Game design summary

During these weeks we have discussed how to evaluate games and what a game design document should contain to name two of many things. But what I have learned from these past weeks is to look at games from a different point of view where I can identify different objects and elements in a game and thereby also see what makes the game good or bad.

Let’s take one of the exercises from the last week’s were we should evaluate the game play. I chose Grow Cube and there are some things missing in the game that you now can see that it would have been nice features to have in the game like a skip or undo button. You can now identify certain things in the game to like different objects as the people, the ball and the water, all of which you can integrate in the environment during certain times in the game. So now you can pinpoint different things and say that this is the things that makes the game bad and this are the things that makes it a good game instead of saying that the whole game is good or bad. That was of course possible before this course too but then it was more like that the graphic or artificial intelligence was bad even though things like that still is important and can make a game good or bad.

One part that I enjoyed was the design document exercise where we had to come up with a game that we had redesigned from an older game. We, the people in my group, chose to redesign Outrun from Sega. I got an idea of a game when we decided what game to redesign, we was supposed to redesign Off Road but I came with the idea to redesign Outrun instead which is a better game. I got an opening to develop this idea into a rather short design document which was really fun and gave me big dreams of the future. But I have learned during this week’s that there isn’t only good ideas and that even ideas has to be evaluated but I still think that Spacerace is a good game with a lot of good ideas. But with the past couple of weeks in my mind I would take some things a bit further and develop them a bit more so the game fits more people than those who have played games for a long time and knows how it all works, to reach a wider audience in the end so too say. Some of the things I think we missed in the design document were to show some sketches of the environments and track layouts of the game but we didn’t have the time to fix it.

During the course we have had a couple of workshops which is a great way of learning things. Aki Järvinen presented us to his analysis tool which was a good way of analyze a game quickly and it showed that even simple games can be very complex with a lot of different things that you normally wouldn’t see or care about or at least think about as a normal player. Aki’s method was divided into nine different elements that the game contains; components, environment, information, theme, game mechanics, rule sets, players and contexts and then there were three types of ownership, self, other or system. At the first look at it, it sounded quite complex and massive with a lot of different elements that all should be in the game. But when he started to explain it all it turned out to be a very easy way of analyzing a game. I analyzed Zookeeper at that workshop and I hope that when I have more time I will analyze other games with his method to practice on analyzing games.

We learned about other analyzing methods that week with MDA being the most interesting one in my opinion. MDA stands for Mechanical, Dynamics and Aesthetics and is a way of how to develop a game with you starting on the aesthetics on the game idea, then forming the dynamics around it and in the end develop the mechanics. What it means is that you start with setting a theme of the game and get a feel to the game, should it be a scary game or a soft game. The dynamics then is about what the game should be about; how to win or lose, how the characters will behave and will there be any power ups.  You finish up with the mechanics which are the rules of the game, what you can and can’t do and how and when do you die in the game. Another thing with MDA is that a person who play a game gets the MDA the other way then the developer, he first meet the mechanics, what can I do and what rules are there in this world then he wonders what to do to win the game and what the character he or she plays can do.

When I came up with Spacerace I wanted a racing game in space that would let you race in both space and on planets. I wanted the game to have a grown up, cartoony look over it, it shouldn’t be childish but still colorful and living. That was a bit of the aesthetics part of the game and then the dynamics of the game should be decided. Spacerace should be about getting to a finish line before the time runs out and you get more time at each checkpoint. The boost system came up here as a power up that you achieve when traveling close to objects like rocks and trees. In the end decisions was made on how different things would work, like multiplayer and what you should be able to do within the screen. I think that the MDA method of developing game ideas is a good way because you always have to think of something that could be fun playing and what theme the game should have and then take the more advanced elements and develop them into something playable.

