Adventures In Game Design

Hey, My name's Jessie! I am a CS Major, Game Design Minor, and an art hobbyist at Case Western Reserve University.  My gamertag is "Zaheelee" on XBox One and "zaheelee" on Steam

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I play games, but can never again be a player

I love games, video games especially, and consider them a very important part of my life. They represent my career goals, my interests, and my hobbies. I am a designer, a programmer, a critic, and a fan, but there is one thing I don’t think I can be anymore: a player.

Now I don’t mean to imply that I am never going to play games again because that would be very out of character for me and I think my friends would be worried that someone stole my blog credentials. However, even though I play all types of games frequently, I am not a “player” in the design sense of the word. When designers make their games, everything they do, every choice they make, is for the sole purpose of giving the player a better experience while simultaneously hiding their work. In a well designed game, the player doesn’t notice all of the specific reasons why their experience is intuitive and fun, they just understand their reaction to the game and go from there. In this sense of what it means to be a player, I no longer fit the mold.

A perfect example of this can be found in my experience with playing, designing, and running Humans Vs Zombies (HvZ), a 10-day long game of tag played outside on campus where zombies attempt to tag humans, and humans attempt to fend off the zombie horde with Nerf blasters. HvZ is a very fun game in general and if you ever get the opportunity to play, I highly recommend it. At Case Western Reserve University, we had additional layers of gameplay on top of the standard goal of “survive all 10 days as a human without being tagged” or “tag more humans than any other zombie.” Every other day, the leaders of the game (known as Core), would hold an hour-long mission. The objective of these missions varied wildly, but they frequently played off of video game tropes. Some of our missions took the form of fetch quests, recon missions, tower defense games, and more. Every mission was unique, and Core would always wait a few years before repeating old mission ideas in order to keep things fresh for the veteran players.

Due to the biannual schedule of HvZ and the length of the game, Core designed at least 5 missions every semester, and I have personally had a hand in designing over 25 of them. What I’m trying to say is that I have had years of design experience with HvZ, while very little time as a true player of the game. My experience with Core started my first semester freshman year when I injured myself during the promotional event for the game and the members of Core took me under their wing to make it up to me. While I didn’t have a hand in planning any of the missions my freshman year, I helped Core run the game and went to their meetings. Even when my injury healed and I played my first proper game of HvZ I was never truly a player. Most of my friends thought I was a member of Core because of my past history with them. I joined Core at the end of my freshman year, spending my sophomore year as Treasurer, and my junior year as the President.

As the semesters went by and I gained more design experience, I came to realize that I had a fundamentally different way of looking at the games I played than the regular HvZ players did. While the players debated their next move or tried to figure out what the other team was thinking, I was always checking to make sure the game was balanced and fair. One of the struggles of designing a real world game is that the only way to enforce the rules is to have an admin witness and call out any infractions of those rules. With over 300 players and only 14 admins on a good day, rule enforcement was an uphill battle. In the eyes of the players, the rules were something to question, test the limits of, and analyze for any kind of weakness. Players would pore over the rules of every mission, searching for some technicality that might give them a leg up over their opponents. For them, winning was the highest priority.

On the designer side, this was sometimes a nightmare to work with. Our goal was always to make the game fun, challenging, and, most importantly, balanced. Seriously, the average Core member says the word “balanced” more often than any other word in the English language. When we actually got the chance to play our missions instead of acting as admins for them (an especially rare occurrence for me), we never stopped being designers. If something needed to be changed on the fly to make the game more fun for everyone, Core members would be pulled out of missions and reassigned to any area of the mission that needed the most help. Even when we did play a mission all the way through, it was an extreme faux pas to attempt to actually win. Now I’m not saying that we all purposely played like idiots, but if you were a Core member playing a mission, the understanding was that you were not to push the limits of the rules to your advantage, and if things looked to be too easy for your team because you were acting like a badass, you would dumb down your own skillset a little. As designers, we didn’t find our success in winning a mission, but in hearing positive feedback when the mission was over.

