guess which one has the better chance of winning the matchup. See if you guess correctly by creating a matchup matrix along the lines of the ones shown above.

Custom Dice Generator

Die 1		Die 2

Hive

August 13, 2015 by Ethan 1 Comment

Learning Video Game Design on the Tabletop comes with a copy of Hive that readers can cut out (or photocopy) and play. As Hive‘s designer, John Yianni, explains in the book, the game grew out of a desire to create a Chess-like game that is played using only pieces and no game board.

Hive‘s design lends itself to expansion by way of adding new insect types to the game. In fact, the John Yianni has created Mosquito, Ladybug, and Pillbug expansion pieces that can be added to the core set of Beetles, Grasshoppers, Soldier Ants, Spiders, and Queen Bees. In addition to these official add-ons, the BoardGameGeek community have come up with several unofficial add-on insects, as well as rule variations.

If you want to take a gentle step into tabletop game design, a good way to do it is to experiment with creating an expansion to an existing game, such as a new insect type for Hive.

The World’s Most Boring Excel Spreadsheet

March 16, 2015 by Ethan Leave a Comment

Learning Video Game Design on the Tabletop briefly discusses how Excel’s spreadsheets and VBA
macro language can be used in digital prototyping. By way of example, here’s an Excel file that recreates the action of The World’s Most Boring Tower Defense Game. This means it can be played as a turn-based strategy game (i.e., the player manually advances the turns by pressing a button) or as a real time strategy game (i.e., the turns advance automatically).

The World’s Most Boring Tower Defense Game is a web-based “game” that I use to demonstrate to my students how a video game’s “real time” action actually takes place over a series of discrete turns (what programmers call “ticks”). The game is also a useful example of what a digital prototype might entail.

You will need to enable macros in order to play the game (this mean it is unplayable in the Excel 2008 for Macs—that version of Excel does not allow Macros). If you run into trouble getting it to work, let me know—the code is a bit of a hack and I wouldn’t be surprised if it runs into problems in various versions of Excel.

In particular, the timer events that drive the sprite animation required jumping through some coding hoops. I wanted to use Excel’s VBA macro language’s “OnTime” event to cause the game sprite (the animated character) to move multiple times a second. Unfortunately, OnTime cannot respond faster than once per second in the Mac version of Excel. I got around this by using the Timer function, which returns the number of seconds since midnight. I use this to have the animation occur within a while-loop that pauses a specified number of milliseconds (more-or-less) as measured using Timer during each loop. Oddly, Microsoft’s documentation for Timer states that it will not return fractions of second on a Mac. But on my Mac it does, so I was able to get the animation to work. I’m not sure if the undocumented ability is due to a change in the Mac OS or in Excel itself, but it does work (at least, it does for me).

All that is to say, this Excel spreadsheet is a bit fragile and may not work for you. Caveat emptor!

Play The World’s Most Boring Tower Defense Game online
Download the Excel version of Boring TD

The World’s Most Boring Tower Defense Game

January 21, 2015 by Ethan Leave a Comment

Play The World’s Most Boring Tower Defense Game

For many years I struggled to teach my students how to make the leap from designing tabletop games to designing video games. In particular, students without a programming background would consistently have problems defining a video game design as a series of concrete steps that do not leave gaping holes in the game algorithms.

Then one semester I taught my students flowcharting and had them create a flowchart that could play a simple game theory style game that I had designed. As if by magic, these students had no problem creating video game designs. Ever since that semester, I have always introduced students to video game design by starting with flowcharting. It has become my magical “turn you into a game designer” wand.

All this is covered in detail in Learning Video Game Design on the Tabletop , but I wanted to share The World’s Most Boring Tower Defense Game, which is one of the tools I use to demonstrate how a video game’s “real time” action actually takes place over a series of discrete turns (what programmers call “ticks”). The game is also a useful example of what a digital prototype might entail (see The World Most Boring Excel Spreadsheet for a version of the game that runs inside of Excel).

The World’s Most Boring Tower Defense Game can be played as a turn-based strategy game (i.e., the player manually advances the turns by pressing a button) or as a real time strategy game (i.e., the turns advance automatically).

Conway’s Game of Life provides another example of how “real time” is in actuality very a series of very rapidly occurring turns. As with The World’s Most Boring Tower Defense Game, Conway’s Game of Life can have its “generations” (aka turns) advance either manually or automatically (using the “step” and “run” buttons, respectively).

Play The World’s Most Boring Tower Defense Game