Field TD

One of the reasons that I’m capturing my thoughts about my prior projects is that some of them are a bit fuzzy, and I don’t want them to go away forever. The ESC Games may not be playable, but I have plenty of media from six years of development and public installations. Other games, however, are ephemeral. They exist in a moment and often never exist again. And, as noted elsewhere, I am the photographer and the facilitator, so I usually have few, if any, images of my live game work. Anyway, this writing is as much for me as for you, as I recall the often crazy details of my years in games.

Somewhere in the late aughts, tower defense games became the new hotness. They were pervasive across Flash game sites and invaded the new iPhone platform. The mechanic is that enemies come in waves, and the player places some form of automated weapon along a path. The player earns some currency for each enemy defeated, allowing more automated weapons to be placed. And the game continues like that until the player is inevitably overwhelmed.

I thought of a field version of tower defense the summer of my first Come Out and Play. It sat in my notebook until a year later when I found a new festival called the Steel City Games Festival. I submitted seven games, thinking they would take one or two. All of the games made it in.

The games I brought to the festival were:

1. Rhythm is a Dancer (aka How to Dance)
2. Knight Cavalier Princess
3. Out of the Box
4. The Lost Treasure of M.O.W.
5. Live Action Spy Party
6. Field TD
7. Field Q*Bert

Rhythm is a Dancer is a Simon Says-like projector game, as is Out of the Box.

Note: Out of the Box was created similarly to Live Action Mao, the precursor to The Lost Treasure of M.O.W. It’s not article-worthy as I ran out of activities and needed to fill time at camp. I adapted Simon Says into a non-verbal hand-sign game, and it worked. I loved being an utterly silent facilitator - that is, until I called someone out and yelled, “Out of the box!” which was mean but embraced by players.

Knight Cavalier Princess is a game I attribute to Karl Rohnke, but perhaps it’s something I made up at camp with my friend Bryan Vitale . Googling it (in quotes) has only Pete-based results. Huh. The Lost Treasure of M.O.W. is a game I debuted at LAPDAWG. Live Action Spy Party was a new game with its premiere at Come Out and Play the prior month; I’ll write about it in another article. Field TD is my version of tower defense in real life. Field Q*Bert… well. It was my attempt at another classic arcade game redone in person. I’m pretty sure it didn’t work because it was too unbalanced. The game was essentially Tag, except the non-it player had to rearrange stacks of cones, which turned out to be more burdensome than anticipated. Maybe Joshua DeBonis remembers the specifics?

Note: It’s possible that most of the players didn’t know the game was broken. I started facilitating games when I was eleven and knew how to redirect games in the right direction. This is how I fixed untested rules on the fly and (theoretically) would incorporate said fixes into future play sessions. Field Q*Bert was never played again.

ESI Design sponsored Michael Schneider , Bryan Vitale (not an employee!), and me to attend the Steel City Game Festival, which included props and travel expenses. We even got three dark blue jumpsuits from a janitorial supply company as our game-facilitation outfits.

I’ll interrupt this reminiscence to point out my vision: I thought we would look like the Beastie Boys, which… we didn’t, but it still felt cool. The issue was that the event happened in the late summer and was in the high eighties for the outdoor games. We didn’t feel cool then.

We made it to the festival. But it wasn’t without drama! Here is an email I sent to the company about my adventure getting to Pittsburgh:

Toward the end of last week, Ericka Saurit and Matt Weisgerber completed ordering the supplies necessary for our festival experience. Included were 300 blue stress balls, 200 yellow stress balls, 100 red stress balls, a dozen foam swords, a dozen Green Lantern inflatable shields (we got these for almost nothing on eBay), a large cardboard castle, 200 colored half-cones, three jumpsuits, and various other props of every shape and size. I grabbed four duffle bags to stuff all our goodies and drove them home on Thursday evening.

I was incredibly stressed about the whole situation because (1) my wife was pregnant, and I didn’t want to be too far away, (2) a potentially major hurricane was on the way, and (3) some of the software for the festival was not complete(!) I drove around for over an hour trying to find a parking spot and finally settled on a place far away from my apartment that required me to move before 8 am on Saturday (flight day). I brought my camera, backpack, and the ESI HD camera inside and settled for dinner. After cutting video and Spy Party cards for 3 – 4 hours, I went to bed and finished my coding the following evening (Friday – the games started Saturday morning). Preferring to sleep in before the flight, I grabbed the car and tried to find another parking spot, assuming that something was bound to have opened up – and I was right! At 12:30 AM, I parked a block away from my apartment and, shortly after, collapsed into bed.

Note: If you ever lived in New York City and had a car, you will empathize with the parking nonsense.

At 5:45 AM, I was awoken by my phone and a blocked-out number. The guy on the other line was rambling about various things and then asked me where I parked. I instantly concluded that this was some volunteer for the city of New York making sure that my car would be safe from Hurricane Irene. How nice! This misconception was shattered, however, when he started talking about a break-in – and frankly, I heard nothing else. He told me to meet at the car, so my pregnant wife and I dressed and ran out the door. The whole time, I was trying to figure out how the police returned my stolen car to the place I had parked it – and why. I was confused.

We got to the car and stared for a couple of moments. The back passenger window was smashed completely, and the glass was on the back seat. I started laughing. The duffle bags were gone – 3 bags containing half of the balls (the blue ball duffle was at my friend Bryan’s house), and the rest of the props were gone entirely. The bandit had made off with over 100 pounds of gaming props! Nothing else was missing from the car – stereo intact, GPS still there, EZ Pass present. The trunk was fine. This would-be thief must have thought a college student was moving out and naively left his life in the back seat of my car. Unfortunately, he was wrong.

