diseño juegos 11 ingles Level 11_ Design Project Overview _ Game Design Concepts

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Game Design Concepts

An experiment in game design and teaching

Level 11: Design ProjectOverview

You made a game on the first day of this course. It took you all of 15 minutes. It probablywasnt very good. At this point, with your current understanding of flow states, feedbackloops and kinds of decisions, you can probably isolate the reasons why it wasnt very good.

You made a few other games after that one. You might be proud of some of them, andembarrassed of others. Looking back, you might find one that you were proud of that you nowrealize could have been better. Or maybe not.

At any rate, you know how to make games.

So, lets make a good game. You have all the knowledge and theory you need.

We will spend the next month making a game. If youre a student, that may sound like anincredibly long time to you, and you will be surprised at how fast it flies by. If youre a littlemore experienced, it may sound like an unreasonably short time, but I promise you willmanage. Do not fear; we will take things one step at a time, through the entire process. Youwill not have to complete everything all at once. (Nor should you. That is not how games aremade.)

Readings

Read the following:

Challenges for Game Designers, Chapter 11 (Targeting a Market). We have discussed theimportance designing for the player (as opposed to the designer) earlier in this course. Thischapter goes into more detail, giving some considerations when designing a game fortarget-demographic or mass-market appeal.

Design Project: an Overview

In my classroom courses, I call this a portfolio project a game that will ultimately go into thestudents game design portfolio as a way of showing their skill at game design. You mayconsider doing this as well, depending on your situation and your career goals.



The purpose of the Design Project is to gain some experience in taking a game through theentire process from concept to completion. Because of this, do not simply start with an existingdesign (such as an earlier game you created in this course, or an idea youve had floatingaround in your head for awhile). You have plenty of time the entire rest of your life! to takeyour existing projects further. For now, get some practice at all of the stages of designing agame.

The Process

As you might guess from the syllabus, the process we will follow is going to go something likethis:

First, generate some core ideas for games. These do not have to be fleshed out in anymeaningful way, they are just seeds that can serve as starting points. You will choose oneto serve as the basis for your Design Project.

Next, you will create the core mechanics of the game. The game does not yet have to becomplete with all details fleshed out, but it does have to be at the point where you can startplaying it with yourself (even if you have to make up a lot of the rules as you go along).Youll play your own game in private, working on it until the point where you have acomplete set of rules.

After that you will bring in some close friends, family, confidantes, or other participants ofthis course. Share your project with them, play the game with them, and get feedback. Thekey here is to figure out if the core of the game is fun at all (if it is not, you can start overwith one of your other ideas or else modify your current one and try again). If it doesntstart out feeling like there is some magical fun quality to the play, that feeling is unlikely tomaterialize later it is far better to abandon an idea early and try again than to waste alarge amount of time on something that is just not going to work. Ideas are cheap,implementation is expensive; act accordingly.

When you have the core of the game working and it is meeting its design goals, it will betime to get into the details. Make sure the game can be played to completion, without thedesigner being present to answer questions or make on-the-fly rulings. Get to the pointwhere the game has a complete set of rules, with no dead-ends or holes that cause the gameto stop when the players cant figure out what happens next. Youll playtest with newplayers who have not seen the game before, and observe them from a distance to see whatthey do.

Once you are confident that your game is solid, youll explore blindtesting a playtestwhere you are not present at all. Youll give your game to some other people who willagree to test it and provide feedback. This most closely simulates actual market conditions,where a person buying a game does not have direct contact with the games designer, andthey must figure out how to play it for themselves.

After all of the details are complete in your game, it is time to tweak the small things. Makesure the game is balanced that is, that there are no strategy exploits that are too powerful,and that all players feel like they have a reasonable chance of success.

Lastly, as the game nears completion and the mechanics become solidified, youll considerthe user interface of your game the visual design of the physical components that willmake the game as pleasant, easy to learn and easy to play as possible.

Once everything is set, youll spend a short amount of time on the craft of the physical



components, making the artwork and assembling the components in their final form.

Keep in mind that game design is an iterative process, and that at any point in the process youmay find a reason to return to earlier steps to redo something. This is fine, and it is to beexpected. This is also the reason why it is better to kill an idea early than to abandon it late. Ifyou find that you have to start over from scratch, youll have more time remaining if you startover in the first week (as opposed to restarting the project in the last week).

