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UA Game Dev Club Meeting

04/06/15

Cindy has arrived and is dying. Forcing new members to introduce themselves.

Cynthia. ECE.

McKenzie. CS.

Andrew. Psych and CS.

Ben. Psych or CS, hasn't decided yet.

Few announcements:

Threes: the Mobile Masterpiece

Talk by Jeremy

One of the best games of 2014. Link to free javascript version (not as good as the bought product).

Link to official webiste.

What's "Threes?" slide. It's actually important that it was made by graphic designers.

"The Game is Adorable". Each tile has adorable faces. Anthropomorphize stuff! Most of the development time was spent on the look. "Angry-birds approach." Angry-birds is a clone of Crush the Castle, but Angry Birds is adorable. "Branding is important." Humanizing numbers works.

Highest number is achievement. Give the number character. Cool, collectable trophies.

Engaging mechanics on a 1-button pick-up-and-play game. Quick-in and quick-out while knowing where you are and what's going on. The game increases in complexity and difficulty on a single, simple premise: make the numbers bigger.

All screenshots are from Jeremy. He's super good at this game. The tutorial is there, but the button itself explains the game.

Numbers are trophies and are shown to the player on startup. Blank spots for trophies motivate the player to try for it. Also, spoilers for the looks of the trophy!

Going through everything about the game and how much the little stuff does for each aspect of the game. Sliding is well-designed. Sliding has immeidate feedback. Swipes are continous motion that could be properly designed on any mobile game.

The game is intuitive and things are learned by doing. Larger numbers get introduced as the game progresses.

What's the difference between this and 2048? This game isn't so easily solvable, and it's also the first game.

The goal of the game is to get the highest score possible.

Bigger numbers show up when the player can use them, and the player doesn't need to be educated about it. It's an understandable addtion that explains itself when it needs to be present.

Threemails link.

The whole dev process was published online in their email form. This game was pretty from the beginning. When prettiness are a main part of the game, they should be considered from the very beginning. Work on the important parts from the beginning.

Threes wasn't the beginning, feeling and looking pretty was the focus of the beginning prototypes.

Come to Cindy's talks about art (though she's not a graphic designer). There's a difference between artists and graphic designers.

Questions!

Would ads have made this game free and as profitable?

Jeremy doesn't think so. There's a lot of problems with ads breaking the point of the game. It's amazing that such a sense of immersion came out of a game about numbers.

What about just one ad? Starting already hurts the experience. What about when leaving? laughter.

End of talk.

Zuoming: Ten Game Design Tools That You Can Use in 30 Minutes

Click-baity title. Been thinking about this talk for quite a bit. So, Zuoming hopes it's interesting. It's just written on a page. No powerpoint. Talking to Livio, he's of the opinion that just an informal talk should be written on a page, and then tangents can emerge naturally.

Conversations about what is useful about Zuoming's talk is anticipated and considered valuable. As long as Zuoming's been in the club, there hasn't really been a talk about design. Zuoming thinks that's good, as without making a game, talking about design is kinda detrimental. Don't build your castle out of thin air.

Now, however, a lot of people have made games, so now talking about design can actually be useful when applied to next game. Zuoming is qualifying himself a bit to prove he's allowed to talk about design. He's been making hobby games since 8th grade. Portfolio of games is at 25 games. Even with most of them being terrible, he's learned a lot about making games.

He thinks about game design concepts close-to-daily.

1) Initiative

When you enter a new game, you want to learn something, but it's a taxing experience. Would you play a new game everyday? No. It's exhausting. Learning can be daunting. A player comes in with some level of initiative with a willingness to learn how to play your game.

As the player learns to play the game, they will lose initiative until they do something cool that engages them. Eventually, they may just give up on playing the game.

Can your game get the player past their sinking initiative?

The beginning initiative is dependant on context and various factors.

2) Mechanics

No debate on what mechanics are. We'll go with base definition.

"Construct of rules that allow you to interact with the game."-Wikipedia.

Different mechanics give different mileages. Trivial when said aloud. "How in the space of possible mechanics can I find the most mileage?"

3) Tutorial

Tuorials hurt initiative unless its hidden within the game. Or you can "bite the nail" and put it all in the beginning of the game, and make it short.

4) Affordance

Affordance is used in various design disciplines. "How can you use things that already exist in real life to make your design better?" An example given in the archetypical book on design the Design of Everyday Things: doors designed to know whether or not a door should be pushed or pulled.

Example of Affordance

Extra Credits example: low resolution game with cash register, green rectangle, and grey circle? That low-resolution stuff is obviously money! Affordances make it easier to add more things to your game.

Example: a button that will increase upwards velocity with downward acceleration. That's jumping. Constant upwards velocity? Elevator? Think of good affordances to make things intuitive. Eventually, though, things will get too complicated, so you'll have to just teach it in.

Another example that Zuoming loves: Braid affordances Mario (affordances is now a verb, deal with it). Real-life is not a necessary source of affordance. Gets into the concepts of genres (not on the list).

5) Conveyance

Choose how to limit the players to do what you expect them to do. The beginning of Mario is a good example. The game conveys to the player that the player must go right. Conveyance can reduce the need for tutorials.

6) Inherent Challenge

Made the terminology up, don't look it up online. Something that already exists that adds interesting properties to the game (related to affordance). Example: local multiplayer. It's hard to break local multiplayer into something not fun. Deck building (aka probability).

Question: definition of inherent challenge? Free packages of affordance.

Another example: gravity.

7) Elegance

Extra Credits talks about depth-vs-complexity. Zuoming thinks of it in terms of amount of initiative/intuitiveness required vs variety of the game. Elegance is important beyond beauty, good for design, because when there are few rules you can really play around with them and really make it adaptable and change it.

Jumping mechanic is intuitive, but orbits are complicated.

To be continued....

We'll add more things to next talk to make up for not getting to all ten things.