Developers Diary. Meeting 1. Orangutan.

First meeting.

We met up to start the prject by discussing our different ideas and settling on one.

First things first however, we decided to fill in the other roles:

I was given the role of Producer.

Erik decided to be Lead Coder.

Filip decided that Lead Art was for him.

Marcus chose Game Designer.

Alex 1 chose QA and Lead Sound was given to Alex 2.

We discussed at length our different game ideas and finally settled on Marcus’s, which I’ll explain briefly:

You are an Orangutan in a jungle, and zookeepers have been sent out to find and take you back to the zoo they’re working at. You must use your different weapons to to defeat them and repel them from the jungle.

After this we distributed certain tasks for the group to manage until wednesday, which is when we will meet again.

Week 5.

Week five was a somewhat slow week. With Adam not present and our communications-course on hold, we were given a challenge to create a finished concept-document based on randomly generated story and characters for our introductory game design course.

We made a team of 6 people, and set to work over the course of 2 days to do the assignment. I kept a developer diary on what everyone was doing, our more skilled graphical artists made art for our different characters and we all made an effort to actually deliver something that was appealing to a niched market.

We designed a point-and-click adventure-game in which you play a young ex-skin-therapist vampire-girl, who longs for company, but due to her terrible skin-condition during the day (vampires can’t stand sunlight), there’s only one person who will be with her, and that’s a blind vampire-hunter that aspires to greatness. He doesn’t know she’s a vampire. They get  a tip about a haunted mansion somewhere in Italy. The game takes the player to a few locations around Italy before finally showing them the mansion, and its many explorable rooms and puzzles. The mansion is haunted by a demonic baby which the vampire-girl wants to make skin-creme off of.

That’s the plot, and we were all very pleased with the effort.

This week was also the first game-jam, which I did not participate in due to illness, but from what I hear it was incredibly educational and a great deal of fun, hopefully the ones that could go were able to take something away from it that will be useful later on.

Week 4.

This week we were given the assignment to create a playable paperback game in 24 hours.

We were told to choose an already existing game and duplicate the player experience from that game. To do this we had to analyze what we liked about it, what was the games essence, and cut it out of the game and turn it applicable in a paperback prototype of that game. For example: one team chose tetris, which to them was a timed challenge experience.

We chose snake. For me, Snake was a game about growing longer, and it felt amazing to see yourself grow. However our team decided on making a tabletop game about becoming your own doom under pressure.

We drew ladders on an A3 paper, and constructed ropes that the player could place between the ladder to move between them. This was vital to the game.

There were four ladders on the paper. At the top of each ladder was a letter, starting from left to right A,B,C,D. At the bottom of the ladders were colors, Blue, Red, Pink and Green. The player draws two cards, and gets assigned a letter and a color. During thirty seconds the player places ropes between the ladders in order to make the avatar move between them. The avatar has to cross the first rope it comes into contact with. When the thirty seconds are up, if the avatar can not move to the color it was assigned, it’s game over.

After the player has scored 5 points, one for each level complete, and one for each bonus point gained, the player has to guide two avatars to two separate points on the board.

All in all we didn’t succeed in recreating the snake experience, but we had an extremely good time, and we all felt pleased with the game we had, disregarding snake. It was an entertaining game that did get harder the more you played it, which is what we set as a goal.

As Adam left the island we had no more lectures in Game Design and Analysis but we still had plenty to do with our essays. We are all struggling and maintaining different teams to complete our tasks, and most of us seem to be enjoying ourselves.

Week 3.

As week three comes to an end, so does another week full of exciting new ways to construct and design games.

At the first days of the week, we were given a lecture on pitch, documentation, and design documents, and the importance of these. By documenting the things we design, by keeping track of what we’re doing, it gets harder to get lost. There seems to be a heavy focus on getting us all used to writing academically, something I’m not sufficiently experienced in as of yet, but they tell us that by the end of the year, we’ll look back at our first essays and other documentations and wonder why we thought it was ever hard. I’m grateful for every challenge they’ve provided us with so far. There’s nothing I haven’t done whole-heartedly, except perhaps find time for reading our course-material. But I’m trying.

