Game Design - SP2023

– PROMPT –

1. Answer the following Board Game Playing Questions.
2. Your blog’s topic should be about the emergent mechanic.  If you have no idea about the emergence experience in games please read Chapter-3:  “Complex System and the Structure of Emergence” – [use this material to support your idea]
3. This page: Board Game Mechanics has much more mechanics than what you played in the board game club – [Find more mechanics and details to support your opinion and inspire your design in the Team Blog below]

– RESPONSE –

• What games did you play?  Please address their name of them. 3 at least.

谁是牛头王；矮人挖矿；嫌疑人在跳舞。

• Which game is your favorite?  Can you describe the mechanics that the most fun experience is derived from? 

Among all three games, 谁是牛头王 is my favorite for its simple mechanics yet involving experience. In general, there are four rows of cards (with numbers 1-104 and random number of 牛头) with one head card given. In each round, every player would pick one card from their hand and put it next to the card with the closest number in ascending order. Whoever puts the sixth card in each row has to collect all the rest five. In the end, the player having the most 牛头 loses the game.

• Did you find the emergent game experience?  Can you describe that? The description could be rules, mechanics, play experience, etc.

As is described in Chapter 3, “for gameplay to emerge from [emergence, the structure of game mechanics, and gameplay], the mechanics must be balanced between order and chaos… Ordered systems are simple to predict, while chaotic systems are impossible to predict, even when you fully understand the way the parts work that make up the system. Emergence thrives somewhere between order and chaos.”

In this game, the rule of punishing the player who owns the sixth card seems unpredictable, thus tending towards chaos. However after first round of experiment, we gradually realized that by paying attention to the cards already given out / calculating between the distance of numbers and the number of players / using the smallest number to get through a tough round, order does exist among hidden strategies. Such subtle balance leads to “a high replay value because the challenges and possible actions that occur while playing are different every time”, thus further making it “a game of emergence”. 

• Which aspect of the board game corresponds to the gameplay in the video game? (As we all know that gameplay is a critical part of video games, so much so that understanding the game system, and surviving the game all depend on it.)

Similar to video games, board game also requires active learning. Simple as the mechanics is, we could always learn more hidden rules through different rounds of play. The more we learn, the higher chance we obtain to win the game, which just as we practiced in video games.

– PROMPT –

Choose one of the 4 games to play then write a response blog for it. Anything could be included in this response.

• Option 1: Celeste
• Option 2: Hollow Knight
• Option 3: INSIDE
• Option 4: Limbo

– RESPONSE –

For this assignment, I played Playdead’s INSIDE, a 2d platformer combining actions and puzzles. When we observed our classmates trying this game in the first class, I was intrigued by its overall visuals and puzzle designs, therefore choosing it from the above four games to personally experience it.

Generally speaking, what fascinated me most was the challenge design of this game. I understood that it would be a running game with some challenging settings at the first glance. However, as I kept playing, the design and imagination of the challenges continuously surprised me not only as a player but also from the perspective of a game designer. Managing to control unconscious people was the first surprise after I got familiar with identifying triggers to change object angles or positions. Looking back, such breakthrough also indicates to reveal the great narrative besides the action required at the beginning. Similarly, when the boy, the main character controlled by players, was required to mimic the actions of those unconscious people, I was again amazed by such challenge design, as it broadens my understanding of user interaction with NPCs and background settings in puzzle games. While sometimes being out of expectation, the challenge designs in this game consistently adhere to our intuition, which makes each challenge successfully hit the balance of encouraging exploration and being logical.

Besides the gameplay, the narrative was also a highlight of this game. The overall setting of this game was gradually unveiled as we players explored forward through controlling the boy, yet what makes it absurd was that the narrative targeted a world-view of losing consciousness and getting rid of being controlled. As I didn’t fully complete this game, I watched several playthrough videos to figure out the ending. The normal ending points to the cruel fact that all struggles to escape from the laboratory were in the end useless, while the hidden one provides an opportunity to shut down the power of control, leading to the simultaneous death of the boy. The latter one, from my understanding, was even crueler because the boy’s death actually proves the fact of being controlled, which denied our ever-lasting assumption of being selected among all to strive for hope — even though we could control those unconscious during the process, we ourselves are still being controlled. Such ending indeed caused an emotional shock to me, and I was again amazed by the designer conveying such heavy messages through seemingly simple keyboard controls like WASD and independent control key.

Other than above, appropriate sound effects (like the groaning of the giant meatball in the end), attracting visuals (represented by the sharp contrast between light and shadows) and vivid visual effects (like the reflection on the water surface) all contribute to the success of the gameplay and narrative, therefore leading to great success. I was extremely inspired to think of future game design, more importantly, to re-consider the meaning of consciousness and the relationship between game players and the controlled game characters.

