Ted's Game Dev Journal

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Welcome to my blog!

This is my first ever blog post so this should be fun. I hope this blog will be somewhere that I can collect my ideas and store inspiration for future projects. This will include game ideas, reference pictures, personal projects and more.

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Week 7 - Positive vs Negative Feedback

In week 7 the idea of positive and negative feedback was introduced. Positive feedback is where the player is rewarded for being further ahead, for example having property in Monopoly allows you to tax players more often and get more property. Negative feedback is where the player is at a detriment for being further ahead, for example in GTA V races players at the front of the race are slower and can’t catch other players’ slipstreams. The idea is that positive feedback allows a player to snowball a lead while negative feedback keeps the game more competitive until the end. These both have their own merits depending on the environment and how the game is played and it is up to the developer to decide which is most suitable to their game or even if both can be suitable in the same game in different scenarios.

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Week 2 Thoughts - Visceral Design

During week 2 of ATP, we talked about Don Norman’s thoughts on different ways design deals with emotions. One of these was using visceral design, where the design focuses on its aesthetic. The example in real life was the orange juicer I’ve included a picture of. Its design is visually striking despite it being less functional than a regular orange juicer. An example from games that was shown, was Gris but there are plenty of these sorts of games. Other games that come to mind when I think of visceral design are LIMBO, Hades and Ori and the Blind Forest which each use their striking art design to further the messages of the games. For LIMBO, the greyscale and darkness reinforces the themes of depression and loneliness. Hades uses flashy, bright and quick animations to augment its high speed combat. Finally, Ori and the Blind Forest uses a mix of glowing characters, vibrant backgrounds and colourful attacks to add a feeling of magic to its world. These are just a few examples but there are many other ways to use visceral design to captivate players and make the game stand out more than its competitors.

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Games as Art

In Celia Pearce’s “The Aesthetics of Play”, she talks about how games have always been viewed as “Low Art”. Examples of this can be seen across the medium, despite many games having vastly more copies sold than movies or books that are equally culturally relevant, these games have not been considered art previously and dismissed as “just a game”. However, in recent years I have felt like this is beginning to change more and more. In years gone by the most artistic a game got was on the level of a game like “Shadow of the Colossus” and even then many would be hesitant to call it “a work of art”. But as boundaries have been pushed by increasingly artistic games including “LIMBO” and “Papers Please”, there has been more acceptance by people to consider them art. Nowadays, a game like “Return of the Obra Dinn” can be released to a sizeable audience which previously may not have even existed due to its art style and gameplay but due to this cultural shift, it (and games like it) now have a gap in the market that is only continuing to grow. It is finally looking possible that one day, maybe far in the future or maybe just a few years away, games will receive the same kind of recognition as art as the other mediums it competes with.

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Concept inspiration for coursework

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Our ATP coursework game as defined by its design principles

Experience: What does the player get to do? Walk around the environment interacting with objects and puzzles.

Theme: What is the game about? How does the game present concepts? The game is about keeping the player constantly on edge. There is a general atmosphere of unease due to the lighting, camera, sound design and more in order to accomplish this despite there not actually being many traditional “horror” events or jump scares.

Point of view: What does the player see, hear, or feel? From what cultural reference point? How are the game and the information within it represented? The player is first person, experiencing the game through the character. The player should feel at home since it is their old apartment but also uneasy due to the imposing Soviet bloc style architecture.

Challenge: How does the game challenge the player? It makes them think about what certain clues could mean and how to solve the games puzzles.

Decision-making: How do players make decisions? They can choose to do some parts of the game in any order or take as long or short as they like completing puzzles.

Skill, strategy, chance, and uncertainty: How are these elements used and balanced? The only real element of skill involved is problem solving, other than this the game does not have much strategy, chance or uncertainty.

Context: Who is playing, where, and when? On what platform? The game is designed to be played on a PC or console rather than mobile due to performance constraints as well as the atmosphere of the game being better experienced when sat down in a low light environment for maximum immersion.

Emotions: How does the game make the player feel? The game makes the player feel many things but the main ones are unease, satisfaction from completing puzzles and excitement/fear from scary moments.

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Games, Design and Play Chapter 4 Exercise 2

Let’s take Among Us for this exercise and change the perspective to 3D. This has positives and negatives. The positives are that the environment would be much more atmospheric and the gameplay would feel more realistic. The negatives would be that the lighting system wouldn’t really work with the 3D aesthetic so part of the ambiance and fear factor would be lost.

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Games, Design and Play Chapter 2 Exercises

1. My favourite game, as I have mentioned, is Minecraft. The goals of which would be easy to pursue if you had access to infinite materials and overpowered items. The developers use these materials as a constraint and make them fun to gather by using a variety of gameplay options that the player must make use of in order to collect them including crafting, travelling to other dimensions, battling monsters and more.