The other methods we were showed was the Game Ontology Project and Game Design Patterns but none of them would be a standardized way for me to develop a game. Game Ontology Project is a wiki like page with games put in different categories and under categories depending on what they contain. If I would use it for a game like World of Warcraft it would first be put in the multiplayer page, then role playing and in the end fantasy but it would be as a good example of a multiplayer role playing game in a fantasy world. It might work when it is all done but for the moment there is too few games represented there to get something useful out of it. Game Design Patterns was also undone with nearly no fact at all to present.

Another workshop we had were the redesign workshop were we redesigned old games into new ones with varying result. The new game idea I liked the most at that workshop was when we took Taito’s Bust-a-Move game and redesigned it to Turbine Turret Turbo, a puzzle game with a lot in common with Bust-a-Move but with a circular playing field and a different control method. It was a giving workshop that I learned a lot from. To spot and pick out different rules from a game and that if you change one rule, the game won’t be the same is a good knowledge to have in the future. If you would take Assassins Creed and change the rule that makes it possible for Altair, the main character and the one the player controls, to climb walls so that he isn’t able to do it any more then the whole game would change. The game is built for you to climb walls and with that rule taken away you would be stranded on the roads and limited to ladders if you want to climb the houses and that would also make the game impossible to finish because you are required to climb up to certain high buildings to see where you can get information about your target. I haven’t thought of these things before but I have now learnt that it is crucial not to change something that could affect the rest of the game if it isn’t something I want, at least when developing a game, if you are redesigning a game then you should change the rules to make the game your own but you have to watch out and see what happens with the game when the rules changes.

The three types of rules; operational rules, constitutive rules and implicit rules, wasn’t something new really but nothing that I have been thinking about either but there have always been more to a game then showed . The three different types of rules are rules on different levels. In a game of football the operational rules are that you should get the ball in to the other team’s goal and not letting them getting the ball in your goal, the first things that you hear when joining a football game. The constitutive rules are that the game should be played with a ball. The implicit rules are, depending on where and when you play, things like if the ball crosses the side line then it is either a kick in if playing with friends or if playing a league you throw in the ball. Operational rules are the rules that you can be told if it is the first time trying something out or when joining a game, constitutive rules are the underlying rules like you have to play with something that roll, whether it is a football or a handball or just a piece of paper. The implicit rules are the rules that those you play with have decided to use, they can be the normal rules of the game or there can be some changes like kick inns instead of throw inns, they are unwritten rules.

The second week on this course we had a lecture about the history of games; we went through the history of arcade, console, pc and handheld games. Very interesting but I wrote a paper on it at upper secondary school and held a presentation about it so I knew most of the stuff already.

This course have made me more aware of what a game designer does and what the work is about, before I knew that I should design games, come up with new game ideas and make something out of it. I have learned a lot and I’ve read a lot of extra materials, like when I wrote the final assignment on the different analyze methods I spent a day reading about the MDA method on different sites, one of them was LeBlanc’s own site 8 kinds of fun. I have spent a lot of time and many late hours to get stuff done and making them as good as possible. To summarize the summary, I have learnt a lot of new things and methods which I think will come in handy when working with games in the future. The lectures have been good and inspiring with some nice conversations and new ways of having lectures on, first time for me to have a distance lectures and taped lecture. I will end this text and course with a thank you to all the teachers who have been teaching us this period and hope to meet you all next year. Thank you and happy New Year.

 

Usability guideline list for games

In Hannamari Saarenpääs presentation of “Evaluation of game experiences” there is a top 10 list about Usability guidelines for games from Nokia. I went to the Nokia homepage to check what the list was all about and it is a list for mobile games mostly. But I think that the list could also be used on videogames and PC games as well. The list looks like this:

1. Appropriate opening display and main menu implementation
2. Natural game controls
3. Pause and save
4. Provide Feedback
5. Challenge
6. Noise Pollution
7. Distinctive graphics
8. In game help
9. High score list
10. Easy restart

