'La Decima Vittima' - My thoughts

'Okay, now what's going on?'

That was the most common sentence I said during this movie. 'La Decima Vittima' (English name: 'The 10th Victim') is a rather unusual movie which is about a game of chase where people sign up to take part in and are assigned a target, they must then find their victim and kill them. 

The story goes with a man who ends up falling in love with his victim, rather than shooting her they start building up a romantic relationship between them. Although they confront each other many times throughout the movie to kill one another, they always fail to do so due to their interests in one another.

Since the original was in Italian, the movie did seem quite humorous, whether this was intentional or due to the films age (when we watched the trailer of the movie the class were laughing through most of it, the trailer we watched here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiJ6oghRqKY ) however the film overall wasn't that bad, and also did remind me of 'The Hunger Games' which is a book/movie about groups of people fighting one another for sport. Plus it also reminds me of gladiators during the Roman era where people fought one another for sport and some people became gladiators for fame and wealth, much like on 'The 10th Victim' where once they get their 10th victim they also game fame and wealth.

Let's tweak - The Royal Game of Ur

Earlier in my blog I wrote about an ancient board game called 'The Royal Game of Ur' which was a board game that was discovered in the South of Iraq in Ur (hence its name)

Our last two lectures were spent looking back at the board games we had chosen to write about in our assignments and to tweak/iterate them however we wanted to. For my tweaks I came up with 2 tweaks:

Use a 6-sided die

Rather than using the stick dice or the triangular shaped dice, I decided to use a more commonly used die which is extremely popular in today's date of playing board games: a 6-sided die. Despite being the most mainstream way of tweaking a board game I wanted to see whether allowing the player to roll a 5 or 6 could actually change how the game plays through and if it's any better or not.
I played a few games with some of my class mates and did pick up on two interesting points:

- The traditional dice highest roll was a 4 which would be quite exciting for the player to get, especially if their piece was on a star or not on the board yet. This meant they could get another go and if they roll another 4 are able to move onto another star for another go. 

-With the introduction of rolling a 5 and 6 this meant there were less 4s being rolled and players were looking to get a 6 instead, after all, it's the new highest number to roll and thus you'll get further with a 6. However, I felt more excited than before when I did roll a 4 and got to move my piece straight from off the board onto the star for another go. 

Overall however, the 6 sided die made the game lose some of its originality alongside todays more recent games and thus I prefer to use the original dice.

Any roll allows you to take your piece off the board

Rather than aiming to try and roll the perfect amount to finally get your piece off the board, I tweaked it so that you can roll any number and if the amount of moves is less than your roll, you can move your piece off the board. This was to try and make the game faster as the player is not trying to aim for a perfect roll (which believe me, happened a lot). Depending on what you're position on the board, this worked well as well as badly:

- this tweak worked well if your pieces are near the end and you only need to roll to get your piece off, especially if it's your last piece. It is relieving knowing that you'll know the next roll guarantees a victory rather than building up stress as the luck of the roll is working against you, allowing your opponent to catch up.

- however, this tweak also works against you if you're on the other end of the game, being the one trying to catch up to the other player. I did start to feel a sense of defeat even before the game ended when my opponent only needed to roll a few more times to win the game as there was no way I could catch up with the amount of pieces I had left (cursing my luck on the rolls, everyone blames it right?) Therefore this tweak could lead to some players quitting way before the game ends as the rule where you must roll the perfect number to leave the board acted as a last hurdle to allow the opponent to catch up.

Overall

I do enjoy playing The Royal game of Ur, I also have thought up of lots of different iterations and tweaks such as:

- allowing the player to move more than one piece in a roll (e.g.: roll a 3, move one piece two spaces and another one space)

- bring in a second set of dice which the player must control two pieces during a turn

- Modifying the game so much to allow up to 4 players (a very ambicious idea however, but could be possible in my eyes)

However, I never got to implement or test these ideas out...yet. But I hope to do so in the future.

Experimenting with 3DS Max

So, what have I been up to lately?

Well, during my course we've been taught 3D modelling on a program called '3DS Max'. A useful tool, and fun to experiment with. Lately we had to create 5 3D models of objects or furniture in or around 150 polygons which was quite a challenge. I don't think I did too badly and the results of each of my models were impressive, however for my next assignment I will use textures that were made for modelling and not the textures from the pictures I took of my soon-to-be models...

My 3D models, not bad for a first time try (there's 6 as I made the bottom right table but decided to scrap due to too low poly count but kept it as it looked nice)

Then afterwards we were taught a few more skills with 3D modelling, namely the line tool which can draw shapes straight away and can trace around a picture allowing you to model it further. This combined with the lathe tool allowed me to create all sorts of different shapes and object. We were then tasked to create chess pieces during a 3D modelling lecture. I decided to give myself the goal to re-create every single chess piece and even put them on a chessboard just to see if I could do it.

It took me a few hours (and a lot of patience) but I was able to recreate the board and all the pieces, the hardest piece to create was the knight chess piece due to the amount of curves and points you had to put in when tracing the horse. Below is a screenshot of my finished chessboard with the chess pieces:

Sadly, I didn't remove the green seams going around the board when I took this picture.

So what now? I hope to carry on messing around with 3DS Max, hoping to make more complicating objects and just test my skill with creating 3D models, after all, about 6 months ago I had no idea how to use 3DS Max and yet now I'm creating these.

And I'm back!

It feels like forever since my last post which I apologize for. Not only have I been caught up with my work and getting a bit too happy with my leisure time (plus I forgot what my password was which is a bit embarrassing!)

Anyways, to show what I've been up to I'll be making another post shortly after to show what I have been up to and hopefully I can keep to a schedule of posting.