UFO Racing League and Collisions

My whole description of this game broke down when I tried to write about collisions... because... I still haven't figured them out completely.  This has been the piece of the puzzle that has seen the most revisions.

The collision system has always involved two things: damage and changing momentum.

Your UFO takes damage when you hit a wall or are hit by another UFO.  That damage then reduces the amount of energy you get to help you maneuver.  But you also heal so that you will eventually be back to full effectiveness.  Exactly how much damage and how much effect and how you heal have all been tinkered with over the years.

Your momentum is also altered when you hit something or are hit by a UFO... exactly how has also changed a lot over the years.

The damage problems have usually been about finding the right balance between making damage have a real effect without too much of an effect.  A lot of this has to do with the kind of race I want -- a race where the UFOs are barely in control, banging off an occasional wall for strategic reasons and definitely hitting other UFOs because they can -- a cross between a demolition derby and NASCAR race.

The other issue I've struggled with is complexity.  My early systems where way to complicated both in relation to the amount of damage meted out by different collisions as well as how momentum would change after a collision.  Until recentlyish, I was the only person who understood collisions well enough to play the game.  That has improved a lot.  Hopefully enough.

Right now, if you hit a wall or get hit by another UFO you take 1 damage.  You track that damage on the chart shown on the right.  I'm using the plastic orange flame to note that I've taken 1 damage.  That means that next turn I will only get 3 energy instead of 4 energy.  As soon as I get that energy, I will heal 1 damage.

Back in the day, you could essentially take infinite damage.  But then UFOs could end up in situations where they would spend several turns doing nothing but tracking their ship's damage and floating around the track aimlessly -- often taking more damage in the process.  It wasn't fun.

So one thing I've done is cap damage at 3.  You will always get at least 1 energy on a turn.  Also, if you already have 3 damage and then take another damage, you actually gain an energy in your battery.  So beating on a defenseless ship actually helps that ship.  This system seems to be working.  Taking 1 damage isn't too harmful and doing it on purpose can be worth it.  But if you take 2 or 3 it can be a pain.

Collisions themselves come in two flavors: hitting walls and hitting other UFOs.  The system involving momentum and collisions is similar for both.  In either case half of your momentum in that direction will go away and you will keep the other half.  If you hit a wall, that momentum you keep gets flipped to the opposite direction -- you bounced.  If you hit another UFO, you give half of your momentum to the other UFO -- you push it.  Both effects can be used strategically.  That other UFO may not really want to be going that fast in that direction.  And bouncing off of walls can be the best way to change directions sometimes even if it causes you damage.

I am glossing over some details here.  And the fact that there are more details is something that is constantly a concern and most of play testing these days focuses on collisions and track design.

One great suggestion I got at a play test a couple of months ago was to add more things to do with energy then just movement.  Especially if it could add more control to when and how you got hit in a collision.  Sometimes it just seemed like there was nothing you could do about that UFO bearing down on you at ramming speed when there should be.

So I added a couple widgets.  Initiative can be used to try to move before everyone else or after everyone else.  Inertial fields can modify how a collision goes down.

A UFO with two positive initiative will move before any UFO with less then two initiative.  It now supersedes total speed for determining who goes first.  Negative initiative works exactly the opposite because sometimes you want everyone else to get out of your way first.

Using the anchor field makes your heavier and harder to move around in a collision.  If you hit a wall you shed all of your momentum in that direction but you take an extra damage.  If a UFO hits you its just like that UFO hit a wall.  If you hit a UFO that UFO takes an extra damage.

Using the spring field makes you bounce more.  If you hit a wall you keep all of your momentum when you bounce it to the opposite direction.  If you hit another UFO, that UFO gains all of your momentum instead of half.  You also do not take any damage from collisions.

Each energy you place on each field allows you to use that field for one collision that turn.  Mostly, I think these effects will be used for strategic collisions with walls, especially the spring field.  However, having an anchor available can be a nice deterrent for someone is thinking about hitting you.

That said, these things need play testing beyond myself.  But if they work, I could see interesting possibilities for upgrading or downgrading your ship's capabilities before the race by making these options better or worse.

UFO Racing League: The Tracks

I know I keep promising to talk about collisions.  When I started this walkthrough with a discussion of movement I suggested that collisions would be next but instead talked about the battery, because I forgot about it when talking about movement.  I want to talk about collisions.  But first, lets talk about one of the things you can collide with: walls.  Well, sometimes I'm going to call them bulkheads so that I can use one word to describe floors, ceiling, and walls that often don't have much to differentiate themselves.