Project02: 2D Game

Team members: Jyoti, William, Annika, Callie

Concept Design: [slides here]

– Flow chart of your game system –

– Structure of Game Level & Challenges –

• See the description from Annika’s documentation.

– Prototype Progress –

• See the video recording from William’s post. 

– Prompt –

• Find challenges HERE
• Conquer as many challenges as possible and insert videos as consequence in a blog… 
• Insert your blog link in the assignment spreadsheet

– Challenge #1: create variables –

– Challenge #3: car speed control i –

 

– Challenge #4: car speed control ii –

– Challenge #5: car speed control iii –

 

– Challenge #6: random color setter –

 

– Challenge #7: create array by tag ii –

 

– Challenge #8: change all trees color to yellow –

 

– Challenge #9: click gameobject function –

 

– Challenge #10: change color function –

 

– Challenge #11: change color function –

 

– Prompt –

• What’s your understanding of the relationship between gameplay and learning.
• Gameplay examples.
• Find a book or article talking about video games, which can support your understanding.

– Response –

Generally speaking, although learning is almost never the initial purpose of designing and developing games of various types, gameplay by nature provokes experiences of learning problem-solving, in other words, handling challenges, as is defined in class. Similar to any other type of creation, games (essentially game designers) introduce to players predetermined contexts and stories — regardless of authenticity and significance — as well as game-specific purposes, including but not limited to beating enemies, breaking records, or even just gain experiences. Both are the major components of gameplay, i.e., the mechanism of the game, and through such gameplay, players often experience processes of learning, ranging from adapting game-specific rules to practicing real-life skills: instant reactions, decision-making, etc.

Good gameplay facilitates learning, which in return motivates players to further explore the game and gain sense of joy or accomplishment. Because “gameplay is about interaction design”, players often acquire active learning experiences and knowledge through interaction with games if they have good gameplay design. Puzzles games represented by “Baba is You” would serve as good examples here. Designing over 200 levels in a general pace of adding difficulties and complexities, the game encourages players to manipulate physical objects assigned with specific rules in order to explore surprising interactions. As the gameplay design well fits players’ learning pace of getting familiar with different elements, every time passing one level, players gradually learn the game rules better and become trained to explore further possibilities of future unknown rules. Similar processes exist in adventure games, where players learn tricks and experiences through past failures that altogether contribute to eventual success.

Moreover, such learning process is tailored to various players thanks to the individualities of players and flexibilities of gameplay design. As Azita Iliya Abdul Jabbar and Patrick Felicia indicated in Gameplay Engagement and Learning in Game-Based Learning: A Systematic Review, learning is considered as “a personal process” because gameplay experiences have no specific rules and largely rely on players’ “individual differences”. Those differences and flexibility further lead to diversities of users’ appetites for game genres and experiences, thus further complicate the learning process in a general sense.

– Work Cited –

– Prompt –

• What is the real life experience that you want to embedded in your lego game?
• What is the creative game experience reflecting the real life experience?
• Documentation part of the 1st week development.

– Proposal –

In this LEGO game, I want to embed the real-life experience of people taking the physical challenges in those Challenge Reality Shows, such as 智勇大冲关 and 男生女生向前冲. The inspiration came after I watched the tutorials for Lego Microgame, which is a template that highly encourages actions like running and jumping and has special visuals of LEGO bricks. Such mechanism reminds me of those challenge shows on TV in real life, where there are normally 4-6 different challenges set relatively high above the swimming pool so that challengers wouldn’t get hurt when falling off. Some of the typical settings are as follows (see figures below). The challenges examine not only people’s intense actions like jumping and sprinting but also quick reactions to different situations within only one opportunity.

Converting it online, I would consider it more a learning-based gameplay rather than a pure examination of players’ reactions. Although physical actions are highly limited in terms of video games, part of the gameplay is designed to be challenging that requires subtle balancing between jumping (space key) and forwarding (arrow key) through keyboard controls. Although it might be hard to pass all challenges at one time, players could gradually learn the tricks through multiple attempts, unlike the one-time experience in TV shows. Moreover, to concretize the obstacle of examining challengers’ instant judgment and reaction facing different situations, I assigned some pickups along the way, with all of which players could trigger the final elevator to success in the end. Players are expected to change views with mouse interactions in order to identify each pickup along the way. Otherwise, they might return back for missing pickups in order to win the game.

As it is my first time using Unity, for the first week I’m focusing on getting familiar with the LEGO template and Unity interfaces/functions/general geometries/special assets, as well as constructing the overall structures of four challenges. Further polishments such as map design and challenge adjustment are expected during the second week.

– Link to Unity Play –

• https://play.unity.com/mg/lego/legogame_challenge0204

– Documentation –

Challenge 1

Challenge 2

Challenge 3

Challenge 4