The key difference between being a player and a designer is what your definition of success is. As a player in a multiplayer game, success means winning and feeling empowered in that victory, but as a designer of a multiplayer game, success means creating the most exciting and interesting experience that you can. Now, due to this mindset, I can’t go back to being just a player. Even though I am no longer part of HvZ Core, I can’t bring myself to adopt the mindset that the rules should be pushed and questioned, and that any advantage you have over the other team should be exploited. I am certain that if I play HvZ this fall, I would still spend the entire game controlling my actions to make the game more balanced and fun for everyone. I won’t be seen as a badass, I won’t lead my team to victory, and under no circumstances will I win this way.

But you know what? I think that’s okay.

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Meaningful Choice in Video Games

In many modern video games, choice is an integral part of the gameplay, identity, and tone of the game.  Of course, the idea of choice comes in many forms, from the ambiguous and highly customizable play style choices in Deus Ex to the binary split second decision making present in The Walking Dead.  If the designers of a game believe that choice is going to be a core mechanic in their game, they are then faced with the difficulty of implementing these choices in a way that the player can interpret.  

Sometimes designers fake this customizable effect by giving the player the illusion of choice, wherein the player is presented with multiple options and told they lead to different outcomes, when in reality every choice leads back to the same result.  On the other end of the spectrum, dedicated designers work extremely hard to make all of their choices meaningful and unique to the player.  However, even these meaningful choices can be further broken down into different categories.  Choices can either be meaningful because through the act of choosing something, the player has made a lasting impact on the mechanics of a game, or they can be meaningful due to their impact on the story of the game.  From my experience, every meaningful choice in a video game is some combination of those two aspects.

           An example of a meaningful mechanics choice can be found in many games with RPG elements.  By allowing the player to customize their character, weapons, and abilities, the designers have allowed the player to choose how they want to go about playing the game.  Will the player decide to be a damage-soaking tank or a stealthy sniper?  Does the player value their health or would they rather spend their experience on another ability?  These choices, when implemented properly, can fundamentally change how a game is played, but they have no impact on the story.  At no point will a character talk to the player about their weapons loadout or their decision to play the game with stealth vs. brawn.

           On the other side of things, story choices change the game in an entirely different way.  In The Walking Dead, the player makes story choices constantly, with the level of impact ranging from temporarily angering one of the players friends to deciding whether or not to save someone from certain death.  Every single choice has an impact on the story of the game, even if it is just a line of dialogue acknowledging that the player chose to respond to someone in a rude tone of voice.  Sometimes, player choices come into play much later in the game, or even in the sequel. If the player chooses to let someone die, the cast, dialogue, and story of the game changes forever, while the mechanics stay exactly the same.

           While these two aspects of choice are fairly different, that does not mean they can’t work together in tandem to create some very meaningful moments. Take the Mass Effect series for example: When the player makes choices, they have the ability to earn morality points based on their decisions.  What the developers believe to be “good” decisions reward the player with Paragon points, while “evil” decisions are rewarded with Renegade points.  Mechanics benefits can be gained from having a large amount of Paragon or Renegade points, but these benefits are hard to get if the player chooses the Paragon and Renegade options equally.  This leaves the player with multiple possible outcomes of a decision they make, further increasing the complexity of their choices.

           When implemented properly, choice can be an extremely useful tool for game designers, as it has the potential to greatly increase the connection a player feels with a game, as they believe that their own decisions helped them play the game how they wanted to, and left a lasting mark on the world.

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Land’s End Review

This week, I had the pleasure of attending the Grace Hopper Celebration for Women in Computing. While there, I had the pleasure of attending an Oculus Gear VR demo, where I played Land’s End.

Land’s End is a VR demo game created by Ustwo Games, the makers of the popular and award winning mobile game, Monument Valley.  

For fans of Monument Valley, this demo is an incredible experience filled with serene music, an aesthetically pleasing color palette, and the feeling of importance hanging in the air.   

