When I first saw that the final project of this class would be
to build a complete, original game of our own design, my first thought
was "Finally! Now I'll have something for my portfolio!" After
completing three years in the Computational Media program, about eighty
percent of my creative projects have come from a single class, and I
had created only one video game. For a major that boats to prepare
students for jobs in the video game industry, it looked like all we
were going to learn was theory rather than gain practical experience.
This class was a great learning experience for me because we were
specifically set up in our groups to work together like a professional
development team. I was able to focus on developing an aspect of the
game that I am good at, rather than worry if I will be able to program
the features I want to include in the game. More CM classes should
have a similar structure, where the students have to create an original
product or deliverable as the final culmination of the class. For the
video game industry, having these sorts of things in your portfolio is
far more impressive than a stack of papers that show that you know the
theory but not its application.
For our first brainstorm session, we discussed a wide variety of games that we would like to design. For me, this was one of the most fun parts of the project, although there were times when the discussion would die as everyone ran out of ideas. One idea that I wish we could have done was a kind of combination between DDR and bird mating dances. We talked about making a game where you where a male bird trying to attract a mate, and there would be several types of mini games that you would go through. One would be to select and arrange items you find in order to make the best nest. Another would be that you could create a dance using aDDR interface and the more impressive the dance, the better you would score. The biggest problem with this was how to determine what was "good" vs what was "bad," since player preferences would vary greatly and it would be impossible to keep our own bias out of it. We had to throw out a lot of good ideas because we were afraid that we would not be able to code it, or that we would not have enough time.
One of the readings that we kept in mind during the brainstorming sessions was DeKoven's The Well Played Game. We wanted to try and make a game that could be played with other people and could be played a variety of ways. Obviously, we were unable to implement a lot of this in our final game design. One of the things that we really wanted to do initially was to make the game cooperatively multiplayer somehow. We really liked the idea of two people helping each other to achieve a goal and making the experience meaningful and fun for the two players. We decided that this aspect would be too difficult to complete given our time constraints. Another aspect of The Well Played Game that we had wanted to use was to allow players to play the game according to their play style. We were going to do this by having a large number of items that provided various benefits, and consequences, to the user for them to choose from. Therefore, we would not enforce a particular type of playing style. The only way we implemented this in the final game was to allow the user to manage their drunk level. We also talked about incorporating some of the ideas mentioned in The Hegemony of Play by Lucida , specifically by allowing the player to choose a particular gendered sprite at the beginning of the game. Again, time constraints prevented us from doing this, but we were able to make some gender ambiguous sprites. The only clues to the sprite's gender is that it has short hair and lacks boobs - otherwise, it is gender neutral.
Throughout our entire project, we had to continuously scrap ideas that we had planned to implement because we did not have time to code them. Although our project over all was not difficult to code, all of our programmers had other classes that ended up cutting down the time they could spend on the game. It was very frustrating for all of us I think to have developed a great idea for a game and then be unable to create it. Our core gameplay concept, that the user balances the trade offs between all of the pickups, was only implemented with picking up beer or water to manage your drunk level. As far as improvements to make to our game, I would tweak some of the gameplay aspects such as spawn rates, enemy agro stats, and level designs. Also, I would include all of the aspects of the game that we were unable to implement. Overall, I believe that we made a good prototype and I would have liked to see us develop it further. One of my favorite parts about this project is the fact that when someone asks me what do you do in Computational Media, I can now pull this up and say that I have made completely original games, from start to finish. More than anything else, the fact that I could apply and test out the theories and positions I have read in papers and text books into a practical, finished product has made this project a very rewarding and enlightening experience for me.
For our first brainstorm session, we discussed a wide variety of games that we would like to design. For me, this was one of the most fun parts of the project, although there were times when the discussion would die as everyone ran out of ideas. One idea that I wish we could have done was a kind of combination between DDR and bird mating dances. We talked about making a game where you where a male bird trying to attract a mate, and there would be several types of mini games that you would go through. One would be to select and arrange items you find in order to make the best nest. Another would be that you could create a dance using aDDR interface and the more impressive the dance, the better you would score. The biggest problem with this was how to determine what was "good" vs what was "bad," since player preferences would vary greatly and it would be impossible to keep our own bias out of it. We had to throw out a lot of good ideas because we were afraid that we would not be able to code it, or that we would not have enough time.
One of the readings that we kept in mind during the brainstorming sessions was DeKoven's The Well Played Game. We wanted to try and make a game that could be played with other people and could be played a variety of ways. Obviously, we were unable to implement a lot of this in our final game design. One of the things that we really wanted to do initially was to make the game cooperatively multiplayer somehow. We really liked the idea of two people helping each other to achieve a goal and making the experience meaningful and fun for the two players. We decided that this aspect would be too difficult to complete given our time constraints. Another aspect of The Well Played Game that we had wanted to use was to allow players to play the game according to their play style. We were going to do this by having a large number of items that provided various benefits, and consequences, to the user for them to choose from. Therefore, we would not enforce a particular type of playing style. The only way we implemented this in the final game was to allow the user to manage their drunk level. We also talked about incorporating some of the ideas mentioned in The Hegemony of Play by Lucida , specifically by allowing the player to choose a particular gendered sprite at the beginning of the game. Again, time constraints prevented us from doing this, but we were able to make some gender ambiguous sprites. The only clues to the sprite's gender is that it has short hair and lacks boobs - otherwise, it is gender neutral.
Throughout our entire project, we had to continuously scrap ideas that we had planned to implement because we did not have time to code them. Although our project over all was not difficult to code, all of our programmers had other classes that ended up cutting down the time they could spend on the game. It was very frustrating for all of us I think to have developed a great idea for a game and then be unable to create it. Our core gameplay concept, that the user balances the trade offs between all of the pickups, was only implemented with picking up beer or water to manage your drunk level. As far as improvements to make to our game, I would tweak some of the gameplay aspects such as spawn rates, enemy agro stats, and level designs. Also, I would include all of the aspects of the game that we were unable to implement. Overall, I believe that we made a good prototype and I would have liked to see us develop it further. One of my favorite parts about this project is the fact that when someone asks me what do you do in Computational Media, I can now pull this up and say that I have made completely original games, from start to finish. More than anything else, the fact that I could apply and test out the theories and positions I have read in papers and text books into a practical, finished product has made this project a very rewarding and enlightening experience for me.
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