<3 Education

Hi blog,

This blog might not seem school work related, however bear with me, and I hope you will see why I chose to put this up as a blog for my reflection. It’s a bit more “personal” than my other posts and I’m going to try to be more personal in the future. Not that people have commented on anything, heck I don’t even know if anyone is reading this stuff.

When I first started to prepare myself to get a higher education I was initially going to apply to a school in Gävle that has a graphical 3D education, because that was what I was doing at the time and it was an education I thought would suit me. I wanted to learn more about how to do 3D stuff. The education was two years. Then later when it was time to apply the education was getting a rework and wasn’t available. That’s when I started looking at other schools for what to do. I’ve always had an interest in games and programming so I applied to several schools related to that, because that was actually what I was thinking of when I was modelling in 3D. I couldn’t apply to pure programming courses, because I didn’t have enough math in my baggage so I applied to several schools. One being Game design in Skövde, and several in Stockholm and of course here on Gotland. When I first was accepted to Gotland, I was dubious if I should take the spot or not, but I accepted in the end (well duh ;).

What I didn’t know however was that the focus was more on the game design part than the programming part. Just reading it afterward seems stupid even to me as I did apply to Skövde on their game design school, but the reasoning was that I wanted to get into a game related school and I was willing to apply to almost anything at the time. Since I cannot draw anything worth a damn and I could only work in 3D software, it was logical that I applied for programming, besides I’ve always had a dream, but haven’t been able to teach myself, to program. I’ve always been that kind of a person, doing stuff, not thinking about why you are doing things, just plain out doing what you think is right. In my case however I’ve often been doing stuff right, but I cannot tell you how or why, just seems like I’m able to figure things out without even reflecting about it. The problem however is that once you start doing that, you stop learning the why, how and what. You don’t learn anything from your automated self, so once you are stuck, you are really stuck, you can’t solve the problem, because the knowledge of what went wrong and why it went wrong is missing. That has always been my problem, it’s when I started at this school that I’ve began thinking of why, how and what. So now every time I do something that for me is automated, I try to stop and think why something happens, what I did (right or wrong) and how I can change something. Analysis, good stuff!

Anyway, I am really glad that I was accepted to school. The more I learn about game design the more happy I am that I was accepted (and that I accepted). I’m learning more and more how cool it is to be able to analyse games (digital and board games) and even other things like TV shows and movies. For instance the small things that we learned in the first year about heroes journey, story arcs and how to build tension is something that you can clearly see if you look for it. I’ve even seen Chechov’s mantle piece in many TV shows, although often it isn’t a gun, but something else. That said however it’s not always evident what it might be. However I find it fun to look for those things and see if I guessed right later on. The teacher warned us that he would ruin games and also TV shows forever. I on the other hand don’t see it that way. I actually find it more entertaining now, because you see why they are doing like they are doing and you more often than not understand the reasoning why something happens. The only exception to the rule so far is probably Game of Thrones, however that series I hear the music and I forget all about analyzing the story.

In the first year I remember that I wasn’t that interested in game design, I mean don’t get me wrong I enjoyed the subject it’s just that it didn’t quite feel like my calling. Now on the other hand I find myself thinking about how to design games more and more. I’m learning to look at games, trying to come up with ideas on how to improve what people have, learning to appreciate the art that is game design and stopping to be as narrow minded as I once was.  I’m starting to like the different things that you can do and the more I talk with other people about game design the more I look forward to the next course that involves game design (which is level design) more and more.

Right now I like the school, I like my fellow students and I like our teachers and I’m really happy that I landed a spot here on this school and even if not everything is perfect at the school, what I learn each day is something I can bring with me. Although I’m not as good with game design as some of my fellow students, I’m learning to appreciate and love the craft that I’ve chosen.

One example, this week I have probably worked more during a week than I have since I got here. We’ve been pulling 8-10 hour days and I’m still not exhausted which I should be. Having these long hours during a week is usually a killer, however I’ve been enjoying making the serious game we are making so much that the time just flies. I’ve been having so much fun testing other peoples games and also trying to make sense of the criticism we got ourselves. Even if I haven’t been at school I’ve been working, looking at this or that. Discussing game design, discussing ideas etc. I’m even going to work this weekend and I’m looking forward to it.

I’ve met some excellent people and people that I want to stay in touch with after I graduate, so if anyone asks me where to apply for a school to get into the gaming industry, Uppsala University Campus Gotland would be the answer they get from me, I’m really enjoying my time here and I’m really having a lot of fun at the same time learning a bunch of stuff. My only regret is that I have to be away from my wife, but I’m doing this for us, so it is worth it. As a person I feel like I grown heaps, even if I’m older than if not all, at least most of the students that take the same course.

