Category: Game Design

In the Game Design Concepts course, I’ve found that one of the most beneficial aspects is the amount of practice with creating prototypes. Since the class is about video game design, there is a bias that any prototypes would also have to be in software, but the instructor is adamant that computers aren’t needed.

Just taking a few minutes to do a quick assignment or two, it is easy to demonstrate for yourself how useful paper prototypes can be. Right away, you can tell if the mechanics you’ve put together are dead in the water or if you have a good chance of creating a game other people would want to play. On the first day of class, for example, there was an assignment to quickly create a race-to-the-end board game. The steps seemed easy enough:

• Draw a path and separate it into spaces.
• Create a theme.
• Create the rules that dictate how the players move.
• Create ways to interact with your opponent.

Here’s the prototype I created on my first pass:

The path winds down the page, although effectively it acts the same as a straight path. That’s Step 1.

Step 2, I decided that the two players are racing to the end to avoid a giant rolling boulder that is following them. I used some pebbles I have in a bowl on my coffee table to act as the players, and I picked a dirty one to be the boulder.

Steps 3 and 4 were interesting. The easy choice would have been to use dice to determine how far a player moves on a given turn, but I didn’t want chance to be involved in the game. I wanted the players to make interesting choices instead. I decided that the players could move 2, 3, or 4 spaces on a turn. If they move less than 4 spaces, however, they can instead place an obstacle behind them for each space they don’t move. That is, a person moving 4 spaces can place no obstacles, a person moving 3 spaces can place 1 obstacle, and a person moving 2 spaces can place 2.

After both players finishes their turns, it’s the boulder’s turn. The boulder will move 3 spaces, but it will stop early if it hits an obstacle. The obstacle is destroyed in the process of stopping the boulder.

The obstacles can be used to slow down your opponent as well. So if you move ahead and hit an obstacle, you destroy it, but have to stop moving forward to do so.

If the player is hit by the boulder, he/she is removed from the game, and the other player wins by default.

Great! That sounds cool. What’s next?

Well, let’s play it!

…

Ugh. This game sucks and is riddled with horribleness! What I found right away was a problem with one of the rules. If you can drop multiple obstacles…where do you put them? There is only one space behind you, so you can’t place both of them there. So does that mean you can place one behind you AND on the space you’re currently on? Sure…

But that leads us to the fundamental problem with the game. Whoever goes first, wins. The first player can move ahead and drop an obstacle. The second player will move and hit that obstacle, being behind the first player. Then the boulder moves forward and crushes the second player.

So I tried tweaking the rules of movement. Maybe you can only move 3 or 4 spaces, and if you move 3 spaces, you are allowed to drop one obstacle. Maybe the boulder can only move 2 spaces. Unfortunately, these small tweaks still had the fundamental problem. I realized that if I wanted to avoid randomness, I would need to do some bigger changes to make this game work. Perhaps change the level layout so that the players can choose where to move instead of always moving along a straight line? Maybe obstacles can only be moved around and not created?

Regardless of what gets decided, the point is that playing the paper prototype, which took mere minutes to create, made a major flaw obvious. Imagine if you were going to spend time writing code, creating art, and producing sound effects and music for this game, only to find out when it was almost finished that it is never going to be fun without major changes. That’s a lot of time and effort wasted, and it would probably take you a long time to find out that you wasted it in the first place!

Seeing these benefits again and again in the assignments for the course, I decided to apply it to my vampire game project. I already had a basic idea of how the player will interact with the game. The player’s job is to find the vampire’s coffin, hidden in one of the buildings in town.

There will be a town map, and the player could move through the streets and enter buildings. Time plays a major part of this game, so there will be a sun moving across the top of the screen to indicate when it is daytime, and a moon will pop up when it is nighttime.

When it is daytime, the vampires will be in hiding, and the player can move anywhere. At night, however, the vampires will be out and about, and they are invincible. They move much faster than the player, too. There will be a single vampire at first, but each night he survives, he will sire a victim and add to his army. Basically, the longer it takes the player to find the coffin, the harder it will be to survive.

Well, the above sounded simple enough, but what happens when I try to play it?

Above is my paper prototype. You can see the player at the northwestern part of town, and the vampire is hidden in a building at the southern end. The sun is out, and so the vampire is sleeping.

One of the first things I did was the simplest. Let the sun go down and see what happens. Right away, the player can see the vampire come out of his hiding spot. If the player can get inside a nearby building and survive until morning, he’s already won the game because now he knows where to find the coffin.