So about having an appropriate opening display and main menu implementation is also a thing for other games then mobile games. They mention that the select and back button should be the usual buttons and not switched. On a cell phone the green button is used to select and the red button to cancel or go back. It is the same on gamepads with the bottom button (on the Xbox 360 controller it’s A, on the PS3 controller it is X) should be use to select or accept things and the middle right button (Xbox 360: B, PS3: O) should be cancel or back. But I know that for some time the O button was used to accept things on my Playstation Portable which got me confused a couple of times. So that is something that shouldn’t change between games and a good point to make the games usability easy. Another thing that the video games have a problem with and that is mentioned under this point is to have a limited number of opening screens before getting to the menu. A lot of games one title screen for each company that have been involved and if it is a PC game, ATI or Nvidia gets one to because the game plays best with their graphic card. A good example with few opening screens before the menu is World of Warcraft with a separate window with some news on and a button to press if you want to play the game and then you get right in to the screen where you have to log in. The first time is the only time you get to see the intro movie.

A natural game control is also very important for today’s game but with many games getting more complicated you have to assign many functions to a single button. I am playing Assassins Creed at the moment and it uses L1 to get fighting commands on the buttons and R1 to action commands. So if you are walking and pressing X on the controller, I am playing it on the Playstation 3 so that is why I refer to the Sixaxis layout, you will walk as a monk and become invisible to the guards but if you press R1 and X while walking you start running instead. This is a smart way of giving the player a lot of controls with a few buttons. On the Nokia page they write that you shouldn’t assign more than one feature to each button and not be required to press more than one button at once but that is for the cell phone and I agree on that for that system.

Pause and saving in games is very common but saving is done in different ways with you having to start the entire stage over or just moving you to a place where you get to start if you save, quit and load the game. Being able to pause a game is standard in today’s game with only multiplayer games being the only genre without it pretty much.

Providing feedback in games is here referred to the user interface or at least that is what I would call it, but to provide vital information on how the player does and such. Too be able to see how much life you have left or your time left on a certain level. Today’s games are often full of feedback, take Assassins Creed for example again, there you see how much life you have left and how alert the guards are, either they are looking for you or they know who you are and then you have to avoid them. Even with feedback being a good thing in a game, the game could get better without it. I read a tip on how to make Assassins Creed a better game yesterday and it was easily done by turning of all the feedback or user interface so that you don’t know whether the guards are looking for you or not and it did actually help a bit and made the game a little bit funnier. They mention over at the homepage that a game should have visual feedback for sound feedbacks if you play without sounds and that is more for the mobile and handheld market thou you never play without sounds on the video game consoles or the PC thou that are a bit of the experience.

On the challenge point Nokia takes up things like it should only take a minute to learn, use different difficulty settings and giving the player rewards to keep them playing. These are important things in other games then cell phone games too. I have played World of Warcraft for quite some time now but in the beginning you didn’t know that much about the game and gameplay. So you chose a class that you thought sounded nice and start playing with it. It took more than a minute to learn but I learned pretty quickly and I think most people does in World of Warcraft with the gameplay getting more advanced the more you play. But the thing is that the different classes are different difficult to play with the paladin being a good beginner class because you are quite good on hitting things but you can heal yourself when needed. A harder class is actually the warrior that sure is strong but when bullied by a couple of mobs stands less chance to succeed, at least for beginner. The reward part in World of Warcraft is when you finish a quest or gaining a level, you often get new stuff which makes you continue playing the game. My first character was a dwarf paladin that I played during the beta and it was a good starting character, then when the game was released I start playing a druid which was a bit more advanced with both magic and different fighting techniques.

Noise pollution is something that isn’t so big in video game market but the problem sure exists. Mostly it is when someone are trying to say something in a game but all the environment sounds makes too much noise so you can’t hear what is said.

I have got the question on how I can see who is a NPC and who is a real player in World of Warcraft and my answer is that you can see the difference if you only play for a while. So there is important to have distinctive graphics in games. In the point and click era of adventure games the different items where usually hidden in the background with you having to search for it with the mouse and that is a bad example of distinctive graphic when you can’t see what you can use and what you can’t.