The tracks in UFO Racing League are essentially large, empty space stations designed specifically as 3-dimensional race tracks.  Each track starts with a starting box where each space ship begins the race from a standing start and each track ends with an exit out of the track and into empty space.  The winner of the race is the first to exit the track.

The tracks in this game are built from modular pieces which are reused for other tracks or can be mixed and matched to create your own tracks.  Each track piece has one job: to convey where the bulkheads are.  Lets look a piece.

While its pretty easy to figure out where the walls are, the floors and ceilings are another matter.  On the piece below you can see that there are colors on the spaces as well as outside the walls.  These colors correspond to a color bar that measures elevation.  The color of the spaces represents the floor and the color along the walls represents the ceiling.  These colors match the color bars on the spine of each spaceship's stand and is repeated on each control board as well.  You will also see numbers along the sides of each track piece that show these values numerically as well.

On the above piece the floor is blue or 3.  That actually represents lowest elevation that a spaceship can be before it hits the floor.  The floor is technically just a bit below that.  The ceiling is red or 5.  Just like the floor this is the highest elevation a spaceship can be before it hits the ceiling.  Being at the height indicated for either the floor or ceiling is always ok, anything beyond that however will result in a collision.  (Yes, I promise collisions are next.)  So on this piece of track, a spaceship can be at elevation 3,4, or 5.

For many track pieces the ceiling and floor change in the middle of the piece.  Here is one of my favorite track pieces.

If you enter this track piece from the left side of this page, you are in a very high section of track -- the floor is at 6.  As you enter the corner of the turn, the ceiling remains at 7 (the highest in the game) but the floor drops down to 1 (the lowest).  After rounding the corner, the floor stays at 1 but the ceiling drops all the way to 2.

So spaceships travelling along this section of track must not only turn 90 degrees to the right, but they must also quickly drop from elevation 6 or 7 to elevation 1 or 2 and then stop dropping so that they don't hit the floor.

This next section is also one of my favorites.

This piece has a lot of elevation changes on it.  Again, if you enter the piece from the left side of the page, it starts out low (1-3) then very slowly increases in elevation as it turns in a spiral before actually running over itself at the end.

One of the fun things about this piece of track is that when a ship is on one of the four spaces that could be either the top or bottom of the spiral, I have yet to see anyone get confused about which part they are on because of the elevation difference.  If your ship is at elevation 3 or less you are in the bottom section.  If your ship is at elevation 5 or higher you are in the top section.

When racing this part of track, the tricky bit is that elevation changes do not overlap very much which creates a very narrow gap where the elevation changes.  So when moving from the 4-5 section to the 5-7 section (green floor to red floor) you have to be at elevation 5.  Any higher and you hit the ceiling in the lower part and any lower and you end up hitting a wall (we'll visualize that later).  That makes this piece a bit of a bottleneck.

Here, I've copied the graphic showing the elevation scale on the spine of the spaceship stands so that you can see all of the colors in order.

Someone asked me recently how I picked those colors.  I essentially started with "darker" colors for lower on the track and moved up to "lighter"colors for higher on the track.  That maybe a bit subjective and I think the numbers are key.  To some degree I expect that the colors are more important for warning that the ceiling or floor elevation has changed and you need to pay attention to that.  I don't really expect people to memorize the color scheme.  Then again, I've seen stranger behavior.

UFO Racing League, The Battery

Last post I promised we'd talk about collisions.  But lets talk about the battery first.

Each UFO comes with a battery where energy can be stored.  If you have energy in your battery -- we have two chips on the battery circled below...

...you can take that energy and add it to the base new thrust you got this turn.  You can take some or all of it.  But you can not put it back.  If you take it, you must use it.

So how do you end up with energy in your battery?  When you are placing new thrust, instead of adding it to the 3D compass rose, you can add it to your battery.  For every 2 thrust put on the battery space in the new thrust area you can put 1 energy in your battery.

Below we are putting two chips on the battery space, along with a couple thrust on the compass rose.

When you move the new thrust up to the current momentum compass rose in order to figure out your movement for this turn, you can move energy to your battery.  In this case, the two chips becomes one chip and is added to your battery space.

You can not put only 1 thrust in the battery space in the new thrust area... all energy put into the battery is rounded down and the remainder discarded.