The robbery occurred at 2:15 am. I know this because a neighbor noticed the guy smash my window and grab a bag... And subsequently, come back to the car for the other bags. The neighbor called the police, and while I slept, an elaborate operation was executed to catch the guy right in front of my apartment.

On my way to the airport to make a 10:30 am flight, I detoured the 114th precinct in Astoria to claim my items. Following proper procedure, the police counted and documented every ball, sword, cone, and shield and laid them out for my inspection. The reaction from the night crew was that I must be a clown or a salesman, but the cardboard castle remained a mystery.

The end of that story is that I missed a day of work, along with the guy who called in the crime, to sit in court to testify against this guy. He was a repeat offender that the Astoria police had tried to nail for years, and this was their chance. Unfortunately, the case was dismissed as the perpetrator was apprehended without being presented with his Miranda rights. This only took the lawyers five hours to work out, so it was a glorious waste of time for all. The silver lining is that I was presented with a restraining order that said, and I’m paraphrasing, that he was not permitted near me, nor was he allowed to commit crimes against me. I guess that’s something?

But that happened a month later. I grabbed my gear and boarded a plane to Pittsburgh with Bryan and Michael, boarding just before the doors closed.

The cab ride to the event was quite notable. The driver started off waxing poetic about the beauty of Pittsburgh, joked about keeping his wife hogtied with duct tape in the basement, and finished with a racist rant about immigrants.

The festival opened with the projector games Rhythm is a Dancer, M.O.W., and Out of the Box. We moved to the field for Field Q*Bert and Knight, Cavalier, Princess. Live Action Spy Party went well, but that was expected as it was the second playthrough at a festival. The day ended with Field TD, and the execution was perfect.

The goal of Field TD is to destroy the castle, which has a set number of hit points. The players are divided into two teams, alternating offense and defense. Each offensive player has three lives and has to get to the castle via a set path. If they get to the end, any remaining lives damage the castle - so a perfect run will take three hit points away. Offenders can trade lives away for items, such as a Shield (helpful) or a Sword (not very useful, but cool looking).

The defense has a similar economy - defenders get three points each round to purchase ammo. The four types of ammo are Blue Balls (1 damage), Yellow Balls (2 damage), Red Balls (3 damage), and Mines (1 damage) - the amount of damage equals the charge per piece of ammo. Any offender that is destroyed before making it to the castle gives the defending team an extra three points to use for the following round. Before the round starts, the defenders must take a static position somewhere along the path and can move once the round is complete.

That’s the basic idea of the game - and it worked so well that Field TD won the Most Fun Game Award at the festival. Riding high on this achievement, I entered the game into the IndieCade festival in 2013, and it was a featured night game. I could not attend due to a conflict, so my friend Mattia Romeo ran the game for me. This proved to work out well because Mattia’s experience running the game was not as successful as mine. He wrote me a breakdown of the issues faced, many related to the context of the game, not the game itself. Some of his feedback, though, was perfect - such as the economy's complexity.

Although I completely understand the logic behind the economy, and it seems intuitive, it’s hard to track and takes much facilitation to get right. I had Michael and Bryan, as well as volunteers, in Pittsburgh running the game. Doing it solo in a less-than-ideal environment amplifies the complexity and frustration of the players.

November of 2013 was Come Out and Play San Francisco. Jessica Fiorini was a newly hired Game Designer & Writer at ESI Design, so we went together to run Field TD and Killer Queen on behalf of Joshua DeBonis and Nik Mikros . Instead of doing something sensible, like doing a minor iteration on Field TD, I completely changed the game into Super Field TD. The idea of the economy was scrapped for a leveling system - the better players did each round, the faster they would level up into new roles. The different roles came with different abilities.

Offense

Each level offers different abilities:

1. Soldier - 1 Life (RED)

2. Veteran Soldier - 2 Lives, Shield (ORANGE)

3a. Specialized Skill Soldier - 1 Life, 1 Special Ball, Shield (YELLOW)

3b. Captain - 2 Lives, Sword, Shield (GREEN)

4a. Bodyguard - 1 Life, Shield (BLUE)

4b. General - 3 Lives, Sword, Shield (VIOLET)

NOTE: The General cannot be killed if the Bodyguard is still alive (unless the General steps on a mine). The General can lose two lives but will keep the third if a Bodyguard is in play. There can only be a General with a Bodyguard.

Defense

There are four different levels of Towers:

1. Shooter - 1 ball per round (RED)

2. Veteran Shooter - 2 balls per round (ORANGE)

3a. Specialized Skill Shooter - 1 ball per round, one mine per round (YELLOW)

3b. Tower Commander - 3 balls per round (GREEN)

4a. Specialized Skill Commander - 2 balls per round, two mines per round (BLUE)?

4b. Tower General - 3 balls per round (VIOLET)

NOTE: The Tower General can relocate one time during the round. The Tower General may only throw balls once planted in a new location.

The colors represent a flag that hung from the player’s waste (a flag that could be grabbed for bonus points, which kept offenders in the middle of the path). And the roles were printed out on posters around the playfield, so the progression was clear.

Even though this seems more convoluted than the original idea, it was much more straightforward. Players no longer had to track points or lives; leveling up was satisfying. Trying out new roles made the game less repetitive and allowed deeper strategies. The game evolved beautifully from the first attempt in Pittsburgh, and both versions are worth playing today. You just need 600 balls and a good parking spot.