IGB220 Game Development Journal

Jacob W - n11609931 A Game Design student at QUT. This is my dev blog for IGB220.

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An Introductory Post

Hi, I'm Jacob Woolley, and this is my first year in the Games and Interactive Design Degree at QUT.

This blog is for my IGB220 Fundamentals of Game Design Course, and will show my progress and hopefully my improved learning and understanding of how games are designed and developed.

As an avid player of games for most of my life I have garnered a lot of interest in learning how games are made for myself and want to continue to learn more about them to hopefully pursue it as a career option in the future.

Outside of uni work, I'm a big fan of anime/manga and am currently consumed by Baldur's Gate 3.

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Assignment 3 Postmortem

I really enjoyed working with my group over the course of this project. I worked with Aerin Larrazabal, Kellah Mcmenamin, Jack Wightman and we were all able to establish the roles that we would take over the course of the project.

I think that our group's ability to communicate over what we were working on made the assignment not that difficult, however getting to that point was a little difficult as none of us were very good at taking up a leadership role and organising exactly what needed to be done. I ended up taking a sort of leadership role in figuring out who would do what based on our different skill sets. We tried to follow the phases of production listed out in Chapter 13 of the Game Design Workshop book, with the addition of the existing prototype to build off. Our planning for the different elements of the game in pre-production phase was shown on the One Sheet and discussed in Discord calls the way we wanted the game to work. In the Production phase we worked separately but simultaneously to produce different aspects of the game to be combined, e.g I worked on menus and finding sound effects, while Aerin designed different art assets that we could use.

In the future to improve on the process we used, I would strive to document all the changes that were made better, as our group was a bit inconsistent as to what we recorded when we made changes. I would also try and do more playtesting in different phases of development, as most of our playtesting was done around the same point in development.

References:

Fullerton, T. (2018). Game design workshop : A playcentric approach to creating innovative games, fourth edition. CRC Press LLC.

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Assignment 3 Playtesting Post

Our first playtest was testing our tutorial level with someone from our workshop. I ran the session and spoke with the playtester, and Aerin and Jack recorded times at which events occurred and the comments that the playtester made. Playtesting resulted in a lot of useful feedback regarding the structure of the level and the order in which tutorials were given. I think that despite doing so much playtesting in the earlier workshop projects, I underestimated how useful it would be in a group setting, especially in how other group members were able to pick up on things that needed changing that I would never have considered. The results of the first playtest led to the addition of a main menu screen, level select screen, and a game over screen. We also streamlined the tutorial level so game mechanics that weren’t easily understood were a lot clearer. Playtesting will definitely play an important role in shaping the rest of the game’s development.

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Assignment 3 Development Post

Working out what each member of the group would do week by week was pretty easy and everyone in the group was pretty easy to communicate with and contact. We each had pretty defined roles within the group and that made it easy to divide up tasks. I took up a sort of leadership role in taking charge of what tasks everyone was doing, and keeping track of progress on tasks. 

We worked on different aspects like adding new sprites for enemies, adding health bars for enemies, and coming up with music, sound effects and different levels. We were also able to plan out what each person was doing in advance which makes checking up each week very easy.

When I was developing my parts of the prototype, I kept in mind what I learned from chapter 11 of the Game Design Workshop book, which talked about keeping in mind the different elements of challenge, play and story, as we wanted to create a difficult but rewarding platformer that had strong thematic story and was a fun balance of the health decay mechanic.

References:

Fullerton, T. (2018). Game design workshop : A playcentric approach to creating innovative games, fourth edition. CRC Press LLC.

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Postmortem - Racing

I think that when I was trying to come up with ideas for an elevator pitch I was stuck in the idea that I had to just adapt the assets of the game in a way that would be interesting to me, but I realised that this held me back a lot when I was trying to create ideas, which led to a worse game overall. This project helped me to learn the importance of relying on a team, as they can help you visualise an idea that you may lack the skills to create on your own. Looking at example One sheets and One pages for Assignment 2 helped me to see that I was limiting myself because of my lack of art skills but I think going forward I will be able to rely on my team to think outside the box and create something interesting and fun. 

Another thing that I realised over the course of this workshop is that the games that I create, focused on a cool story/world and a fun and engaging mechanic to improve on basic gameplay wouldn't necessarily appeal to all types of players, and Chapter 4 of the Game Design Workshop helped me to realise that the games that I want to create cater to player types such as the Explorer, the Artist and the Storyteller, and that I want to create engaging worlds for those kinds of players to enjoy.

References:

Fullerton, T. (2018). Game design workshop : A playcentric approach to creating innovative games, fourth edition. CRC Press LLC.

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Week 6/7 Tutorial

Week 6: Following this tutorial was probably the hardest of all the tutorials so far, as there were some instructions about the camera following the player, as the size of the assets were actually relatively small, which meant I was confused on some of the steps relating to the camera. I was able to make everything work pretty well, but I struggled to think of how I could make the game interesting with a unique mechanic. I decided to add a variety of different cars as the sheer number of cars you could potentially encounter would add a lot of variety to the very basic concept. 