In game help is provided in most games today with either a tutorial in the beginning or different pop up bubbles that tells you what everything does. I really prefer the tutorial alternative but that should be something that isn’t necessary to go through as in Lionheads Black and White where it could be skipped at all before they released it and fixed a patch. So providing in game help is an important thing to have in a game.

Next on the list is the high score part which I must agree on that it should a part of a game if the game is made to fit one. High score lists is not only high score lists as on arcade games but also lap times in racing games and lists on how many you have killed in different first person shooters and such.

Restart options is something that sometimes isn’t done so well in video games. I have played a bit of Resistance: Fall of Men the last month and the game doesn’t have any restart level option that I have found and when you die, you get automatically respawned to the latest checkpoint which of course helps the game flow but if you don’t want to respawn at the latest checkpoint and instead exit the game you actually have to let the game load and then exit it. So that is a bad example on when a game lacks restart options.

So this list that Nokia and also Hannamari presents works pretty much on both mobile games and video and PC games too, although the priority might not be the same on both sides. My excuses for the text being a bit long with the page setup being 1-2 pages and this one ends on 2 and a half page, hope you can oversee it.

Flow

Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi created the term flow which describes a state of mind when doing any activity like painting or playing a game. When in the flow state you lose track of time and you are just getting all the parts right in whatever you are doing. It’s a quite nice experience which I have sensed a lot of times during my days, often while playing a game.

 

When playing Quake 3 (id Software, 1999) you sometimes get into the flow. What it means is that if you fire a rocket; you are pretty sure that it will hit someone. It’s like knowing your surroundings and really be in the game with you knowing where all the people are. When someone is flying from one of the rocket pads which make you fly a bit forward in Quake 3, if you are in the flow you can fire a shot at him while he is in the air and you will hit him and see him fall down to the ground dead. I have experienced flow a lot in Quake 3 but also in other first person shooters like Unreal Tournament and Halo.

 

Another genre where flow can be really important is in the racing/driving genre where you know exactly when and where to brake to take the curve perfectly and you can nearly feel how you sit in the car driving it by yourself even when you are driving it with a gamepad. I got some great experiences from different racing games where I have been in the flow. One example is Motorstorm (Eden Studio, 2007) which was the first game I had to my Playstation 3. I played it pretty much in the beginning and advanced through the levels and I really knew how to drive the different vehicles. Then I read on a gaming site that they were going to have a competition in Motorstorm against another site with the first prize being a trip down to Leipzig and the game convention there earlier this year. I thought that it would at least be worth a shot to try and see how good I am and it turned out I was pretty good. I won it all but I never went down to Leipzig because school had just started at the same time. But after the tournament I came home and started up Motorstorm and now I was really bad at it. I lost all the flow I had earlier.

 

So flow is something you can have, but you can also lose it. It might sound weird but that is how I see it. A stupid thing to do is to develop a game which requires the flow state to success. I would say that many racing games do so, I recently bought Project Gotham Racing 4 (Bizarre Entertainment, 2007) and this game is sometimes really dependent on that the player is in a flow state I would say. I played the game on medium which let me win quite easy but then I came to a race that I couldn’t win. There was always something wrong, sometimes I jumped straight out of the track, sometimes the opponents just rushed past me with my car still being the “best” car.

 

Flow can sometimes make you do the most impossible things in games; a good example is Guitar Hero 2 (Harmonix, 2006) that I played on the Xbox 360 since the summer. After you have been playing it for a while you get more skilled. But in some parts of the game the chords get really hard and when you see them you like closing your eyes and hoping for the best, maybe not but that how it feels sometimes. But often, if you have played regularly for a while you actually hit all the chords without missing a single one of them and after it you are wondering how that just happened. That is a really good example on flow, when the skills of the player is at the same level as the challenge, but it might not always look that way.