Huh. Well, that’s not what I wanted. For one thing, I want the player to seek out the coffin, searching each building in turn. If the player can simply wait for the vampire to reveal himself, there’s no tension and no fun. For another thing, I want the player to be afraid to be outside of the safety of a building at night. Staying out at night should be a good strategy for getting killed, not for winning. What could I do?

Aha! What if I limited the viewable part of the screen at night based on the player’s location?

Look at that! Now, if it is nighttime, and the player is outdoors, he can only see the immediate vicinity. If a vampire appears out of one of these buildings, the player probably won’t have time to get away since the vampires are so fast. Otherwise, the player has no idea where a vampire might come from. On top of that, the only thing a player would want to do at this point is find safety. The vampires will find you, and you won’t know where they are until you see one…and if you see one, it’s too late.

Another set of paper prototypes involved the building view, which helped me figure out what the player should be doing when hiding from the vampires. I’ve already started programming, but I’m still early enough in the project that these paper prototypes, which took me minutes to make and play, saved me a lot of pain and frustration. When I can only dedicate so much time in my week to this project, it’s nice to feel somewhat confident that what I am working towards isn’t broken in a basic way.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been participating in a free online course on game design. The Game Design Concepts course is taught by Ian Schreiber, co-author of Challenges for Game Designers.

The basic point of the book and the course is that too many people are intimidated when it comes to learning how to design a video game. Schools claim that they would love to teach game design but cannot afford enough computers. Schreiber and Brenda Brathwaite argue that teaching game design does not require expensive hardware, software, programming experience, or any technology one would normally associate with video games. Game design can be done with inexpensive pen-and-paper, dice, index cards, and coins.

The blog is freely available, so you don’t have to be one of the 1400+ participants to read it. People have taken advantage of the class wiki in order to translate the course into multiple languages, making it more accessible! The forum is great for discussing the course topics with other students and getting feedback on assignments and ideas.

From day one, we’ve been designing and prototyping games. A number of the reading assignments outside of the book were familiar to me, such as Greg Costikyan’s article on a a common vocabulary for game designers and Dough Church’s Formal Abstract Design Tools, but when all of them are put together in the context of this course, the readings provided fresh insight, especially since they were immediately applicable to an assignment.

Most recently an assignment asked us to take a video game that did not already have a board game adaptation and create one. The exercise was in determining the mechanics that were key to the game, which should help when you go from a paper prototype to a video game, too. I chose Yars’ Revenge, and while I haven’t played my assignment, the feedback I received on the rules was quite positive. Quite a few of the submitted game rules looked fantastic. One of my favorites was based on Flatspace.

The class continues until August, and it’s definitely fun and practical. I would highly recommend it to any indie game developer. Is anyone else currently participating in it?

I am participating in the Blogs of the Round Table for the first time in many months. May’s topic:

A Game Is Worth a Thousand Words: What would one of your favorite pieces of non-interactive art look like if it had been created as a game first? May’s topic challenges you to imagine that the artist had been a game designer and supersede the source artwork–whether it be a painting, a sculpture, an installation, or any other piece that can be appreciated in a primarily visual way–to imagine a game that might have tried to communicate the same themes, the same message, to its audience.

A tall order! And yet I enjoyed doing the research for this one. The topic reminded me of The Cavern from Plowing the Dark, which was a virtual reality room. The artist was tasked with making the technology appealing, and she filled the room with virtual reality versions of famous paintings such as Rousseau’s The Dream. And yet, merely walking through a painting didn’t seem to do enough, as cool as it sounded.

Choosing My Art
I could have chosen any non-interactive art from any medium, but I decided to stick with paintings. The problem with reimagining a painting in game form is that I first had to know what the original painting was meant to be seen as. For instance, van Gogh’s Starry Night, a hallmark of freshman female dorm rooms on college campuses everywhere, would be fascinating to see as a game, except my research indicated that no one actually knows what it is supposed to signify or mean. Other paintings were made simply to be visually pleasing, and perhaps if I gave much more thought to it I could find a way to make a game that captures the essence of beauty, but I felt that it would be relatively shallow. I wanted to find a painting with meaning, something that asked the viewer to study it, and in a way, did most of the job of interactivity on its own.

I found something of it in a memory. When I was a child, I went to a Catholic grade school. One of the priests had the opportunity to go to Italy, and he had a projection slide show of some of the things he saw while there. I don’t remember much, and I don’t remember anyone saying what we were looking at, but I do remember seeing a portion of a large painting. This painting had a man, naked, covering part of his face with one hand, while cowering in an attempt to hide the rest of his body. I remember the priest making a point of noting how ashamed this person was. It made quite an impression on me.

