2D or 3D, that is the question

While doing games design, at least in our course, you will learn about 3D as well as 2D. In our case, we use Flash for 2D by default and Unity and UDK for 3D design. I personally am an advocate of 2D and 2D games since I love the restrictions of the 2D environment, with small exceptions (platformers, I’m looking at you), but this morning I really had a thought about what type of game I would do in my second semester when I will have to make a 3D game. This post is a small discussion about how I see 3D in comparison with 2D from a games design student’s perspective.

We are Game Designers part 1

As children, we designed games. Tons of them. We designed, we played and we iterated the hell out of them. My friends and I, and I’m sure I’m not the only one, designed over 10 games I think, and iterated them and older ones time and time again. In this post, I just want to talk about what I find fascinating about that, and how I love my childhood. As today’s game designer that I am.

That sharpie is for prototyping later

Randomness and story arcs

During one of our first lectures, we discussed about how warning the players that certain things would or might happen is good for the game and the player. How is a player supposed to know what his actions might do in a game? How would he know which path is right to choose? In class, the main reason for this was the designer’s duty to inform the player that, in Mario for example, if he presses the X button, then Mario will jump and only jump. Same for pressing the Y button that causes Mario to shoot jumping fireballs out of his mouth if he has eaten the magic jalapeño flower, while HOLDING that same button would make Mario sprint. Now, I remember that I wasn’t told any of these in Supermario Bros. back when I played it on the NES, but nevermind. The idea was that the player must know what his (physical) actions (over the controller and/or buttons in game) do, and him being able to plan accordingly. How would we have felt if the Y and X button suddenly got inverted? Anyway, I’m deviating. This post is about how the same lecture dealt with RPG’s, a genre in which I wholly agree that that idea is wrong. Let me explain…

Life as remediation

We call the representation of one medium in another remediation

Games are just “interactive entertainment”. They were here after the films;
Films are just moving photographs. They were here after the photographs;
Photographs are just standardized paintings, done through a different mechanical and chemical process. They were here after the paintings;
Paintings are just colored drawings. They were here after the drawings;
Drawings are just drawn thoughts. They were here after the thoughts;
Thoughts are just translated electrical impulses gotten from the brain as a result to the outward activity from what our bodies sense. They were here after the senses;
Senses are…as far as I can see at the moment.

Taking EVERYTHING into account – design perspective

I like new ideas for games. Of course I do, I’m supposed to be a game designer. After all, if we don’t like new game ideas, who would? There are two things that I want to share with you today. One of them baffled me with the tech that’s behind it, while the second one just served as a reminder for something that should’ve stuck with me from the first days in uni.

The games that I want to talk about are “Magnetic Billiards: Blueprint” (iOS) and “Pixeljunk 4AM” (PS3 Move).

Global Games Jam 2012 – The Snake-A-Maze experiment

This post has spent some time in the making, but I believe that now is a good time to publish it. I have participated in the Global Games Jam 2012. Myself, along with a team of 4 other 1st years from University Campus Suffolk, spent 48 hours making a game from scratch, on a set theme. My own contributions to the game were in the form of doing some of the coding, debugging a lot and helping in coming up with the general idea. Also this was the first time I created and recorded sounds, which I found extremely interesting and this could be something I believe I would like to do again, at least once.

For more information about the Global Games Jam, check out their website.

Now, why exactly am I writing about the Global Games Jam? The reason is simple: I’ve managed to create a full game, from start to finish, with 5 people, in 48 hours. Sure, it’s not bug-free, but those are minor details. I’ve been trying to create a full game with another team of 5 people for the last 6 months and we’re somewhere along 3/4’s of the game. I want to talk about good ideas and good managing, being able to do a crunch session in which all the members of the team work together and are together in the same room and do nothing else but work (and occasionally go for a pizza).

The whole experience was great and I learned lots of new things, including how to start thinking as a good object-oriented programmer (taking the lead from the senior 1st programmer which was in our team).

When the theme was assigned…

Shifting Maze – Iterations 3 and 4

In the last post, I had a good idea (in my opinion) for a nice little strategic game with random elements, but the first two iterations relied too heavily on luck, so I decided to rethink some of the game.

Rethinking

Shifting Maze – Iterations 1 and 2

One of the most interesting things that game designers can do, in my opinion, is to make paper prototypes of games, and board games. Nothing quite compares with the feel you get from building up a game from scratch in 30 minutes and then having people play it and give you feedback on it. To compare, it took me around 3-4 hours to write up the balloon game that’s in a post below, just because it was my first solo-take on a coded game, without help from tutors or tutorials.

So here’s the second board game I did since I arrived at UCS, the first one being a not-so-genius race-to-the-finish game. I will present the concept and iterative process as this game advances. At the moment it’s at its 3rd iteration, so I will post the early 2 iterations now and the 3rd one separately a bit later.

The whole idea of this game came when Rob challenged us to make a game in which dice would not be used to decide how many squares you move, after giving us a squared board on which we could try to do our game. I put on my “challenge accepted” face and gave it a go. After a few turns I decided I didn’t like the board, so set out to make my own. Having the idea roaming in my head for quite a while, I decided to do an ever shifting maze game.

Stay a while, and listen

Narrative in games. A very interesting topic. You see, the narrative is actually the order in which the story is told and, in my opinion, is something that can truly elevate a game. Of course, if the game as a whole is not worth any positive reviews because it’s just a very weak and unworked copy of what its predecessor was, no matter how interesting and innovative the narrative is, the game won’t be interesting or funny or fun or entertaining story wise because oh, they tried to make it hip and appeal to a broader audience and didn’t care about why the game was good in the first place but nooo, they had to try and sell more and…*breathe, breathe*… Ok, let’s try to dissect what narrative can do to a game and how it can improve it. I said improve, not “it’s the only cool feature we have”.

Level bosses pace around the waves of time

When discussing about games, it has become recent knowledge that games have levels. From the beginning of time, since people played Tetris, they know that the game has a lot of levels that go up every time the player reaches a milestone (usually by reaching a certain score, like multiples of 10.000). Also, recently, people have started hearing about casual games made by the developer PopCap Games, the developers of Bejeweled, Zuma, Plants vs. Zombies and a lot of other casual games that have become popular.

Because the game industry is still emergent in relation to its academic nature, papers have emerged, explaining different concepts that the players take as granted nowadays. In this blog post I will be commenting on 2 papers: José P. Zagal, Clara Fernández- Vara and Michael Mateas (2008) – Rounds, Levels and Waves Segmentation in Vintage Arcade Games, and Space of Possibility and Pacing in Casual Game Design – A PopCap Case Study, by Marcos Venturelli. Let’s talk about waves and the rest!