 

Flow is not only occurring in .games for me. I have also felt it when I am snowboarding on the winters. It is when you just “flow” down the slope, you don’t think on how you are doing it; you just do. It is a really nice feeling. But that’s it for this assignment.

Activision Blizzard

Ännu ett uppköp i spelvärlden eller denna gång är det bara två företag som har gått samman, så lite uppköp men inte fullt ut som när EA är med i bilden. Hur som helst så har Activision och Vivendi gått ihop och bildat Activision Blizzard som dom valde att döpa sig. Dom hoppas väll att när folk ser Blizzard så tänker dom att de måste vara ett bra spel eftersom dom ligger bakom World of Warcraft och det funkar säkert. Hur som helst så har dom många stora serier i ryggen nu, Guitar Hero, Call of Duty, Starcraft, Warcraft osv. Tydligen, enligt Gamereactor, så har företagets vd Robert Kotick gått ut och sagt att dom ska använda sig av samma release modell som EA använder vilket innebär att släppa en uppföljare varje år.

Första tanken är ….

Andra tanken WTF!

Jag ser väll varför man vill släppa ett spel i varje serie per år (pengar stavas det) men det brukar sluta med att spelen stressas fram och kvaliten på spelen sjunker. Tar man Guitar Hero så har det släpps nästan ett spel per år men dom har aldrig haft stressen på sig att göra ett per år vilket innebär att dom har kunnat finslipa det lite längre o kanske släppt det lite senare men nu så kommer dom vara tvugna att släppa ett spel per år vilket betyder mindre finslipning. Activision Blizzard kommer troligen att förstöra många bra spelserier pga detta.

Dom utannonserade i dag Call of Duty 5 och Guitar Hero 4 som då bör släppas nästa år med deras nya modell. Läste en kommentar på Gamereactor som sa att om inte kvaliten sjunker så sjunker intresset istället vilket jag kan hålla med om. Nu har jag iofs inga planer på att införskaffa varken Guitar Hero 3 eller Call of Duty 4 som precis är släppta men om det kommer årliga uppföljare så kommer vi ju aldrig få se nya spelserier utan bara uppföljare på uppföljare. Vi får se vad som händer med Blizzard om dom blir tvingade att släppa nya strategispel varje år oxå eller om dom får släppa sina spel när dom anser dom färdiga, får dom inte det så är det ju bara att gratulera till att totalförstöra ett helt företag som aldrig släppt ett dåligt spel.

När jag först hörde om affären så tänkte jag att det kanske inte var så dåligt, då slipper man oroa sig för att EA köper upp något av företagen men nu när man har läst detta så blir man ju lite orolig ändå. Dock har jag bara sett nyheten om årliga spelsläpp på Gamereactors hemsida så man kanske ska ta just den delen med en nypa salt.

Design Document

The last thing we had to do on Mondays workshop with Johannes was to form 3 groups and then to decide a game that you should redesign and write a design document on. My group first decided to redesign Off road, an old NES game which today is kinda crappy. But the game is seen from above, you are going around on a track and competing against 3 other cars. You can collect items on the track which gives you more money that you can use to upgrade your car. I played the game Monday evening on an emulator and didn’t really feel that it was the right game to redesign. Instead I asked the group if we could change game to Outrun, Segas classic arcade game and we could.

 

I started that evening by write down some ideas of what I imagine the game look like. I wrote down several environments, track layouts and I pointed out some of the rules in the original game. Next day after the lecture the group sat down and I told them I have this idea of a game, we discuss it for a while and everybody seems to like it. We split the group in to two, one part that would fix the presentation for the next day and one who would start with the design document, it was after all 10 pages to write and it could have been tough doing that in one day and a half. I started to work on the designdocument with Johan. I had a clear picture of what the game should look like, but it is sometimes hard to put it into words so other people understand what you want but I think I managed kind of good, the design document decides if I did.

 

The design document ended up on over 10 pages of which I wrote atleast 7 of them. I don’t blame my group for it thou because it came kinda automatically with me just writing down what I wanted the game to look like and such.

