Activity 8: Game Design 101
For this activity, I read Tracy Fullerton's Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games, and followed along with some of her exercises.
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Exercise 1.1: Become a Tester (pg. 5)
For this exercise, my partner and I played the 2014 city-building title, Banished. We had both played this game before, but not for many years. We chose it as it allows for many different strategies, and we thought it would be interesting to see how our personalities came through with our different approaches to developing the same settlement.
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Exercise 2.3: Objectives (pg. 34)
ONI
In this game, you have to survive long enough to build a rocket ship and leave the asteroid.
The Princeless Bride
In this game, you must solve riddles in order to reunite mother and daughter.
Reus
In this game, you must shape the world to help humanity flourish without driving them to greed!
Children of Morta
In this game, every time you die you gain experience to help you reach the next level and come closer to stopping the Evil rooting at its heart.
Tooth and Tail
in this game you must organize your communist-animal forces to defeat (and devour) your opponents.
Exercise 2.8: Story (pg. 46)
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I have always been a fan of games with great stories. This was likely sparked by being raised on a steady diet of point-and-click adventure games as a kid, such as Kings Quest and Monkey Island. Good stories do not make or break a game, but it certainly helps keep me hooked; for instance, Dragon Age 2 (a game notorious for terrible mechanics and level designs) still kept me engaged because it had superbly written characters.
Videogames are a storytelling medium. Some have made me cry (To the Moon) and some have made me laugh (Unwritten Tales). Some stories are bait to tantalize curiosity (Subnautica) and others set you up to easily make your own (The Sims and the old Neverwinter Nights campaign builder).
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Exercise 3.8: Utility and Scarcity (pg. 80)
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Scrabble
Call of Duty
vs.
Resources Include:
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Letter Tiles on hand
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Letter Tiles still in the bag
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Spaces available on the board
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Tiles already on the board
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Powerups on the board
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Tiles in hand and already on the board are useful to the player as they are the building blocks for making words on the available spaces, and thus getting points. Powerups can further increase the number of points for a word.
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The game has a finite number of tiles, so as the game progresses the chances of drawing useful letters become slimmer. Similarly, as words are played they take up valuable real-estate on the board and consume powerups. Eventually, there are no more playable tiles and the game ends.
Resources Include:
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Health
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Various Guns and Ammo
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Grenades (ex: frag and smoke)
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These resources help the players accomplish their objectives. Health is what keeps you alive, giving you time to act. The various guns behave differently, which can accommodate different strategies and playstyles (are they running with a machine gun or do they prefer to stalk and snipe?). The ammo is what keeps these guns functional. Grenades can be useful for ambushes and quick getaways.
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The game makes health scarce by constantly taking it away in a hail of bullets. In the older COD games. medkits were the only way to recover it. These are hidden around the level. Depending on which COD is being played, the player may not heal between missions, making these medkits vital. Later COD games also heal payers with time, resulting in hiding maneuvers when things get dire.
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You can only carry so many guns, ammo, and grenades. Once the player runs low, they will have to get more from stashes and the fallen.
Has Renewable Units (ex: Terran SCVs)
Has renewable units (ex: doctors)
Has finite units; you may only use so many coding blocks for each level.
There is no UI, so health is indicated through visuals and sound
Health bar as well as body temperature, hunger, injuries, etc.
Health Bar. Health can be regenerated through found items, operation stations, and getting a new character.
Exercise 3.9: Resource Types (pg. 85)
Arcade-style game where you have a limited number of lives before you have to restart.
Combines health and number of lives.
You must burn things to get coins to buy more things to burn.
The life simulator where you can get a job AND a house.
Build up your island's industry to buy new buildings.
You have limited time to prepare for the next temperature drop.
You have limited time to identify document errors and to make moral decisions.
You only have so much time in a day. If you're not in bed by 2am, you will pass out and lose your stuff.
A turn based rogue-like.
A turn based strategy game.
You only have so many turns to find treasure and bring it back to England.
ex) invincibility stars
ex) shrines
Inventory is limited by weight
Inventory is limited by space (some items are larger!)
Inventory is VERY limited to different types of items. But you can carry up to 99 units of each type.
Resources are dependent on biome, and availability may also depend on the season.
Different biomes in the asteroid provide different resources (and hazards!)
Lives
Units
Health
Currency
Inventory
Power-Ups
Actions
Time
Special
Terrain
Exercise 6.3: Board Game Analysis (pg. 171)
For this activity, I played the board game, Puerto Rico, with a group of friends, noting our interactions with the gameplay mechanics and each other. Later, some of my students volunteered to play it so that I could observe their process for learning how to play. This was quite an interesting experience, and I was delighted to see the different avenues they took to learn how to play. By far the hardest part for me was to keep my mouth shut and not give them any hints! If they were in a videogame, I would be the tooltip popups. My notes from both these experiences are shown below:
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Citations:
Fullerton, T. (2014). Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games, NY: Taylor & Francis (CRS Press).