3. I’m going to use the example of chess for my idea here. The way you could add an element of chance to chess is by randomising which piece the player is allowed to move when they are not in check. This would add a risk vs reward aspect where players can move into positions where they could have their piece taken but bank on the other player not being able to move the piece that would take it next turn. This way you have to create and react to multiple threats at once depending on what pieces you can move that turn.

6. Hades uses theme and storytelling to both push the player to complete their run in order to escape Hell while also giving them opportunities to collect items that won’t help their run but will instead allow them to interact with characters in new ways. For example, they can collect nectar which gives no benefit in a run but can be given to characters for additional dialogue and rewards.

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Games, Design and Play Review

After finishing Games, Design and Play: A Detailed Approach to Iterative Game Design I had two main thoughts on the book, one good and one bad.

The good: There are several interesting ideas explored in the book such as in chapter 4 where “the layers of a play experience” is talked about. This particular section talks about how games can be broken down into several layers which each represent a way that the player interacts with the game, these being the sensory, information, interaction, frame and purpose layers. These ideas contain useful concepts that I can and likely will implement in future projects when approaching game development.

The bad: The biggest issue I had with the book was its tendency to be reductionist in many sections. I mentioned in an earlier post about the kinds of play that if you take a game like Minecraft that can fit into any of the kinds of play, you realise that the kinds of play are only really useful as examples of how people can play the game rather than a categorisation of the game itself. There were several other examples of this throughout the book where in my opinion it tried to hard to put games into easily definable categories where they often don’t entirely fit or where they fit into multiple categories.

Overall the book is quite good but has some obvious flaws. It was a worthwhile read with some useful takeaways as long as you don’t take everything literally.

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Week 4 Game Ideas

For our next lab session we've been recommended to come up with some game ideas. intogames.org/news/generating-great-game-ideas-guide was recommended to help come up with ideas.

Here are some ideas I came up with using their "Adjective (a) + Genre (g) + Environment (e) + Setting (s)" formula in step 1.

1. A dark (a), RPG (g) based in a fantasy kingdom (e) a long time after its collapse (s)

2. A fast-paced (a), volleyball game (g) set in a high-school (e) in modern day Japan (s)

3. A creepy(a), Lovecraftian detective game(g) set in a big city (e) where everyone has vanished (s)

I then followed step 2 and made the following mind-map from my 3rd idea:

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Gameplay demo from Endless Arena Alpha 1.0

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Games, Design and Play Chapter 3 Exercise 1

For this exercise I’ve chosen to describe my all time favourite game Minecraft using the kinds of play described in this chapter as I feel that it is unique in that it has some form of play for almost anyone and fits into each of these categories. Competitive play - It has PvP combat as well as many community made minigame competitions such as Hunger Games. Cooperative play - Most of the standard multiplayer experience involved playing with friends and working together to build, fight and explore along side each other. Skill-based play - There are many forms of skill-based play in Minecraft but one that comes to mind is the balancing of attacking with your weapon, defending with your shield and positioning and making use of your utility tools such as fishing rods, ender pearls, lava buckets and more. Experience-based play - While this may seem like the hardest kind of play to categorise Minecraft as, there is a wealth of custom maps where the player can seek different experiences Whimsical play - It’s hard to pick out any kind of play as whimsical without experiencing it due to the inherent silly nature of it. But I can certainly say I’ve had my fair share of silly, absurd fun during my time with the game, and that’s enough for me. Role-playing - There are many RP servers in Minecraft where players can assume the lives of villagers and kings and monsters and whatever they like. Performative play - Maybe the most niche form of play in Minecraft from this list, there are still many people who play on servers with theatres and comedy clubs where they can join in and perform. Expressive play - Back to the custom maps for this one, there are many of these which feature expressive play in their themes and the way their gameplay is crafted. Simulation-based play - This form of play in Minecraft is probably the most interesting from the outside. There are many servers dedicated to simulations of anything from plane flights to playing music to replicating entire other video games, each with their own cult following.

I’d like to take this opportunity to talk about my thoughts on these “forms of play”. You can see that they are good ways of summarising many of the things that you can do in this game, and many other games for that matter. However, none of these accurately tell you what kind of game Minecraft is, and again often this is the same for most other games, because of the range of gameplay options and approaches you can take to playing it are so vast and diverse that it depends on the person playing it. Therefore to me these are less definitions of how Minecraft is played and instead suggestions on how it CAN be played.

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Endless Arena Features to be Implemented

Necessary: 1. Sprites for player, sword and enemies 2. Knockback player when hit by enemy 3. Attack animations 4. Game over screen when lives hit 0 5. In game UI 6. Enemy spawning at random locations 7. Round system 8. Music 9. Sound effects 10. Knockback enemy when hit by sword 12. Enemy health system

Optional: 1. Power Ups 2. Boss rounds 3. Boss AI 4. Ranged AI 5. Tutorial

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As part of my Approaches to Play module we were asked to come up with a game with the theme "The Path" in a short period of time. Here's a demo of what I came up with.

