“Point Zero Games” and “Army Of Zero”… what’s the big idea?

When we first started putting real thought into creating the characters, we decided that we ought to have a way of generating character stats that made all the gameplay balance. We didn’t know at the start how many characters we would have, and indeed we thought (before wiser heads prevailed) that we might have many more than the 84 we ended up with.

So we looked at ways of creating the characters in a way that would tie in with the puzzles and still leave a playable game. Was there a way to automatically do that? If there was, it would make creating (literally) an army of characters possible - we’re talking hundreds of characters, each with a name, stats and their own (computer-generated) image.

I recalled an article I’d read about the classic computer space-trading game Elite, whose authors Braben and Bell had used pseudo-random numbers (actually the Fibonacci sequence) to build their galaxies, and we played with similar ideas for a while. It would have been a good way to go if we’d pushed ahead with the enormous army that we originally planned, Eventually, though, saner heads prevailed and we started to settle on a smaller group of characters. When we figured out that we could get a manageable number of unique characters by having four character stats and each character’s stats adding up to zero, we knew we had something that we could make work.

I’ve written about the balance that this gave the game in a separate post, so I won’t go over it again here.  But we had the germ of the “zero” idea.

So the name of the game flowed from that.  In retrospect, “Order Of Zero” and “League Of Zero” might have been more appropriate, because of the fact that those names both imply the need to put the cards into a sequence.  (I’m not revealing any secrets here: I’ve mentioned this before.)  But “Army Of Zero” has echoes of the existing phrase “Army Of One“, so that works too.

The company name came later, but we wanted to have some kind of theme going through the company name and riffing off the word “zero” seemed a more abstract - and hence less restrictive - choice for future projects than “army”.  “Point Zero” worked out well for the treasure hunts too, because we could use the word “point” as in “compass point”: the graphic we used for the treasure hunts is a compass rose with “Z” for zero replacing “N” for north.

A few days ago we added something new to the site.  We now have a pair of treasure hunts available.  Go and have a look.

Both the treasure hunts are based in Manchester, and offer a series of clues based on interesting stuff lying around in the city.  They’re aimed at families, as all our stuff is, and available as downloads in PDF format.  We actually wrote them about a year ago, and we were selling them through our other site clooz.co.uk, but we thought it would be nice to have everything in one place.  So they’ve been rebranded under the Point Zero Games and added to our site.

It’s pretty amazing what’s around in Manchester.  The connections with the rest of the world start to fly thick and fast when you’re looking for them, and the number of hidden meanings and allusions in buildings and sculpture is a joy: here at Point Zero Games, we love hidden messages, as you’ll know if you’re an Army Of Zero fan.  But the nice thing about our treasure hunts is that you’re not expected to know this stuff before you start.  The puzzles are easy, and they guide you through the stories of Manchester and its history, so rather than needing to come equipped with lots of useless information, you actually pick up the useless fascinating information as you solve the clues.

Incidentally, if anyone out there wants us to create a treasure hunt for their own location, let us know.  It’s a great thing to include in any local publication, such as a newspaper or regional children’s magazine.

We break from tradition in this blog post to talk about someone else’s game.  Regular readers will have realised my fondness for stuff that pretend to be one thing, but then turn out to be something different.  The delight I get from having my preconceptions taken away, ripped into tiny pieces and handed back to me is a rare pleasure, but one to be savoured, and it certainly inspired Army Of Zero, even if Army Of Zero’s dual nature isn’t really a secret.

And so, I’d like to point you in the direction of a “role-playing game” called The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen, by James Wallis.  Players adopt the roles of (let’s say) eighteenth century European nobles and challenge one another to tell tall tales, viz: “Tell me Baron, the story of the time you ate the King of Norway’s horse in most curious circumstances”.  Or: “Tell me Baron, the story of why the keeper of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew classified your moustache as a herb”.  And so forth.  Disputes are settled by duels to the death (but if you don’t want to cause a mess on the floor, the Baron gives you leave to replace the usual duelling with a round of Rock-Paper-Scissors).

And basically that’s it as far as the game is concerned.  Is it a good game to play?  I dunno.  I don’t expect I’ll ever play it, because I’m not clever enough, and it requires an ability for improv. comedy that I suspect would defeat many.

But how the game plays isn’t the point.  The point is that the rule book is very, very funny.  It’s written in the voice of the eponymous Baron and published in a style that I haven’t seen since I attended a minor English public school in the 1970’s, which by my calculations makes it a reasonable facsimile of a book from two centuries earlier - all engraved illustrations, effs where there should be esses, and, wow, catchwords!  I haven’t seen catchwords for decades.

Here’s a sample paragraph from the book:

Gather the company and count its members.   If it is late in the evening then ask a manservant or potboy to do it for you.   Make sure that each player has a purse of coins before them equal to the total number of players—do not ask a servant to do this,  servants being by nature a shifty and feckless lot who will as soon rob a man blind as help him out of a ditch,  and I have been robbed in enough ditches to know.   If your company  numbers less than five,  then give each one five coins.   If it numbers more than twenty then think not of playing the game :  instead I advise you to pool your purses,  hire some mercenaries and plan an invasion of Belgium.

And so on, in a similar vein.  It says it’s a role-playing game, actually I would file it under humour.

You can order The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen from Mongoose Publishing.  And you can download a sample of the first few pages as a PDF from Magnum Opus Press.

So… we’re a month into Army Of Zero, and so far no-one’s cracked the puzzles.  I think one or two people have figured out what the notches around the edges are for, but so far, that’s about it.  But it’s early days, so keep on keeping on.  There are some (very vague) hints over in the FAQ, if you’re completely bamboozled.

In response to one person’s question: you don’t need any special equipment to decode the messages, nothing like colour filters or anything like that.  All the information is in plain sight, but you might need to refer to books or the internet to make sense of what you find.