Battle Mahjong
We like to kick lots of ideas around the office. Sometimes we kick them until, like the poor fellow in Clockwork Orange, they lie twisted and bleeding on the ground with Singing in the Rain playing cheerily off to one side.
For example, the other day I heard some members of the Neopets team discussing the idea of breeding a dolphin with a chimp. Nobody was sure if it would result in a chimp with fins, but if it did, Deanna - the gameplay lead on Neopets - assured everybody that she would be happy to look after it.
Aside from the inappropriate hybridization of wildly diverse species, the most interesting ideas we talk about are naturally ideas for games.
Daniel, our DS Lead on an almost-announced project, asked the other day how we could write Battle Mahjong. It's been spinning around in my head for a few days now and the best way to get stuff like that out seems to be to vomit my thoughts up here in my blog, thus clearing some room in my skull for more important ideas like, oh I don't know... how to make a cocktail that includes beer and raspberry cordial.
After my initial mental images of Battle Mahjong that included two chimps with fins gleefully hurling bone tiles at each other until one of them lost an eye, my brain switched out of idiot mode and into game designer mode - a movement that is usually akin to leaping across a tiny crack in the pavement.
To begin with, there are two different types of Mahjong. There's real Mahjong and then there is the one many of us are probably more familiar with: Mahjong Solitaire. Since real Mahjong is already a competitive game, I'd rather think of how to bastardize the solitaire version into something cool. Since it's a game about matching pairs of tiles and clearing a board, it'd be pretty easy to have each tile type represent some resource or action in the game that either benefited you or harmed your opponent. Because it is naturally turn-based, and could be comparitive in effect rather than destructive (think compare final scores, rather than do actual damage), I think it could be easily adapted to greater than 2 players or even for cooperative play.
Anyway, it sounds cool to me. So if anybody reads this and thinks it sounds cool too, please write the game, because Daniel and I would both like to play it.
If it's good, we'll even send you one of our chimps with fins.
Cheers
-Steve
For example, the other day I heard some members of the Neopets team discussing the idea of breeding a dolphin with a chimp. Nobody was sure if it would result in a chimp with fins, but if it did, Deanna - the gameplay lead on Neopets - assured everybody that she would be happy to look after it.
Aside from the inappropriate hybridization of wildly diverse species, the most interesting ideas we talk about are naturally ideas for games.
Daniel, our DS Lead on an almost-announced project, asked the other day how we could write Battle Mahjong. It's been spinning around in my head for a few days now and the best way to get stuff like that out seems to be to vomit my thoughts up here in my blog, thus clearing some room in my skull for more important ideas like, oh I don't know... how to make a cocktail that includes beer and raspberry cordial.
After my initial mental images of Battle Mahjong that included two chimps with fins gleefully hurling bone tiles at each other until one of them lost an eye, my brain switched out of idiot mode and into game designer mode - a movement that is usually akin to leaping across a tiny crack in the pavement.
To begin with, there are two different types of Mahjong. There's real Mahjong and then there is the one many of us are probably more familiar with: Mahjong Solitaire. Since real Mahjong is already a competitive game, I'd rather think of how to bastardize the solitaire version into something cool. Since it's a game about matching pairs of tiles and clearing a board, it'd be pretty easy to have each tile type represent some resource or action in the game that either benefited you or harmed your opponent. Because it is naturally turn-based, and could be comparitive in effect rather than destructive (think compare final scores, rather than do actual damage), I think it could be easily adapted to greater than 2 players or even for cooperative play.
Anyway, it sounds cool to me. So if anybody reads this and thinks it sounds cool too, please write the game, because Daniel and I would both like to play it.
If it's good, we'll even send you one of our chimps with fins.
Cheers
-Steve
Total Comments 10
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lol. chimps with fins. you should write more blogs steve or have a separate section for yours on teh front page. theyre funny. dammit i sound like a fanboy.
