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Re: Design Idea Wk 6: Hardware driven game
A pair of sensor gloves would provide a lot of control about how you could use objects in the game compared to conventional input devices. For example, in real life you can aim and throw things in lots of different ways (overarm, underarm, adding spin etc), but in a game you can generally only grab, drop, push and pull. For example in Portal/Half Life 2 you can only lift a cube or drop it and it is difficult to place it precisely.
To take advantage of this I think it would be neat to make a superhero game. One where your character has super strength and can pick up huge things like cars and trucks using the gloves. Read the rest of this entry »
Re: Design Idea wk5: Mechanic driven
My idea is for a game that involves the fluid dynamics of air instead of water. A game where you have to direct waves of butterflies to a goal on the screen, but they cannot fly through turbulence in the air. As they fly their wings create turbulence which makes it harder for the butterflies behind to reach the goal. This negative feedback mechanism makes the game harder as the player progresses towards the goal. Butterflies that hit bad turbulence are either trapped or pushed off the screen. The butterflies change colour as more reach the goal to indicate how many are remaining. They should be pretty because the player will expect them to look good because they’re butterflies.
Re: Reflection Wk 4 – Is that all there is?
I agree with David Jaffe’s response that art games should not be made if they aren’t going to be fun, because games primary purpose is entertaining lots of people. If someone was to add a little more depth to a game it should not be at the expense of the fun. But to make a really fun game that also has depth would be hard to do. I think that games mirror other entertainment like TV and movies which are also made by large teams of people and a lot of things have to come together and work really well to create something fantastic.
I can see that it would be difficult to add rules for generating particular emotions in a game that are also fun. Games are harder to predict their effects because unlike any other medium they depend on the player’s interactions and the designer cannot control how the player will play the game.
Games need to be engaging for a much longer period of time than a movie or TV show, which is why they lend themselves well to action type games where the player runs around killing things. It’s not like you can fast forward over the dull bits in a game, you have to play through them to get to the next part.
Re: Design idea wk 4 – Games for Mum
Scrabble-Rummikub Crossover
My mum doesn’t play video games, and a lot of the activities that she likes are ones that she can already do in real life, so there isn’t much point making a game about them. Also a game based on the books and TV shows she likes would have to be a video game, which she would never play. But she does play board games and card games. So I thought I’d combine her two of her favourites, Scrabble and Rummikub.
Re: Design Idea Wk 3 – Design a Toy
You are an undead warlord with an undead skeleton army. With supreme power and near immortality you can do pretty much whatever you want. You can command them to do whatever you feel like and they have to obey. The army members can be commanded in groups or addressed singly. You have full control of what they wear, where they live and what they do because they only want to do what you say. You could command them to invade countries, or create a peace loving society that has mandatory line-dancing on Tuesdays.
The player could also give their skeletons personalities and habits so that they can manipulate them into loving or hating you. It could be fun if you teach them to behave in a certain way and then then decide to force them to do stuff they do not like. This could make them begin plotting against you. You could also customise their clothes or rearrange their bones so they form different creatures and give them different behaviours, maybe just instincts.
You can change any of their attributes in-game, including their personalities and bone structure and left alone they will carry out how they have been told to behave.
This is a toy and not a game because the player can come up with any story or goals they want, it’s supposed to be like playing with a toy army that moves by itself. The fun is in the self expression available with having a complete control over the behaviours of a large group, down to it’s individual members.
Re: Reflection Week 3 – Emergence
Gish
The demo for Gish had a steeper learning curve compared to other games. I spent ages trying to make Gish jump high enough to get up a ledge only to work out a way of sticking up the wall instead because the jumping was so much more difficult. I suppose that’s a sort of emergence in itself, but not really the good sort. But after you get going there’s a lot more you can do. So there’s a trade-off between shallow controls, which are easy to use, and deep controls, which give more flexibility.
It’s interesting that in David Rosen’s design tour he mentioned the annoying physics bugs in Gish, because a lot of emergence in other games results from players taking advantage of physics bugs.
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Constellation
I’m not sure putting random things in a game is a good thing. This could mislead the player into thinking there’s something there and then they become frustrated when they investigate further and find nothing. They might have fun investigating, but at the end there is cruel disappointment. It could also teach the player to mistrust the game and ignore things that were real clues. This is different to Easter eggs because they have been put there deliberately and the player understands what they are. If the player understands they are not important then they could add to the game, for example leaving a piece of the plot unexplained means that they could have fun speculating about what would have happened.
Re: Design idea wk2 – Ball game
In tuts this week we will be analysing the ball game we played in the first lecture. Your design task this week is to come up with an idea for a computer game that incorporates some of the dynamics of the ball game, but in a new setting. So your game cannot just be “multiplayer a first person shooter in which you throw coloured balls around the room”.
Justify why the dynamics you carry over make sense in your new setting.
Re: Journal wk2 – digital vs non-digital games
Your reflection topic for this week: What are the differences between table-top board/card/roleplaying games, computer games and sports/live action games? What does abilities and constraints does each kind offer you as a player or as a designer? How might the same game change from one medium to another?
Re: Design Idea Wk 1: Dogma Manifesto
Dogma 2001: A Challenge to Game Designers
I agree that there is a certain amount of safety in not being too creative when making a game, you want to have an estimate of how much money you can get back for your investment. I do the same sort of things when choosing a game to buy. I don’t tend to want to spend my money on a game I might like when there is a sequel in a series I’ve already played before.
Re: Journal Wk 1: Why are you here?
- Why are you doing this subject? What interests you about games? What kinds of games would you like to play? To make? What do you hope to learn?
I’m doing this subject because I like video games and I’d like to make a game sometime. Games are interesting because they’re fun to play and they also look like fun to make.