Idea Generation

Recall from Level 4 that there are many ways to start conceiving of ideas. Start with coreaesthetics, or a core mechanic. Start with materials from other sources. Start with a narrative.And so on.

Today, start generating some ideas. Look in the world around you. What systems do you seethat would make great games? Carry a notebook with you wherever you go in the next fewdays, and write down every idea that occurs to you, no matter how silly it may seem.

The more you generate ideas, the easier it gets.

Design Project Constraints

I could leave this entire project open-ended, but in order to get you started Im going to giveyou some constraints. Remember, constraints are your friends.

If youve never designed a complete game before this course, follow this set ofconstraints. Create a board game, card game, or tile-laying game (that is, it musteither have a board, cards, or tiles as physical components). It may have more than

one of these components, and it may involve additional components beyond these (such asdice or pawns). You may choose any theme you want, as long as it is original do not use anexisting IP (intellectual property). In short, if your work would violate someone elsestrademark or copyright, dont do it. You will undoubtedly work with other peoples IP atvarious points in your own career; take the opportunity now to do something original withyour own IP.

Im going to place two more restrictions to help you. First, you may not make a trivia game, orany other game that relies on large amounts of content (such as Trivial Pursuit, Pictionary,Apples to Apples, or Cranium). This is purely for the purpose of keeping your scope limited; ifyou have to generate 250 cards with unique trivia questions on them, it will leave you far lesstime for playtesting the game mechanics. I would put Trading Card Games (like Magic: theGathering and Pokemon TCG) in this category as well, since it requires so much time to create alarge number of cards.

Second, you may not use roll-and-move mechanics in any form. Do not throw dice and thenmove a pawn around the track. Do not use a spinner or a teetotum or card draws or any otherrandom-number-generating device to determine what a player does on their turn. There areseveral reasons for this prohibition. First, the mechanic is highly overused, and it is practically



impossible for you to make a game that will not feel like a clone of Monopoly, Trouble, Sorry!,Chutes & Ladders, or any of the other myriad games that rely on this as their core mechanic.Second, the mechanic essentially makes the key decision each turn for the player, so the game ismaking interesting decisions but the player is not. By divorcing player intentionality from thegames outcome, you usually end up with a game that is not particularly fun to play (no matterhow fun it is to design).

If you have designed one or more complete games before but still do not feellike you are a strong game designer, follow this set of constraints. Follow all ofthe Green Circle constraints above. In addition, add one of the following

constraints. This is your choice, based entirely on your area of interest within game design:

Design your game such that it has a strong embedded narrative that is interactive in someway. You will have to think of ways to tell a story through the player actions of a boardgame, and how to integrate narrative and game mechanics. If you are interested primarilyin RPGs or other forms of storytelling, do this.

Create a purely cooperative board game for two or more players, so that everyone wins orloses as a team. This is challenging for several reasons. The game must provide systemsthat are the opposition, since the players do not provide opposition to each other.Cooperative games generally have a problem where a single skilled player can direct all ofthe other players (since everyone is cooperating, after all), leading to an MDA Aestheticwhere most of the players are bored because they are just being told what to do by anotherplayer. If you are interested in the social dynamics of games, choose this.

Make a two-player head-to-head game with asymmetry: the players start with unequalresources, positions, capabilities, and so on and yet they are balanced even though theyare quite different. These games are not so hard to design the core rules for, but they arevery difficult to balance. If you are interested in the technical and mathematical side ofgame design and game balance, try this.

Create a game to teach any topic that is normally taught at the high school (pre-college)level. It is up to you whether to teach a narrow, specific fact or a broad concept. Thechallenge here, of course, is to start with a fun game and not have the focus on educationget in the way of that. If youre interested in serious games (games that have a purposeother than pure entertainment), then do this project.

If you have designed multiple games professionally and you consider yourselfhighly experienced, follow this set of constraints. Ignore everything above. Youmust create a board game that uses a roll-and-move mechanic as the primary

gameplay activity. But make it good.

This mechanic is highly overused in games. It also creates a separation between the playersdecisions and the actions that the player takes on the board. It is therefore extremelychallenging to design a game that uses this mechanic in a way that feels fresh, original, andcompelling. But Im sure if you have reached this point in your career, you are up to thechallenge.