The game mechanics feel very natural for the platform, with the main form of interaction taking the form of sustained gazes at floating UI elements to activate them.  Now that might sound a bit wordy, but what it means is that in order to move forward, you simply look at a glowing light floating above your destination and maintain eye contact with it for a few seconds.  For the majority of the demo, there is only one set path that you can take through the world, which stands as an unfortunate reminder that you are playing a demo and not a full game.

Thankfully, as the demo progresses, interactive elements are introduced.  The puzzles progressed at a nice rate and offered a new perspective at the proper times in the demo, making the whole experience have a nice flow. Some puzzles involved a connect-the-dots scenario where you simply point your head in the direction of the next dot to add it to the web.  These were not difficult in any way, but they were remarkably satisfying.  

(An example of a connect-the-dots puzzle can be seen in the image above)

The next puzzles involved the ability to pick up and move giant stones to clear a path or reconnect an ancient rune.  The mechanics for lifting these stones felt very natural, and were also accomplished by making eye contact with a rune on the stone and moving it around with your gaze. The best way I can describe it is that it feels like clicking and dragging with a mouse, but the clicking motion is a short amount of eye contact and the dragging motion is the movement of your head. 

The movement of the stones felt very intuitive, but more importantly, they felt heavy.  It’s difficult to describe, but when the stones were being lifted in the air and stacked accordingly, it just felt right.  

While I have been singing the praises of this demo so far, there were a few things I found issue with. For starters, when moving from one place to another, the player seems to float over the landscape to get there. The demo takes place on the uneven terrain of a series of rocky islands, yet the movement of the player always follows a straight line from point A to B.  The player character does not feel as though it occupies a physical space, much unlike the stones in the puzzles.  This is unfortunately jarring enough to break the suspension of disbelief that the demo would otherwise have maintained.  

Another thing I found (minor) issue with was the quality of the graphics.  Due to the game being played on Gear VR and not an Oculus Rift, the quality of the screen was limited by the quality of the phone attached to the headset.  I don’t see this as a permanent issue though.  Due to the nature of the graphics of Land’s End, the introduction of a higher quality screen will do wonders for the visual quality of the experience.  

All in all, the demo was a fantastic experience and I believe with a little more development in the areas of camera movement and increasing the difficulty of the puzzles, Land’s End has the potential to be a fantastic game.  

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Game Reviews!

Hey guys, I haven’t really updated this blog in a long time, so I think I am going to start doing a series of game reviews.  Stay tuned for the first installment!

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#GHC15

I am so unbelievably excited for Grace Hopper this year! Only a week left to go!

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So I mentioned Skynet in a tweet, and was immediately mentioned in someone elses tweet. When I went to investigate, I discovered this amazing TwitterBot. Apparently, every time someone mentions something Terminator related, it tweets a Terminator quote at them. I didn't even tag anything Terminator related, it just knew.

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Twenty To Texas (a Grace Hopper adventure)

Hey guys, I know I haven’t posted in a while, but I’ve been very busy.  I am currently interning at Hyland Software and working in the development department!  I am the sole developer on a project that I have a good amount of creative control over and I couldn’t be happier with it.  However, I’m not gonna spend this whole time writing about my job.  I want to elaborate a little on why there is suddenly an influx of talk about “Twenty to Texas”.  So, without further ado, here is my magical tale about how the Grace Hopper Celebration in 2014 changed my life: 

Last fall I was given the incredible opportunity to attend GHC 2014 in Phoenix, AZ with 9 women from the Computer Science department at Case Western Reserve University.  It came at a time in my college career when I was struggling to find a reason to continue on my path to obtaining a Computer Science degree, and I was slowly becoming discouraged by feelings of isolation and the lack of a strong mentor. 