This Thursday we were given the honor of having a lecture and workshop with Ernest Adams, a game designer / author / guest professor. His way of presenting the “why’s” of his way of game design was amusing and inspiring, with a heavy tone of “What will the player do in your game?”. And it’s given me some food for thought. I am looking forward to seeing some examples of design documents, so that I can begin practicing writing my own ones, and I hope that my Moleskine arrives soon, so that I can start taking down notes of the ideas that I get, and there are many of them.

The workshop consisted of this:

We were split into teams of five and given a dream. Our goal was to take on the roles of a games studio and design a game that made this dream come alive. Our dream was “I want to ride across USA on a motorcycle with very little money.” So our first question was “What do we want our player to feel? How do we make them feel it? How do we make the player actually play those feelings?”

We discussed at length and came up with an open world exploration game, with a heavy focus on the scenic beauty of the United States, and the feeling that cruising the roads there gives you. I was given the role of Level Designer, but considering that we were designing an open world, I was given the task of designing the different jobs that the player were required to do to make some money for gas for his motorcycle. I wanted them to be menial jobs, since the idea was to travel with little money. Such as shoveling snow, or picking apples, or as such.

In the end our team came together and we did something we were all proud of. It was extremely satisfying to see everybody pulling their weight, and come up with something that I think was without a doubt un-buildable, but as a design was very accurate to our goals.

Week 2. MDA.

The second week on Gotland has been inspiring in a whole new array of ways. With the introduction of the MDA -framework came a whole new way to look at games as both a designer and a consumer. Why do I enjoy this game, what does it offer me as a player that inspire this type of emotion in me? How can I use this emotional response as a designer?

If I want to my players to enjoy fellowship fun in my shooter, I need a mechanic that allows for that to happen, obviously. But in that group, how do I want them to feel? Does the addition of more players increase the struggle or make them feel more powerful? Is it less rewarding to pull the trigger if your friends are already mowing your enemy down?

To try out what mechanics have to be changed to bring forth a different aesthetic, we were told to play a card-game called Sissyfight, which simulates a schoolyard bullying of young girls. The goal of the game is bullying. How does the game achieve this?

Our assignment turned out to be two different things:

– Set sissyfight in a ninja setting.

-Promote different sweets for a snack-company using the sissyfight engine.

For our Ninja-Project we changed a simple mechanic to try and increase the potential for betrayal, and the overall tension. We included a silent communication on top of the normal one, allowing glances, nudging and discreet gestures to try to get your point across. Testing confirmed that our aesthetic goals had been met, that we had achieved what we set out to do.

For the promotion of snacks we had to take apart the combat system and look at what made it work. We wanted our snacks to be promoted, so we wanted them to be integral to the gameplay and for them to be showed in a positive light. We accomplished this by turning them into the score-keeping system of the game, as well as allowing the snacks to be consumed for powerups, thereby giving the player the feeling that snacks were either important to save for yourself, or to consume.

Overall the entire framework of MDA has been an eye-opener. Dynamics are more of an abstract concept than the Aesthetics and the Mechanics of the framework, but no less important. All of it can still be anticipated, tested, predicted. And this gives us as designers the power to design better.

Over the weekend I plan on constructing 2 different versions of sissyfight, starting by choosing an aesthetic, and trying to promote dynamics by changing the mechanics.

Week 1.

Monday 01/09 I was formally accepted as a student to uppsala university campus gotland.
It’s been incredibly educational only in the first week, which has consisted of the creation of dungeons and dragons characters, and the analysis of systems. The DnD character generation system is, to a beginner, complex but offers a wide range of adaption to outside input. One character might be useful for one situation, and another one completely useless. It all depends on the numbers that the system provides and it’s been very insightful to learn about it.