Week 10 Notes

Exercises 

● 4.1: Making Checkers Dramatic (p97) 

[For this exercise, devise a set of dramatic elements for checkers that make the game more emotionally engaging.]

Instead of having checker pieces, you could actually make the pieces characters and from there build a whole narrative from it. You can start by asking why these two sides are fighting in the first place. Perhaps it's a battle between light and dark or a comedic game of romance where two sides fight for each others love. In this case, the pieces on the board could represent capturable affection points. Maybe the space of the game isn't just limited to the small board of regular checkers, but players have to do something in the physical space of the real world in order  capture a piece.

● 4.2: Dramatic Games (p97) 

[Name five games that you find dramatically interesting. What is it about those games that you find compelling?]

1. Black Survival, a sort of battle royale game (that requires strategic thinking and APM instead of guns blazing action) where player collect resources on the map to get stronger while avoiding or fighting other players.
2. Lethal League, FAST BALLS, it's insane if you could even hit the balls when it's accelerating at high speeds but that depends on the player's intuition and game sense to hit it at a certain beat
3. Celeste, the movement in this game is clean, and the narrative hits  deep
4. Darkest Dungeon, the fact that the characters on your team, that  you work so hard to equip and level up, are liable to permanantly die intensifies this game by a hundred times
5. Osu, relies on the player's precision and also good hand-eye coordination 

● 4.4: Goals and Feedback (p100)

[List the types of skills required by the games you enjoy. What other types of skills do people enjoy that you could incorporate into the games you design?]

1. Accuracy (FPS, MOBA)
2. Timing (in rhythm and platform games)
3. Combat Systems (fighting mobs and bosses to get stronger)
4. Constructing 
5. Memory (Game sense/knowledge)

● 4.5: Player Types (p104) 

[Pick three games and list the types of feedback generated in each. Then describe how the feedback relates to the ultimate goal of each game.]

1. League of Legends,  exciting gameplay when interacting with both players on your team and against opposing players to ultimately defeat them and their structures. If it weren't for this goal (to blow up the enemy's nexus), then there wouldn't be a reason for both teams to fight
2. Path of Exile, a dark and grim world where almost everything (even crates) drop some sort of item because the ultimate goal is to get stronger by these equips and other enchantments. The feature of item drops perpetuates the incentive to check out newer drops and see if they are better than the ones you currently wear.
3. Dead Cells, as the player you die and revive after each run, which may not be particularly long. This allows the player to keep playing however they might be playing, exploring new maps and progressing or just running it down to the ultimate goal of reaching the end.

Reading 

● GDW Chapter 7: Prototyping Your original Game Idea (p210—232) 

When you first start designing a game, start building core gameplay mechanics and go on from there. Core mechanics can be defined as the actions that a player repeats most often when striving to achieve the game's overall goal. This can be seen from a system involving player activity and rewards. It's useful to construct visualization of your gameplay mechanics to spot holes. More complex designs don't always make for a better player experience.

It's hilarious how players can misinterpret text in a game, but also something important to look at. In one playtest session of Magic: The Gathering, Richard Garfield encountered a playtester who read one of the cards as to literally make the opponent lose on the next turn. The orginal text was, "Opponent loses next turn." Although I could read it as literally losing, I think the game developers were going for a "skip turn" card.

The beauty of card games is making decks, utilizing the kit that is the plethora of cards within the game to make what Garfield describes as "degenerate decks",  but it's definitely what makes the game fun. For the players facing those decks, maybe not.

Creating a physical prototype involves, a foundation; a representation of core gameplay with then structual elements that considers the most essential things in your game; formal details like rules and procedures (this will require testing rules and removing them if unfit), then refinement of your playable protoype.

Research 

● BaraBariBall by Noah Sasso

BaraBariBall is a sports game, but it's also a fighting game.  Players win a point by dunking the ball (situated on the center of a platform in the middle of the screen) into the opposing side's water. However if they fall into the water, they will lose a point. There are three characters to choose from; Sari, an agile scorer; Joshi, a versatile scorer and Popo, a heavy powerful brawler. You can play against another player or play against a team in pairs of two. The controls in this game are unique in the way that characters can jump more than once, even in the air. This flexible movement causes intense gameplay between and amongst players when juggling the ball to one another (while simultaneously dodging the player) or in the air. But when the character turns blinking red, they turn into a state of "helpless", a vunerable state where attacks against you will become ten times as devastating. Another procedure is that you can knock the ball out of an opposing player by stunning them; this involves the mechanics of the three characters' movesets. The game may seem very simple, but there are many intricate details within the controls and other events that occur within the system, such as clashing and canceling.