Pablo Escobar Serious game

I wrote a whole lot yesterday that I saved as a draft, thus there will be two posts today.

Anyway today we had the third meeting of the week, in just as many days. This time however we had someone who wasn’t a part of the group to join us when we were testing the game that we had. The feedback we got was something we had thought about, but it was said and explained in such a fashion that we instantly after that knew what to do. All cred to Oskar who basically put us on the right track. It’s incredible that a small thing like that can do so much for a project. Just having someone coming from the outside, seeing things that we’re too close to see and then make us go aaaah. After that it was just a matter of fixing the broken things and we have a serious game that now not only feels like a serious game, but it also plays as one with the mechanics. So now we have both the narrative aspects in the cards that the Pablo player has, but also with his actions. Although a lot of what we have done have been abstracted, it still feels like you have a Pablo simulator. Also as a player you feel the tension, you have strategies that you can do and you have an internal economy in the game where the Pablo player gets an advantage, then the other players get an advantage and it swings back and forth like that until one side gets the upper hand.

Also the way we achieve this is both by using dice and using strategy to pick locations that is difficult for the players to reach within a certain amount of time. Although we haven’t really balanced the game, it is already now semi balanced, because if the players choose the wrong strategy they will lose, and if the Pablo player use the wrong strategy he will easily lose. So I think we got a system that works really well, which means that we have the Serious Game in the mechanics as well as in the cards that the Pablo player plays. The cards will tell the story, the mechanics will show it visually, that for instance he did a lot of bad stuff, but that he occasionally builds a school or something that benefited the people living in Colombia.

Feels good that we were able to bring the game further to a final version and it feels really great that we are finally on the right track. Not that I was ever worried, as the people in my group are really good at what we are doing.

Gamification

While I’m on the subject of serious games, I might as well add a few thoughts on the guest lecture that we had on Monday. I have to be honest I didn’t think about the gamification idea that they had and didn’t really think that much about it. I thought it was cool that they could make a game about pretty much anything, that you just make goals in real life, where people update the progress through their phones. Now the interesting part is that when they did this, smart phones didn’t exist, so there was no GPS and they used sms instead of GPS locations etc.

Now that there’s been a few days since the lecture however, the idea is nice and I know that there are games where people are out looking for stuff that they need to locate, making them travel around in the community to find small notes or whatever it is. However I do believe that those games are limited in themselves, firstly you need to pay in order to be able to create your own locations. Then you need to make sure that the location you put something in is updated. It can’t be too accessible, because people will then either think it is trash or something else. Then again a lot of people, myself included, find the notion of a message in a bottle very interesting, and I would say that a system like that kinda invoke that feeling. You don’t know what the message is, but it is from someone else and it is sort of a treasure hunt.

Anyway it’s a very interesting idea that you can make games out of something that you want people to learn, or that you want to change a certain behavior, figure out how you can change that behavior and then make a game so that the things you want to change become something fun and interesting rather than a dull command from the top of the “food chain”. This kind of competition is something that I’m going to suggest for my wife that she implement in the business she’s in. Making agents compete against each other, but at the same time make them want to to as best as they can. Several ways this can be done, but since the call center is divided into countries, they could have different countries have a competition so that the winning team will win an award and make the whole thing an experience they remember. The award could be something that the whole team can do, a team event or just an award ceremony of sorts.

I see this could be a motivational thing that people can do for their employees, on nearly any workplaces. The goal might not always be to improve production, it could also be about improving the work environment or even finding ways to save money, like one of the examples we got was to try and get the electrical bill down a notch. They achieved it by having a competition where people turned off lights that were on and every time they did so they got points. Anyway most important thing is to have a goal and have an incentive to why they should complete the goals and also know what behavior you want to change / improve.

Interface design and progress on serious games

Today we had a lecture about interface design. There’s a lot of things you don’t think about when creating an interface, but after we had the lecture I thought it was more or less obvious. I didn’t know that we had a focus area when we are looking at things, however when now being aware of it, you notice it right away. You only see a certain small point of the screen. Also you do see stuff outside, but the peripheral vision is more a way to make you aware that there are changes that you might need to look at. Which is how we need to think when we are creating interfaces.

It’s kinda one of those things that is more or less self explanatory when you hear it, but stuff that you at least I haven’t really thought about and it makes perfect sense. Also there’s no universal answer to how to design an interface, or even how to make a menu system intuitive. For the most part you want as little text as possible and you want to have as easy menus as possible without it destroying the message. That’s both in-game and in the menu system before you start. For instance that you let people have access to the play button without having to press a million steps in order to begin playing.

What also was interesting was the link towards webpages, where you want an easy signup button and easy way for people to get into the webpage without going through a million steps in order to get where they want to be. There’s a lot of smart and simple solutions. One example that was mentioned, was that you could let the player click on a play button, the client downloads, while it does that or while you start the game you can start typing in the name of your character, then an email address and you can get the ball rolling from there.

