Transdimensional Adventures

This week's reading teaches us the importance of game testing. The point of this is to find and squish as many bugs as possible before the game releases as well as ensuring the game is fun and balanced. Firstly, you want to try out an early prototype and make sure all the numbers are correct (things like player abilities, amount of health, damage, money, experience points, etc). ( image source ) Next, we start debugging. This aims to get rid of as many glitches, loopholes and stalemates as possible. One can of course solo test, and that may be enough for some games. However, for many other games this will be inadequate. Most, if not all multiplayer games need to be tested with multiple players, sometimes more than the design team has (see: MMO's like World of Warcraft). In this case, we turn to the QA team and open beta testers. These testers can be anyone from friends, family, to people who signed up for a beta on your website. After reading all of the mater...

The first reading for this week is called   Into the Woods: A Practical Guide to the Hero's Journey   This article talks about the "Hero's Journey". It's a concept in mythology and storytelling which is basically a template for most stories. ( image source , public domain) I'll be honest, I don't think the author did a good job explaining what "the myth" is in the first part of the article, and so I had to dig around a bit. It turns out "the myth" is just a story. The story doesn't need to have all the components listed above, and they don't necessarily have to be in the given order. The  wikipedia article for the hero's journey   explains what it is quite well and gives several examples for each point. The second article is called  What Every Game Developer Needs to Know about Story . This article again talks about the storylines in videogames. Side note: these articles are old, the author refers to the Xbox 360...

What a hefty two months this has been! In these short nine weeks I've learned a multitude of skills and facts, both about the process of designing and developing a game as well as about my classmates from college, since they're all writing their own blogs, and we often look at each others' blogs. My favourite reading was from week 7,  developing a princess saving app . I liked it because we took a deep dive "under the hood" of a simple app, a complex app and a videogame (which is an app too, really).  Also I liked this and wanted to share: (image taken from  week 7 reading PDF ) Overall, I would say I'm finding the game development part quite challenging because I set out to create a game that has a unique system, where you fly a spaceship rather than control a single character in an environment on terrain. I decided this at the start because we were shown  this video   which talks about the growth mindset. To me, creating a game like that would...

In this week's reading (I actually read the right one ) we learn about the psychological process behind a player's reasoning for their actions in-game.  We learn about learning curves in apps and games and how a simple app's learning curve compares to a complex one. In short, the simple app will have less features but will also be easier to use (an example could be MS Paint), whereas a more complex app will have a steeper learning curve but more features (like Adobe Photoshop ).  A game's learning curve steadily increases in bumps to give the player the best satisfaction. They learn to play the game better, upgrade their items, and along with that the difficulty steadily increases. We also learned about the STARS atom (Skills, Tools & Actions, Rules, Stimulus). 1. Skills What is the player able to do? 2. Tools & Action What does the player actually do? 3. Rules What happens in the game? How does the game react to the player's actions? 4. St...

This week's reading walks us through many important points we have to consider while developing a game. While it does talk about board and card games, a lot of these rules will also apply to video games. The first point that is brought up is "Components"  of the game. This can mean many things, for example cards, dice, or even Monopoly money and property cards. We are taught to be mindful of colour-blind players and to keep components of the same type looking similar. So in videogames this could mean to have enemies' colour coded or  look similar to each other. This shows an easy way to add "colourblind mode" to games The second point talks about "The Box" of the game. We learn about the do's and don'ts of game packaging. One important thing to keep in mind is to make the title of the game big on the side of the box so potential buyers can see what it is easily. This is a box art database, we could pick some good ones? ...

What makes up a game? To answer that we have to look at existing games and what qualities/content they have. This is a list given to us by our lecturer: Players Objectives Rules Resource management Game state Information Sequencing Player interaction Theme Let's break it down; Players: how many players are there?  Do they play together or against each other?  Do they interact with each other at all? Are they alone or in a team? Objectives: What's the point of the game? To create/destroy something? To control/collect something? To race against others? (or time) Minecraft is a game, with seemingly no goal and expects the player to imagine their own objectives Rules: What's allowed? What's not allowed? What does one have to do to win? To lose? To draw? Does a player lose progress or get kicked out when they cheat? Resources: What's available to the player that's beneficial to them? What can they ...

What is game design? I have learned about it and I have decided to share it with you. To ask that question, one first needs to ask "What is a game?". There are many definitions but the one that stuck with me the most was "A voluntary effort to overcome unnecessary obstacles". The term was coined by Bernard Suits in the book "The Grasshopper", published in 1978. The first part of this definition tells us that it is a "voluntary effort" which means it is not needed for survival, or to gather resources needed for survival. It also tells us that players need to put in effort to win, be it physical or mental, or in case of some videogames, both. The second part tells us that players need to "overcome unnecessary obstacles". This tells us that players have to stick to " arbitrary rules ", speaking in terms of real life. The players are not forbidden by the laws of physics to follow the rules, but if they do not follow the rul...