Week One, Project Start

Ludology and 2D games. Ludology: the study of games and gaming, mainly video games. Two major principles of gaming are randomness and uncertainty. These two principles are commonly mistaken to be the same, but are very different. Randomness: A set field of outcomes for any given input. Uncertainty: May be predetermined, but is unknown by the player. Some video games will contain both of these, some only one and some have neither. An example of a game that uses both randomness and uncertainty is Borderlands, the single player campaign is uncertain, and "loot" that you find in various chests around the world is completely random. An example of a game that has only randomness would be any game that uses a die, as the outcome is completely random. An example of a game that uses only uncertainty would be chess, as it is player vs player, you have no idea what the other player will do. The next task we had was to decide in our groups how we would add an aspect of randomness into the game we would be creating for this project. We are using two 6 sided die and one ten sided die to determine movements and attacks. On the 6 sided die the numbers wont mean what they normally do, as we are having them equal to only 0's, 1's or a 2 (via a table in the games rules), otherwise the game would be over too quickly. We also have walls, traps, HP pickups and the games ending which are all completely random and will be moved around each game.