 

What have I learned of all this then? I have learned that it requires more than two days to write a design document but for this excersice it was just the right amount of time. Even thou we had a tough last day with a lot of texts that had to be written then. You have to do this things organized, it is good if someone takes a bit of controll over the whole operation and tell the others what has to be done and stuff and I had that roll on this project.

 

I learned that it is hard to express what you want the product to look and be like with words. I showed them a video to show the group what I wanted the game to look like which made it easier for them to understand my idea. It takes a lot of time, even with an design document in our size, to get it done. I sat more hours than I can think of but it was worth it and I learned a lot from it.

 

In total I think this was a great experience, to write our own design document and see what it is about. I found it enjoyable to do it and would really like to write a real one that I can sell to a company and get a game produced but I’ll have to wait a few years for that I guess. It feels like something I really can think myself working with in the future.

Redesign workshop

Mondays lecture with Johannes Niemelä was a quite intresting workshop. We redesigned a couple of games during the day, trying to find rules and goals that we could change. First up we had to come up with as many simple games as possible for a cellphone and the games should be unique. I started with writing V-rally 2 and Tetris on my paper, not that they are unique but more to get a start. Then I thought of games that would work playing on a cellphone and came up with two or three different ideas. One of the ideas was a rail-shooter like House of the Dead. To shoot the enemies you have to press the number that is shown on the enemy.

 

Another idea is two different music games, one is like Diagassou Band Brothers where you play different instruments. It could work well on cellphones with mp3 players so you can use your own tunes in the game. The other game is more like DDR style where you use the buttons 2, 4, 6 and 8 on the cellphone to ”dance” as done in DDR, but here you use your fingers instead of your feets. I think the two music games could work very well today when more and more people have cellphones with mp3 players in them and why not do something else than staring out the window when riding the bus.

 

 

After that we played a bit of Mafia which only one of us in the class had played before. The game got more fun when we added two new characters, one sheriff and one doctor, and also limited the mafia members to only a forth of the group, before we used one of three of the group.

 

 

Then we had to redesign a classic schoolyard game so it could fit in the classroom. My group decided to redesign 1-2-3-Red Light which is a game where one person are standing at a wall and while he is watching the wall the people behind him should try to get to the wall. But the person at the wall counts to three and turns around and then everybody have to stand still. If you move you move back to the starting position. We made this to fit in the classroom and you had to jump over the benches from the front and backwards. It worked kinda well but it didn’t really fit in the classroom with people getting hurt. But the excersice was nice with 25 minutes to redesign it to fit in the classroom.

 

 

After lunch we got a new excersice were we should redesign a classic digital game. We decided to redesign Bust-a-Move from Taito. Bust-a-Move is a puzzle game where you aim a cannon loaded with a coloured ball and trying to get three balls of the same color togheter and if you do they will disaper. You are playing on a field where the cannon is placed at the bottom on the screen and you are aiming upwards. The field is rectangular and the colored balls are getting closer to the player with time. What we change in the game was to redesign the playfield to a circle that you can spin, we also changed that you don’t controll the cannon that is shooting the balls but instead the magasine with 9 balls in that are at your dispotial. The whole thing would work like if you spin the outer circle clockwise the inner circle with the ammo would spin counter clockwise. The cannon are spinning automatically and stops at one place and firing a ball, then spin again. We named the game Turbine Turret Turbo.

 

 

That was pretty much what we did that day and it was very giving.You learn much better when you working in a workshop like this than just sitting and listening to a speach by some one.Those lectures is needed to ofcourse but in a workshop you really have to use your brain and think.

The timepressure helps in this situations, when you have like 5 minutes to figure out as many new games as possible that could work on a cellphone. We got 30 minutes to redesign other games and it is intresting to see how much that actually happens during those minutes. Lets take the redesign of Bust-a-Move as an exampel, we managed to redesign the game and pretty much make new game out of it in only 30 minutes.