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Week 7: The basic car framework was already implemented through the tutorials, so it was just making small mechanics that could be used by new cars, and recolouring basic sprites. The playtesting feedback that I got was centred around there not really being enough types of cars when that was the central mechanic, and that the different types of cars were not really clear, which were both fair points as in the short development time frame I was only able to make some cars and there would be more in the full game if it were to be full realised, and the fact that I don't have a lot of artistic skill makes it harder to make a vast number of cars unique.

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Elevator Pitch - Racing

Name of Game: Dangerous Derby

Pitch: This ain't your average car race! In this fast paced endless racing game, test your mettle against a vast number of cars, each hurtling down the track at different speeds trying to win no matter what it takes! Take tight control of your car as you dodge and weave through determined racers who don't mind if you're just a casualty in the way of their victory.

Controls: WASD or Arrow Keys

Selling Points:

Large variety cars that travel at different speeds and utilise various weapons or other utilities to keep the player on their toes

Control a car that responds to your every movement perfectly to maneuver between even the smallest of gaps

Score system to compete against your friends

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Postmortem - Asteroids

This is a postmortem reflection on my second game made in the IGB220 workshops - the Asteroids game Soul Stealer.

For this game the elevator pitch came to me very naturally, and I found a mechanic and story that I liked with relative ease. The only problem I had in this regard was using the base assets we were given to make the platformer made the story/mechanic not make too much sense, but this could be easily rectified by me using other free assets or making my own so it isn't really a big deal.

Learning about utilising different screens was interesting, and although I didn't think of it while I was developing, the feedback I got about my tutorial disappearing too quickly helped me realise that menu screens and the like would be easy to do to help show tutorials, as well as a pause menu to stop the game at any time.

Reading Chapter 9 of the Game Design Workshop this week led me to think about how I want to approach playtesting for future workshop projects and assignment 3 later on. I think that the one-on-one playtesting style where you just take notes on what is occurring would be best for my playtesting, as until now I have just gotten all my playtesters to play at once and then give me their feedback.

In terms of gameplay feedback, playtesters said that it wasn't really clear what needed to be done in order to stay alive, and that they were dying too quickly before they figured out what was going on. This has helped me to realise the importance of playtesting, especially with people who don't know how the game works, as my understanding of the game's mechanics led to me staying alive for much longer than the playtesters. Seeing playtesters play also helped me to understand that it was important to make sure I fine tuned variables to make sure that the experience wasn't too overwhelming.

In order to improve this game, I would probably add a menu screen that would display tutorials, and lore on the game, as well as a difficulty select option that would change variables such as life decay and enemy health to enable players of different skill levels to get similar levels of enjoyment and satisfaction from the game. I think that I have been able to improve a lot more since the first prototype we made in the workshop, as my mechanics worked well and I understood how I could make them work in the game easily and quickly.

References:

Fullerton, T. (2018). Game design workshop : A playcentric approach to creating innovative games, fourth edition. CRC Press LLC.

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Week 4/5 Tutorial

Week 4: This week didn't have a tutorial due to the break so we just had to make the asteroids game at home ourselves following the sheet. The elevator pitch that I made this time came from me wanting to add an almost constant source of pressure while you're playing, as I found that the basic version of this game was almost impossible to lose and is almost relaxing as you sink into a comfortable state of knowing what to do, and I thought it would really add to the moment-to-moment gameplay that would come out of the need to analyse your health and the enemies around you. I still used the default assets as I wanted to focus on the gameplay working well first. Creating the prototype following the worksheet was also pretty simple even without having the tutor there to help just in case.

Learning about implementing different screens and swapping between them and preserving data between them was also very interesting.

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Week 5: This week was again play testing for our games that we made the week before.

Reading chapter 10 of the Game Design Workshop book this week allowed me to take a different approach to the development of my prototype by focusing on each part of development in the order that was talked about: Foundation, Structure, Formal Details, Refinement. With the previous game I made an effort to focus on the base mechanics, and this time I focused on Foundation and Structure. I made the effort to think about my changes that would make the game stand out/be fun to play, and then make an engaging gameplay loop by balancing game mechanics.

I implemented a tutorial text that explained how the game and life loss mechanic worked by using a timer that would make it disappear so it wasn't just on screen the whole time, and also changed the health values of enemies so it would be more rewarding to kill a bigger enemy compared to the time it took.

The feedback I got from my playtesting was that it was that the way to restore life was unclear, as it was rapidly decreasing and the minimal increases weren't all that noticeable. The health of the largest enemy/asteroid was also too high and needed tweaking, and the tutorial text that I implemented disappeared too quickly or was covered by asteroids spawning on top of it.

When talking with my tutor afterwards we talked about improving the game by adding things like a menu screen that would avoid the tutorial being covered up, and values of life decay, enemy health and regen were all things that I recognised needed changing from the testing.

References:

Fullerton, T. (2018). Game design workshop : A playcentric approach to creating innovative games, fourth edition. CRC Press LLC.

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Post-Mortem - Platformer

This is a postmortem reflection on my first game made in the IGB220 workshops - the platformer Soul Shift.