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Do you have to be good at something for it to be fun?

While reading chapter 2 of Games, Design and Play, I started thinking about how I perceive challenge in games. For me, in most games that I play I am what’s colloquially known as a “try-hard”. I enjoy getting good at games and understanding their mechanics on a deep level. This ranges from traditionally challenging games like Dark Souls (where I have 100% of the Steam achievements for all 3 Souls games as well as Sekiro on Steam) to more “casual” games, most recently Among Us where I took the time to learn the tasks on each map, the layouts, when to vote and when not to vote to give myself the maximum chance of winning as both crewmate and impostor. 

However, I think it’s important to recognise that this is not the only reason to play games. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s idea of flow state, the balance of challenge against skill to stop the player becoming either overly bored or anxious, has some clear flaws in this regard as it does not take into account players who do not play for the sake of challenge. For example, to bring things back to Among Us several of my friends have dozens of hours on the game now but still don’t know much more about how to play than when they first started because they are playing more for the social aspect of the game as well as the fun of running around completing tasks or going for kills regardless of whether or not they win. 

Not only that but as a try-hard I still enjoy these other aspects of the game immensely and would likely still thoroughly enjoy many of my favourite games even if the challenge was reduced or taken away because I enjoy the core elements of those games that facilitate the challenge more than I enjoy the challenge itself. “Souls-style” combat and world building are why I keep playing those games, the challenge is just a reason for me to keep playing past the point I normally would.

Then there are many people with disabilities that make it harder for them to overcome the challenges presented by some games. Despite this many people with disabilities play these games, and overcome the challenges placed before them, not just because they seek to prove that they can but because they enjoy the mechanics of the games. A streamer named Loop is a prime example of this as he is legally blind and deaf and yet still plays and streams Counter Strike. The challenge of playing a game with such a high skill ceiling with his disabilities could have been enough to push him away from the game but he enjoyed the gameplay so much that he kept playing anyway. As a side note, he even achieved the rank of Global Elite, the highest rank in the game and an impressive feat for anyone.

To summarise I do not believe that you have to be good at something for it to be fun. This seems obvious but unfortunately in a world of ranking systems, leaderboards and try-hards like me it can sometimes not feel this way. But in my opinion a game does not need to be challenging to be fun, it just needs to be well designed so that it is fun for everyone to play and so that players of differing skill levels can all enjoy the game even if it’s not for the same reasons. Designing a game solely around challenge is just unnecessarily gating people who would otherwise enjoy it.

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Dark's use of world mechanics as a facilitator for characters and story

Netflix’s time travel drama Dark is, in my opinion, the greatest sci-fi show ever written. With a complex plot containing multiple timelines, characters interacting with each other at different ages at different points in time and heavy grounding in science and the rules of its universe, the show can be confusing and chaotic at times. In a worse show this would detract from the experience as the viewer might feel lost and disconnected, but Dark is not a worse show. Instead of making this complex plot the star of the show, it instead chooses to focus on its characters and their relationships as they try to navigate the hellish loop they find themselves in. 

This one choice by the makers of the show changes Dark significantly as the viewers are able to connect and identify with characters, investing them in the show while the complex world crafted around them acts like the rabbit hole down which they can delve as far as they like. This is something done by not just Dark, but some of my personal favourite games of all time too. Examples that spring to mind are Dark Souls and Hollow Knight where the expansive worlds play second fiddle to the primary focus, the characters and story. A poor example of this would be a game like Destiny, which has a very interesting world and setting but is limited by generic characters and repetitive missions. During the development of my own games, this idea is something I want to place front and centre. Creating an interesting world is easy, populating that world with interesting and relatable characters and stories is much harder but provides a significantly richer experience.

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I took a walk to Greenwich Park on Wednesday for the first time and came across this incredible view of London. As I looked out across it I couldn’t help but feel a sense of awe at the scale of it all, and this was just one city in one country in a vast world. Funnily enough, I have actually had the same feeling in a few games in the past. The first one that came to mind was Breath of the Wild after completing the Great Plateau and seeing the scale of my surroundings from the top of the first tower, I felt like an adventurer in an uncharted world. When I played Guild Wars 2 I got the same feeling after completing the map in my first area. It took hours and then I looked at the map and realised this was only a tiny fraction of the task I had remaining if I wanted to get to 100% map completion (something I just recently accomplished). I think for games with large maps it can be invaluable to give the players a sense of scale at the start of the game so that they can truly appreciate the road that lies ahead of them and I hope that one day I will be able to create a game that can give this same feeling of limitless potential to others as they look out across a vast landscape that I’ve created.