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