 I had found out about the conference through my good friend Haley, and I managed to jump on the bandwagon right before we solidified the list of girls attending. Before attending, I was frustrated with a few of my CS classes and with some of the other people in my major.  When there are around 200 CS majors and less than 35 of them are women it can get lonely and overwhelming very quickly.  Even though I had been programming for over 5 years at that point, I still struggled with feelings of inadequacy whenever I looked at my louder, more outwardly confident, and less humble male classmates.  I was in full on existential crisis mode. 

Then, once I got to the convention center and listened to the opening ceremony, I felt a little more at home, and a lot more excited.  I was surrounded by people like me, who have struggled in a male-dominated field, who have searched high and low for other women to share their experiences with, and they stuck it out and stayed.

On the second morning, I met two amazing women who design games for a living and told them some of my stories.  (If you’re interested, you can follow them @kathesagona and @Evaliation) They supported me, they laughed with me, and they asked me what I was interested in. At the time, I was very much on the fence about pursuing a career in the video game industry, but they saw something in me that I didn’t.  They encouraged me to take game design classes and to read everything I could get my hands on about the industry.  I am still so glad that these women were there for me, a complete stranger, when I was desperately in need of a mentor.

The rest of the conference went in a similar manner, and I met more incredible men and women than I ever thought possible.  I met Bonnie Ross (Find her @PlutonForEver), the head of 343 Industries (the people who make Halo), who continues to be my role model to this day, and was further inspired to pursue a career in game design. 

 I distinctly remember that during her presentation she looked out at the crowd and said “People always ask me why there are no women in the industry.  Women always ask me this especially.  Do you want to know what my main question is?  Why aren’t YOU in the industry?  If you want more women developing games then why aren’t YOU the one doing it?”

I had never in my life thought of it like that. I had never considered that I, Jessie Adkins could make it in the industry.  But there I was, watching an amazing woman who had never even met me tell me that I could.  I cannot stress how much her presentation changed my outlook on my place in computer science.  

Then, with the conference over and life returning to normal, I found that I was not the same person who got on the plane to Phoenix with a mountain of homework and too much caffeine in my blood.  I became more social with the other women in the department, I spoke up in class more, I became less tolerant of outright sexism and I learned how to tactfully approach the topic when it needed to be brought up.  I even found a mentor in the amazing student who helped send us to GHC in the first place, Steph Hippo (@stephhippo).  I found confidence and courage in her, and used this confidence to speak about my experiences and to work with the department to make the environment more inclusive.  I was even asked to speak to business students and prospective CS majors about these topics.

So what does any of this have to do with Twenty to Texas?  Well, this year Grace Hopper is being held in Houston, and it is our goal to sent TWENTY girls from CWRU to the conference.  

The 2014 GHC absolutely changed my outlook on my major, my future career choices, and my confidence.  I would do anything in my power to return this year, to continue meeting inspiring people, to advance my knowledge of game design, and to bring back everything I learn so I can share it with the rest of the Computer Science department here at Case.

If you want more information, or if you would like to donate and help us reach our lofty goal, you can find out more here: twentytotexas.org

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Long-Awaited Resident Medieval Update

It has been much too long since I talked about how Resident Medieval is going. I don’t have much to say now, so there will definitely be more posts in the near future, but there are a few big things going on.

1.) the alpha version of the game is due NEXT THURSDAY!!! Basically, it’s crunch time now.

2.) We might actually have a pretty good alpha done in time!

3.) The AI for NPC’s is looking great, all of our locations are made, the UI is coming along nicely, the animations are linked together and in the process of being scripted (yay!), we are writing our own music for the game (it sound great, so I might post some of it here), and the game in general is coming together nicely!

Look forward to pictures, music, and some terrible quality iPhone videos of people playing it!

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The Unity API is like a Printed Encyclopedia...

It contains technically correct definitions, and useful vocabulary, but it is completely useless in a practical sense, you should probably never open it for fear of the crazy amount of redirection, and Googling it will ALWAYS be a better option.

