GAME DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT

Spring 2017

Dr. Vasile Alaiba

Faculty of Computer Science

“Al. I. Cuza” University Iași, România

Agenda

■ Ideas and Value

– I have the best idea in the world! What should I DO?

■ Game Flow

– The place where we all wish to be.

■ Meaningful Decisions

– It’s what makes games interesting.

IDEAS AND VALUEI feel I’m on to something great!

But I can’t tell you, because I’ll have to kill you…

Good ideas are a dime a dozen, and even that price is too high.

■ Never demand an NDA when pitching your idea to friends, colleagues, possible investors, etc.

Ideas have no intrinsic value!

■ Many publishers will not even look at unsolicited ideas.

■ Game designers have far more ideas than they have time to implement; there is never a reason to steal one.

Fictitious Scenario

■ Imagine a publisher that has a big pirate game in the works. An unsolicited idea comes in from a stranger who pitches them a similar pirate game.

■ The publisher looks at the idea, realizes it is similar to what they are already working on, and politely declines.

■ Then the publisher comes out with the pirate game and the designer thinks that the publisher stole his idea and made it without him!

What has value?

■ Once a game is created, it has value.

■ A team charter or a partnership agreement documents the future ownership rights of the project once it is finished.

■ This is not protecting the idea, but the timeinvestment that the team members will make in implementing the idea.

What next?

■ Read Chapter 8 Prototypes and Intellectual property (p. 80 – 84) from [2].

■ Read the article The Value of Ideas: https://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2008/05/the-value-of-ideas/

GAME FLOWThe Fundamental

Game Design Directive

The Mental State of Flow

■ The concept of flow

– proposed by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

– explains why artists and other creative types becoming “lost in their work”

– developers call this “the zone”

■ Flow is a state of focus and concentration on a task that is intrinsically rewarding.

Conditions to Achieve Flow

■ An activity with a clear set of goals and progress.

■ The task must have clear and immediate feedback so the person can adjust his actions as needed.

■ The person must balance between the perceived challenges of the task and his perceived skills.

– He must see the task as neither too easy nor too hard.

A good balance between challenge and skill creates flow.

Achieving Flow with Game Design

■ As the player’s skill increases, if the game’s challenge does not increase, the player enters a state of boredom.

■ As the game’s challenge increases, if the player’s abilities do not increase, the player experiences frustration.

■ The Game Design Directive:

Craft an experience that puts the player between anxiety and boredom,

without knowing the player’s skills.

Case Study: Shadow of the Colossus

■ The player is a young man who must defeat massive colossi.

■ The battles are multi-staged and intense, which leads to a sense of accomplishment and conquest at the end.

■ After each fight, the player must travel by horse through a largely barren and unpopulated landscape in search of the next colossus.

■ There are:

– no towns or dungeons to explore,

– no characters with which to interact,– no enemies to defeat other than the colossi.

Case Study: Shadow of the Colossus

Why did the designers choose to have these quiet, peaceful rides in between heart pounding boss fights?

Navigating the Flow Channel

The Flow Channel

■ The flow channel is the area where the player is neither frustrated nor bored.

■ The goal is to get the player to bounce off the edges of the flow channel.

■ The player gets a period of easy play that releases tension and challenge, and brings him back down toward the boredom side.

■ Before he gets bored, a new, harder challenge is introduced, to match with the player’s increased mastery.

What next?

■ Listen to the TED Talk Flow, the secret to happiness by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounciation)

■ Read from [2] the beginning of Chapter 9 Flow and the Fundamental Game Design Directive (p. 86-92).

MEANINGFUL DECISIONS

Making decisions is

what the players do in a game.

Case Study: The Game LCR

■ A game for three or more players.

■ Each player has a pile of chips and some dice with L, C, R, and dots on the faces.

■ Players take turns, rolling the dice.

■ For each L/R he passes a chip to the player on his left/right.

■ For every C he rolls, he passes a chip into a center pot.

■ When one player amasses all the chips, the game is over.

Why is LCR one of the worst games?

■ The game is 100% random, the players have no input in the outcome of the game.

■ Actually the game does not need players!!!

Player Agency

■ The designer must frame decision points in a way that is conducive to generating or maintaining flow for the player.

■ Agency means being able to act on your own behalf.

■ You do not have agency when watching movies because you cannot affect the state of the events.

■ A player who can make only decisions that do not affect the game state does not have agency.

What is a Decision?

■ The player has to make a decision if he needs to choose between multiple options.

■ Sometimes not choosing is an option, so not doing anything is a decision!

Meaningless Decisions

■ Blind Decisions– The player must choose without any information.

■ Obvious Decisions– The player has only one rational option.

■ Empty/Misleading Decisions– A decision that has no impact on the game state.

■ Handcuffing Decisions– A decision that removes the ability of players to make

further meaningful decisions.

Meaningful Decisions

■ Trade-offs

– Choose between options that balance each other (for example: inrease damage, decrease movement).

■ Risk/Reward

– Choose between options that have different risk/reward ratio.

What next?

■ Read from [2]:

– the introduction to Part 3 Meaningful Decisions (p. 84-86)

– Chapter 10 Decision-Making (p.101-116)

References

■ [1] Fullerton, T., Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games, CRC Press, 2014

■ [2] Hiwiller, Z., Players Making Decisions: Game Design Essentials and the Art of Understanding Your Players, New Riders, 2016