With that, I did a search online. Was it a painting of Hell? I found some interesting ones, but nothing resembled what I remembered. Maybe it was Judgement Day? Besides finding a few Terminator references, I found quite a few artists did paintings of it. But then I found it: Michaelangelo’s The Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel.

Wikipedia has a very large resolution image of the painting, so feel free to check it out. The figure I remembered is near the bottom right of the painting:

Ok, I had a painting. What was it trying to convey to the people who would see it? I did some reading, and there was much to be made about the colors or the composition or how it relates to the ceiling. What really inspired me to want to see the painting for myself one day is this wonderful article called The Terror of Salvation: The Last Judgement.

The painting is called The Last Judgement, but its focus is more upon the resurrection of the body at the end of time. There is also the idea that judgment is not a simple matter of Jesus and God counting your sins and deciding where you go. Michaelangelo was a student of Dante, who looked at salvation and damnation as human choices. Judgment is personal and internal, not imposed upon by the Deity. God simply allowed you to make your judgment. Sin wasn’t a quantity of actions. It was a state of the soul.

Designing It As a Game

There are quite a few places I could take The Last Judgment: The Game. While I would ideally have the setting be similar to the painting, I felt it was too limiting. The painting works because everyone understands that they aren’t being judged based on a single point in time. Each person has lived a life of choices before seeing the painting. It’s very powerful because people bring their personal history with them when they see it.

Therefore, Michaelangelo’s game wouldn’t start at Judgment Day. It would start at birth.

Initially, others would be making decisions for you, but as you get older, you become more capable of thinking for yourself. There wouldn’t be a need for a “sin meter” or HUD. Through your own knowledge of your actions, you should be aware of the state of your soul.

Each day in game time might be representative of a year. Perhaps one day you are poor, and you have the opportunity to steal some food. Do you? Perhaps another day you are lonely. Do you take comfort with a local prostitute?

Some choices aren’t quite so obvious or clear-cut. Do you make fast friends with some of nefarious elements in your society? Do you become a bad influence on someone else? Do you steal bread for someone who is hungry? Do you stay at home when you could be productive? If someone strikes you, do you strike back? Do you lie to protect a friend from a bully? Do you lend a panhandler money, not knowing what he is going to use it for? Do you destroy a group of small houses that have been there for decades to make room for a large condominium that can bring in more money to the community?

Essentially, the game is about making decisions. Perhaps circumstances might be different for each play session, but the choices are always in the player’s control. Based on those decisions, of course, your life and the lives of those around you are affected. Perhaps you live a life of luxury, but depending on how you got there, you might have few friends, many enemies, and a lot of debt. Perhaps you give away all of your earnings, but because you never save any for yourself, your capability to earn and therefore give is limited. Perhaps in an effort to avoid committing sinful acts, you lock yourself in your room, but by doing so you waste your potential as a human being.

At the end of the player’s life, it is Judgment Day. An angel shows you a book, detailing the decisions you made. Jesus stands before you, and he waits for you to decide whether you have lived a life worthy of salvation or whether your actions clearly showed a desire for damnation.

That’s It?

That’s it. The idea behind the game is to allow the player the chance to explore a life of different choices. Judgment Day is not simply a matter of counting up what you think are the wrong actions and subtracting them from the number of right actions in the hopes that you came out to a positive goodness rating. It would be more introspective, more personal. Jesus isn’t angry or pleased to see you. He isn’t going to send you to Hell. You are.

Couldn’t the player lead an evil life and then decide to be saved anyway? Yes, and the game wouldn’t stop them. The game doesn’t deal with the aftermath of your decision. If you choose to sin your way to Judgment Day and simply think you can click on the “Salvation” button, sure, you could complain that the game is broken. Another way of looking at it: you’ve missed the point. Judgment Day is yours to take seriously. The game isn’t going to enforce it for you any more than God is. Read the account of your life that the angel is showing you. The game would keep track of choices, including omissions, as well as telling you about the other people in your life and how your actions affected them. Recognize that the choices you make color who you are, and that you, faced with the knowledge of all of your decisions, get to decide whether such a life makes you worthy of salvation.

If Art Was a Game

I really enjoyed the challenge of this month’s topic. Another painting I wanted to make a game out of was Nighthawks at the suggestion of a good friend of mine. Making a game about the emptiness or loneliness of modern urban life is something I hope another Round Table blog takes up before May is over.