Next, we really will talk about collisions.  Or... Tracks.  I know completely not the same thing.  Maybe I'll tease you forever promising to talk about collisions.

UFO Racing League, Basic Movement Walkthrough

Before I get too far into talking about the status of UFO Racing League, I figured I should walk through the game as it is.  Not too many details here, just the basics.

In the future, we race space ships instead of race cars -- of course.  The UFO Racing League is akin to NASCAR in space in style.  The space ships in the series were nicknamed UFOs because that's what they look like.

Each player gets a control board that they use to track the status of their ship's momentum, height, damage, battery, and set new thrust.  Below is the control board for the Blue #3 UFO.  For now, we will just worry about the parts related to movement -- the core of the game.

The top left of the board is where the ship's current momentum is tracked (close-up below).  Note that momentum is tracked along 3 axis: one vertical; and two horizontal axis.  Small blue poker chips are stacked in the circles to indicate how much momentum the ship currently has in that direction.  In the middle is a picture of your UFO.

The momentum chart shows us how to move your UFO when its your turn to do so.  Below we see some blue chips in different places on the compass.  One chip on the up side of the vertical axis, one chip on one side of one of the horizontal axis, and two chips stacked on one side of the other horizontal axis.  This shows us that on our turn, we must move our ship up one, one space this way , and two spaces this way .

Note, UFOs do not have a front or a back.  So horizontal movement is made in the absolute direction of that axis.  In order to facilitate this, everyone's board should be placed on the table perpendicular to the track -- not at an angle.

So lets see how this movement works on a track.  Below we are looking at an overhead of the UFO on a piece of track.

When we move our UFO, we must move one axis at a time, but we must move the entire thrust in an axis when we move it.  We can not split up the move.  So, lets move this way  first.  We have to move two spaces that way so we end up here (translucent marker show where the ship was before).

Note that we could not have moved only one space, moved a different direction and then moved another space in this direction.  We had to move both spaces at once.  Next lets move this way  the one space we need to.

Finally we must move up one space.  Each UFO sits on a plastic base with a series of 7 steps that indicate the UFO's current height.  Below, we move from height 4 to height 5:

Now that we've seen the very basics of movement, lets learn how to change our speeds or momentum in these different directions.

The bottom of the board is where you set set your ship's new thrust at the beginning of a turn (close-up below).  Note that the basic, 3-dimensional compass rose is essentially copied with the addition of a space where energy can be ear-marked for your battery (more on batteries later).

At the beginning of every turn, you will receive some number of small blue poker chips, which represents the energy output of your ship that turn.  This energy is placed anywhere on the thrust chart or onto the battery area next to the thrust chart.

Below, we have placed four energy in different places around the thrust chart: one up, one this way , and two this way .

This is how we change our momentum from turn to turn -- by adding this thrust to our current momentum to find our new momentum, and thus how we will move our UFO this turn.

After everyone has had a chance to set their thrust for this turn (done secretly behind a screen), we must consolidate new thrust and old momentum.  Step one is to move all thrust from the thrust chart up to the same compass rose locations on the momentum chart.  In the example below, I changed the color of the new thrust tokens to red to highlight what was new and what was old.

We don't normally want momentum in two opposite directions, so its time to simplify.  Lets look at this  axis first -- highlighted by the green arrows.  Last turn we had one momentum this way .  This turn we added two thrust this way .  In all situations like this we subtract the smaller amount from the larger amount.

That will leave us with one momentum going this way .  We see the result of that below, and our next axis highlighted in green.

Now we subtract 1 new momentum  this way from the two momentum we had this way .  That leaves us with one this way .  And we move on the vertical axis.

In this situation, we added 1 thrust up to the one thrust we already had going up to end up with two thrust going up.  Now we know have our resolved momentum for this turn and can move our UFO again.

Next Time: Collisions! Or maybe Batteries! (I know, it doesn't have the same ring.)

UFO Racing League at UnPub 3

First post will be about the game I've been developing for several years now --UFO Racing League.  More about the game itself later, but last month I had the opportunity to take the game to UnPub 3 for some playtesting.  It was a fabulous experience that I recommend to anyone with a game in development.

One of the best things is that players are given a form to fill out after they play your game and then John sends them to you. I glanced at them when I got them but then saw Daniel Solis' quantitative review of the data he got from his play test of Belle of the Ball at UnPub 3 and couldn't believe I had not thought to do the same.  Yesterday I did the same.