need to balance things out a bit then so - infinite should get off their lazy @$$es and give us psp galactrix!!!!!!! thats better, now my post has the appropriate level of anger for the internet |
Posted 07-17-2008 at 03:28 PM by Red Knight
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Steve,
Once upon a time in the early 90's a hotseat version of a Battle Mahjong was available on the Amiga called Shanghai. Players alternated timed turns (about 10 seconds in length) trying to match a pair of tiles. As soon as you matched or if the timer expired it went to the other players turn. The game winner was the person who matched the most pairs of tiles. Thus there was an incentive to move quickly to deny your opponent time to look for future matches on your turn. Also once you were ahead you wanted to mangle the board to get to 0 matches left ASAP so you'd win. Of course the *real* battle was for control of 1 mouse in hot seat mode as I recall more than a few *cheater* comments when you didn't let go of the mouse quickly enough  I spent countless hours playing that game in hotseat mode with friends. You can probably download it off one of the game sites dedicated to preserving old software and run it on an emulator. It would be a cool game to have now that we could have online play even if it didn't get any additions at all. KGB |
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Posted 07-17-2008 at 07:04 PM by KGB
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Quote:
For example, the other day I heard some members of the Neopets team discussing the idea of breeding a dolphin with a chimp. Nobody was sure if it would result in a chimp with fins, but if it did, Deanna - the gameplay lead on Neopets - assured everybody that she would be happy to look after it.
Does my presence keep a certain level of sanity around for the rest of the team or something? And a Chimp/Dolphin hybrid could be quite smart, seeing as how dolphins are the second most intelligent species on Earth, right in front of Humans. I wonder what the most intelligent species is? |
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Posted 07-17-2008 at 11:26 PM by Si_
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I wonder what the most intelligent species is?
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Posted 07-18-2008 at 01:30 AM by Charcoal
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Designers
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Posted 07-18-2008 at 02:34 AM by Si_
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http://forums.infinite-interactive.c...read.php?t=560
However, since I have a tendency to procastinate nothing has happened since (and lately I've been playing around with an idea for an advanced Settlers of Catan...). Anyway, for a battle Mahjong, I guess you could start by giving each of the different tile types from the original some resource type, figure in rules which allow you to chain moves, throw in some specials like spells in PQ and enforce that timelimit KGB mentioned. Maybe the biggest question would be filling the field, if the game resembled PQ. Although just playing a field by field and creating a new one when the current one has no more moves available, I think some sort of an algorithm to "regenerate" the field at times would make things more interesting. There could alternatively be a mode where both players move at the same time, however on multiplayer this would easily degenerate into a battles of Fastest Mouse Hand and Least Lag. On tiles/theme/spells: For a Mahjong game I think a Chinese inspired theme would be appropriate, which is why I think maybe there should be five elements (metal, wood, water, fire, earth). This would obviously mean five kinds of "mana" pieces, added with whatever special pieces you would want. The only question would be, should all of the elements be equally powerful (and as such have as many pieces on the board) or should some of them be more rare? If some of them would be more rare, that could be easily done by assigning, say, fire, earth and water to the main three suits and throwing metal and wood on the floral and seasonal suits. If they were to be equal, by adding up the three main suits, florals and seasonals you get 35 pairs, which would nicely give 7 pairs for each element. The rest of the pieces (wind and dragon) could be left for special pieces ("skulls", wildcards, board refill, board mix up...). (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahjong_tiles) |
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Posted 07-18-2008 at 04:19 AM by Jodwin
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I wonder what the most intelligent species is?
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Posted 07-18-2008 at 07:27 AM by MarcDerell
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Jodwin, I've got Mahjong Quest and it's actually not bad. There's a story mode which really just starts with easy games and increases the difficulty but adds some interesting non-standard tiles to the mix to make life interesting, such as dynamite, whirlwinds and ..err can't remember what it's called but it lets you swap a tile with another. The story and the game are pretty disconnected though. It really was a case of "let's make up a story to wrap around this game we've made", I think.
You can also play regular mahjong solitaire, with quite a few different board layouts and you can also select any one of a number of different rule sets just to spice things up a bit. All in all, if you like playing mahjong solitaire, I think it's well worth the price and it provides quite a lot more variety than others Ive seen. On the Battle Quest idea... Hmm.. watch this space |
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Posted 07-18-2008 at 01:16 PM by Malorion
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sounds rather nice. also what about timed games, whereby you both race to beat a board, where pairing gains points, points gain prizes and prizes are ways of slowing opponents, shuffling, addind tiles etc. could work?
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Posted 11-20-2008 at 11:01 PM by gangrath
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That would be very interesting to play
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Posted 06-15-2009 at 03:06 AM by Deadmeat
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Recent Blog Entries by SteveFawkner
- Battle Mahjong (07-17-2008)
- Going the Full 360 (06-16-2008)
- My Personal Character Sheet (06-04-2008)
- Virtual Pants Around Virtual Ankles (06-04-2008)
- Thinking About Design... (05-20-2008)