The thing that I struggled most initially was trying to make something unique. I was trying to make something totally new which was making it difficult to think of a platformer early in development. Once I learned that all I needed to do was try and put a fun twist or interesting change to the base game, it was much easier to come up with a pitch that I was satisfied. I also found that making an interesting world the game took place in or a story helped my enjoyment in developing the mechanics and levels for the game.

This type of development makes use of what is talked about in Chapter 2 of Game Design Workshop, finding different ways to engage the player. The ways that I find work best for me when I am trying to develop something that will engage the player is an engaging story or interesting mechanic that can draw the player in.

In terms of development, I learned a lot of useful ways that the GDevelop engine could be manipulated for it to perform in the way that I want it to. Although I was able to make the player character swap gravity when they landed on an enemy i wasn't able to make movement function while the player was flipped. I believe that the cause of this was my lack of understanding of how functions and events worked properly in GDevelop.

The feedback I got for my game was mostly positive, and the criticisms I got were related to the short length of my prototype and the mechanics that I needed to improve.

In order to improve my devlopment process for future prototypes I need to take more of a deep dive into how the mechanics of GDevelop function together and plan out the way that my elevator pitch will interact with GDevelop.

References:

Fullerton, T. (2018). Game design workshop : A playcentric approach to creating innovative games, fourth edition. CRC Press LLC.

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Elevator Pitch - Asteroids

Name of Game: Soul Stealer

Pitch: In a not-so-distant future, the life of every living thing is running out, including the life of your own planet. New technology has been developed that allows life force to be stolen to be given from one entity to another, and you have been selected to kill other creatures in space in order to obtain their life. To avoid over-expenditure of life to send you to space, this will be a one-way trip, thank you for your brave sacrifice. An endless fast-paced shoot-em-up where your own life is constantly running out, and killing enemies will restore it.

Controls: Mouse to move, left mouse click to shoot

Selling Points:

The tension of a constantly depleting life

'Picking your battles' - Fight a strong enemy to increase life more at the cost of the time it takes, or fight smaller enemies for less reward but in much less time

Score system to keep testing how far you can go.

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Elevator Pitch - Platformer

I forgot to upload this!

Name of Game: Soul Shift

Pitch: Take control of gravity itself with the souls of your enemies! Defeating foes will reverse your polarity, allowing you to reach previously unobtainable areas. Limited enemies and a difficult series of platforming levels lends itself to a difficult but rewarding platformer experience where you will need to get the timing just right to claim your reward.

Controls: A,D for movement, Spacebar to jump

Selling Points:

Core Mechanic of precisely jumping on enemy heads to switch gravity

Difficult levels that require precise jumps to clear

Short separated segments rather than long drawn out levels

Images:

References:

Google Images: Retrieved from https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=558639794&rlz=1C1RXQR_en-GBAU991AU991&sxsrf=AB5stBhXEKS18L_KLaoZX7uJSlF-pSfBnw:1692584466215&q=g+switch+3&tbm=isch&source=lnms&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiItfG-2OyAAxW6SWwGHc4wCrAQ0pQJegQICxAB&biw=958&bih=921#imgrc=FiT4ZQJv2zw2EM&imgdii=VX1QkQYlqZirUM

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Week 2/3 Tutorial

The week 2 tutorial involved my first interaction with GDevelop, which is ... interesting. Some weird middle ground between Scratch and an actual game engine.

We made a basic platformer using some sprites we were given, but for some reason my slime wouldn't collide with the objects made to turn it left and right. The tutor had no idea why it wasn't working either and after deleting everything and rewriting all the code it just ... worked? Very basic platformer complete.

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In the week 3 tutorial we got to develop platformers more towards our elevator pitch (which I forgot about but created one mid-development :P) and then got our first experience playtesting other games and getting feedback for our own. The development of my game went kind of smoothly, I was able to reverse gravity for the player object pretty easily, but couldn't make the player detect that they were landed on a platform while upside down. This meant that I couldn't make the player jump on the second slime, but still managed to cobble together a prototype that worked (albeit very short).

One of the lines that stood out to me while I was reading Chapter 1 of Game Design Workshop was 'The role of the game designer is first and foremost, to be an advocate for the player. The game designer must look at the world of games through the player's eyes.' This stayed in the back of my mind while I was developing this prototype, as I tried to think about the kind of solid gameplay that would be able to draw a player in, especially since I knew I wouldn't be able to focus on graphics or sound design as a crutch. This is what led to my decision to expand on the existing gameplay using an interesting and fun mechanic while staying true to the engaging platforming that I feel makes platformers fun.

I got 2 people to playtest my game and give feedback while I did the same for them. The feedback I got was that the gravity switching mechanic was interesting, and if I could get it fully working it would be cool, and also that it might allow for more concise platforming (which was my ideal). The other feedback I got was that the level was very short and more of a concept, and that the game would need more things to spice it up.

It was helpful to experience some negative feedback even if these were things I was planning to change myself outside of the limited development time within the workshop. Experiencing recieving feedback in person really helped to drill in the concept from the lecture of not being arrogant about your game and allowing all feedback rather than just positivity.

References:

Fullerton, T. (2018). Game design workshop : A playcentric approach to creating innovative games, fourth edition. CRC Press LLC.