17 different people played the game over the course of 4 games -- three 4-player games and one 5-player game. I had two families play. One husband, wife, and 2 young boys (~8-10 maybe). Another father with his two tween daughters (who texted between moves). There were also a number of other designers who played the game so a great mix of play testers.

The first 5 questions on the form ask people to rate various aspects of the game.

That's good. Of course, some of this is the fact that I was there to teach the game. The real test will come when blind testing starts and people have to learn from the rule book.  I found teaching the game to be a great experience. My second play test was near the end of Saturday's session and I suspected we would not have time to finish the game so I tried to really compress teaching and that was great because it really focused the teaching to the important parts -- in turn I think it helped me focus the pitch for the game.

The game is not designed to have much luck.  Even less now then in previous versions. Although how you view luck may help answer this question. While there may appear to be no luck at all in the game, because other people's moves can affect your moves, there is some luck there.

Always great to hear that people think your game is fun.  I was a little surprised that some people found it humorous or hilarious, but I think that may stem from running into opponents -- that can be funny for everyone who did not get run into.

That's great news.  Its something that has been a work in progress for the game. I've been spending a lot of time on track design lately which has been a big contributor to the game taking too long. The games that weekend all took right around 1.5 hours. That seems pretty good to me.

This is also great news. Previous versions of the game had some very artificial forms of interaction that I have removed because it was obvious that they were artificial and they just detracted form the best parts of the game.  After doing that I held my breath hoping that the core mechanic would be enough to carry interactivity.

The next six questions asked more yes/no quesitons.

I thought this was a very interesting question. I think most people answered this with the thought that predictable is bad. But planning ahead is a huge part of the game, so some amount of predictability at a tactical level is required to keep planning from getting frustrating.  One of the Yes answers noted in the margins that the yes answer was a good thing.

The rest of that set of questions:

Yea!  You really do love the game!  Well, at least these 17 people did.

The end of the questionnaire asked if you liked the game, why, and asked what other games you like and don't like. 16 of the 17 said they liked and 1 said they didn't know.

Whys:

• It was a quick, interactive game more based on strategy then luck
• The physics is fun. Having to think ahead about where you need to be when you get to the later parts of the track was fun
• Lots of fun, fast paced.  Opportunities for player v. player
• Physics is a fun, unique aspect in a game
• A lot of fun and very quick, and very interactive
• because it was strategic and interactive
• I felt it required a good amount of strategy
• because it was fun and could spend time with the family
• I enjoyed being able to bump players into walls
• I have never played anything like it
• cool take on racing game with concise, clear mechanics
• fun, light (feeling) but still interesting
• great 3-D. momentum is really neat
• simple, fun and its racing
• it was enjoyable with good mechanics
• it was very cranial + strategic w/o being tedious

Favorite parts:

• the player interaction
• racing, persistent momentum
• the way the physics worked
• I dunno, using quick thinking to outwit my opponents? I like competition.
• I loved crashing into people
• ramming into people
• the interaction with others
• interaction with others
• preventing players from moving forward
• 3-dimensions
• movement mechanics
• getting a feel for hot to control your ship
• imagining the 3-D space
• the math
• collisions and movement aspect
• the visualization of reakl thrust/momentum, etc.
• managing the momentum - preparing for changes in the course - strategic use of expert pilot

Least favorite parts:

• none
• collisions feel like, with all of the cool persistent movemebt, the collisions feel a bit unrealistic
• tough to say, it was all fun
• Math problems, haha
• keeping momentum
• getting trapped in the corner
• none
• none
• damage
• downtime? (maybe streamline movement resolution (time limit))
• hard to visualize the ceiling
• nothing
• make the expert pilot card once per turn
• the parts falling apart
• the math :)
• as the learning round it was too long

Favorite games of the testers;

• strategy, RPG
• rog (?)/themed
• tabletop role playing games
• word games
• anything really
• mystery
• trivia
• table top RPG
• card/dice
• strategy/euro
• heavy w/ tension (diplomacy, agricola, I do like RFTG [race for the galaxy?])

Least favorite games of the testers:

• fluffy, non-strategic party games
• worker placement
• poker/gambling games
• lifestyle(?) games.  Games where you just set up a life
• sports
• trivia
• artistic
• trivia
• I do not like racing games
• dicefest
• luck
• abstract

Thanks again to John for all his hard work and Tim for making the slog out to Delaware to play some games.