What If I Dont Want To Make a Board Game?



Some of you expressed a strong interest in board games and are excited to get started. Dont letme keep you. Realize that you are in the lucky minority.

Some of you are still more interested in making video games. Ill remind you that the vastmajority of your time making a video game will be spent creating art assets and writingprogramming code, and if you want to learn game design then you should choose an activitywhere the bulk of your time is spent designing the game. The principles and concepts of gamedesign are mostly the same, whether you work in cardboard or code, so if youve got the skillsto design video games you should be able to use those same skills to make a board game.

Some of you expressed interest in creating tabletop role-playing games. Ill remind you thatevaluating the design of an RPG is tricky, since a sufficiently skilled GM and players cansalvage a weak system (or, sufficiently inexperienced players can ruin a perfectly goodsystem). This will make playtesting far more difficult to evaluate, so you will find it useful topractice on a board game project first. Note that the line between board game and RPG hasblurred in the past few years, given narrative-heavy board games like Android and mechanics-heavy RPGs like D&D 4th Edition.

Some of you might have additional real-world constraints. You might be on a budget, and soyou cant spend more than a certain amount of money on your prototype. You might live in aremote location where prototyping materials are scarce, and youll have to make do with whatyou have. You might have less time than usual to devote to your project, in which case youllneed to design a game that has a short play time (so that you can playtest and iterate morefrequently in less time). If you have constraints from your life that affect this project, considerthose to be part of the project. A designer should not complain that they lack the resources tomake the game they want; rather, they should find a way to make the best game possible withthe resources they have.

Homeplay

I ask three things of you:

Start generating ideas for your Design Project now, based on the constraints above. As Imentioned earlier, keep them in a notebook or some other place where they will not getlost, and that you keep with you constantly so that you can write down your ideas as youthink of them.

By Wednesday, August 5, noon GMT: look over your ideas and post your three favoriteson the forum (http://gamedesignconcepts.aceboard.com/). Note that this is a day earlierthan usual, in order to give time for feedback.

By Thursday, August 6, noon GMT: read the posts of two other people at your same skilllevel, and provide constructive comments on their ideas. If you posted in Blue Square orBlack Diamond, also critique three others at a skill level below yours. If you see posts withno responses, reply to those first, so that everyone can have at least some feedback.

You may also use Twitter (with the #GDCU tag) to ask for immediate feedback of ideas as theyoccur to you.



This entry was posted on August 3, 2009 at 7:00 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You canfollow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, ortrackback from your own site.

8 Responses to Level 11: Design ProjectOverview

A Shot of Orange Juice (the Blog) Giant Log Flume Says: August 3, 2009 at 11:07 am | Reply[] now some of you may consider this cheating but seeing as Ian has now gotten to thethe project phase of the course; I think Im just going to roll what I was going to run aprototype for into []

Jeff Meckley Says: August 3, 2009 at 11:23 am | ReplyIan, would you consider command cards that present the player with several options as aroll and move mechanic? Command cards such as Attack, Assault, Op-Fire, and Move.

JM

Bryan Cash Says: August 4, 2009 at 10:40 am | ReplyIs there going to be a Level 11 Challenge forum created for posting to?

ai864 Says: August 5, 2009 at 9:09 am | ReplySorry about the oversight. The forums have now been created.

Szonja Says: August 5, 2009 at 1:52 am | ReplyMe too I would need some clarifications in this regard. Is randomness o.k. if it doesntresult in a number? Where in the game mechanics can randomness appear?

incobalt Says: August 5, 2009 at 7:22 am | ReplyI think what hes getting at is that he wants a game to be skill-based and not chance-based.You can have random elements as long as the random elements are NOT used todetermine what a player does on their turn. Risk has dice to determine battle outcomes,but does not determine the decision to fight or move or turn in cards to get more troops.

jorgecomics Says: August 5, 2009 at 3:45 pm | ReplyBeware also that this type of cliche is not just dice related. If your movement is ruled bydrawing random number cards from a deck youre getting the same result as chutes andladders.

Keep that in mind.

Lesson 11 Game Design Brainstorm | My Personal Blog Says:



July 26, 2011 at 7:52 am | Reply[] Lesson 11of the Game Design Concepts on-line course has asked for three game ideas.The constraints are as follows: []

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