Long story short, the Unity API can be described as:

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Look what I found in the corner of my Algorithms TA's office. It was coated in a thick layer of dust, and there are these small latches on each side that keep it closed (kinda like a briefcase). The keys are very fun to press, and it makes me feel like Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible 1. I think I'll start exploring some of the buildings on campus a little more. I think I'll end up finding some pretty cool things.

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Mixamo Issues

I have been having a few issues with Mixamo lately, and I am not really sure the best way to report these bugs I’m having, so I will write this instead because I know the person managing their tumblr account both follows me and checks their tags quite regularly.  

If I am looking under “My Assets” then “My Animations”, when I check multiple boxes to queue the download of multiple animations, the settings box used for specifying file type does not work properly.  If I select that I want to download all selected items as a Unity file, it will revert my choice back to the default as soon as I press “Queue Download”.  This means I have to queue all of the downloads by hand if I want a Unity file, which takes some large chunk of time.

Second, when something is done Queuing, it will send a notification to whatever page you are on at the time and will force reload the page.  This is frustrating if you have just selected an animation and are about to Queue it, but then your selection will be reloaded and unchecked.

Third, if you are on the “Downloads” page and waiting for a queued download to complete and be available for download, you must refresh the page once it is finished in order to actually click the button “Download”

Long story short, these aren’t too major of issues, but they do suck up a lot of time, so I just wanted to let you guys know about them in as constructive a way as I can.  I still love Mixamo as a service, and will continue to use it regardless of these issues.

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Tales of My Unproductive Spring Break

I barely did anything related to school work over spring break and I couldn’t be happier.  Instead, I watched a season and a half of House of Cards, went to the movies a few times, and played Halo and Far Cry 4 for a very long time.  I’m thinking of reviewing all of the video games I play at some point, so you can (hopefully) look forward to that in the near future.

In terms of Resident Medieval, things are just about to start picking up with that project, so expect to see a lot more posts about the progress of the game and some of the funnier development aspects of it.  If I ever figure out how to take video of my computer screen instead of just lots and lots of screenshots, I’ll definitely upload some videos, but if that doesn’t happen, you might just get some lovely videos shot from my iPhone. 

At the very least, I will soon be getting some photos of the 3D locations we’ll be using in the game, and maybe some sound files for the background music.  Character models coming soon, and animations are in the works. 

We’ve got a little bit less than 6 weeks to get this done, so I am about to put myself into a perpetual state of crunch time mentality.

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Resident Medieval Update

It's almost Spring Break! WOO!

Sadly, that means that it is not actually Spring Break yet and I still have work to do before I am free to play Halo for days on end.  I am currently working on the final Design Document for the project, and as of right now the damn thing is 17 pages long.  Granted, we have 8 people working on it and it contains almost all of our dialogue, but still, it's a lot.

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Midterm Season

It's that time of the semester again: Midterms.

Tomorrow I have an Algorithms midterm and a Chemistry midterm, while I have a Differential Equations midterm on Friday.  

Oh, and the Algorithms professor told our class that while he doesn't think anyone in the class will actually finish the test, he wants us to try our hardest.  He also told us he knows we are doing our best and he is very happy about that.  While I should logically see this as disheartening or scary, instead I see this as an opportunity to make my Algorithms professor proud.  I am very happy that he is showing faith in us, and actually treating us like human beings.  I have had too many professors who yell at a class for having a low average, but this guy just cares about us and cares that we learn the material.  

It's pretty sweet

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I have a newfound respect for video games with more than one model for NPCs

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My friend is working on the same project as me and she encountered this lovely bug.  The bullets don't despawn for some reason, so they just float around like glow sticks on acid

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Our new Intro to Game Design project is Asteroids! It's a great game, except

-the base code that we were given (pictured above) is buggy and broken

-we were not actually given a lecture on AI and were asked to write 3 different AIs for the enemy ships

-nothing makes sense

-there is no documentation for ANYTHING

-every time you change something in the code it makes the game look like a cheap 1990's space ballet

Well, here goes nothing...