Very interesting lecture, although something that makes you go “doh”, I should have thought about that and that it is really self explanatory, sometimes you just need the information served in order to realize that of course that’s how you do it.

Serious games

In the serious games department we’ve had a couple of interesting days. We got our feedback on the game that we had in mind, and although I understand the whole thing about needing to have the serious game aspect baked into the mechanics it didn’t do us any favor. We had a game that we thought was really good, and looking at it in retrospect we might have majorly failed, and the tricky part now is that we need to find a way to put a story about Pablo Escobar into the whole board game that we are making without using too many cards to explain about what he did. That even though he was a drug smuggler and a really bad person, he also did some good things for Colombia. He wasn’t a saint, far from it, however the interesting part about him was that he managed to avoid capture for so long and it wasn’t until the U.S. got the Colombian government to allow for extradition to the US that he escaped custody (in a prison he owned).

The whole bribe or be killed aspect is kinda interesting as well. Not that it made him a good guy, far from it, however it would be a mechanic that is interesting in itself. Problem however is that interesting mechanics doesn’t make for a serious game and the whole getting the game to be a serious game about a person that had a huge impact on drug smuggling and getting that into a mechanic and at the same time not having a narrative that is only in a card that you draw is very very difficult. We now have a system that doesn’t really feel like a serious game at all. That said, it is a very blurred line if you abstract something too much and figuring out how you can tell a story about a person without spelling it out directly is the challenge we are currently facing.

Boardgame progress / thoughts on lecture

Yesterday I began making a test layout for our board game, which we tested today. It failed horribly. We tested it only once, but it quickly became clear that it was too small for 5 players. Not only that but the monster was, contrary to our belief, much more powerful than we had anticipated. Having hidden movement makes it much easier for the monster to ambush the other players. We did however figure out that players needed more places to move and shortcuts, so we did a board on the spot that worked remarkably well. It had 133 movement squares compared to the one I made which had only 61.

However even if we increased the size of the board, it still gave the monster (we haven’t really defined its name or what it is, but we call it monster to distinguish it from players) a way to catch the other players as they have no idea where the monster is, unless they get killed. That is every 4 rounds the monsters location is revealed and the players have to adjust accordingly. I’m surprised how well it turned out with the board that we made up on the spot.

Going forward we need to add stuff to the game, for instance what happens when the monster catches the player, what happens when the player searches for the item they need. It would also be nice to add a feature for teleportation as we had planned, all that however require that we add just one functionality at a time so that we can test between each thing we add. Right now it feels like we got a solid base to work on and right now it feels like the only thing that can screw this up is if we add too much stuff too quickly without proper testing.

Another thing that I see more clearly now is that in a board game it is much easier to make a game when you start with the aesthetics and when you start with what the game should feel like for the player and adjust the rules based on that. Because when you start in that end you know if you achieve the aesthetic goals that you are on the right track and today we got to feel that for the first time, and the hidden movement of the monster gave the player excitement, at the same time playing the monster was really fun as you could see the other players movement, and plan your movement accordingly and trapping the players. Also revealing how much you can go each step also adds to this excitement for the player which was scarier than I initially thought it would be. The meeting we had today boosted my confidence in the game we are making.

Lecture thoughts

Today we had a lecture about AARRR and MDA, plus eternal beta. AARRR is something that is more commonly used on the web. However it is a model that is applicable for games as well, which was interesting. AARRR stands for Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral and Revenue. The interesting part about this is that it is a model you can use to test out games on the public.

Now this is very interesting, my wife works in the callcentre business as a manager there and they are always using metrics and the word retention. Now retention for their sake is how long agents are staying or how well they are able to keep their employees. Metrics that are used in the callcentre business is a measure for how well agents are doing and how well the earnings for the callcentre is. As an example they have metrics that measure their performance and in some cases also how big their cheques will be. Now we get to look at games the same way. That everything that you put out there can be measured in one way or another. As a business model it is a good way to see if a game might be profitable or if you can just stop the game development and do that in an early stage, because you can see that how much the potential for earning the game will be and how much employees and other stuff costs.

Right now however it is difficult to get a really clear picture of the usefulness of this “new” framework (AARRR), because as I see it it is more a business model than a framework.  I get that it is a model based around what you can make money out of and what you can’t make money out of. I do see that more and more games on steam are now classified as “early access”, which I’m guessing is part of this AARRR framework and eternal beta “idea”. That a product is released when it is done. Another recent example of this is Dota 2, which was in beta for a very long time, and once they released it there was no major change. It was patched later by a larger patch however, since I didn’t play Dota 2 at that time I don’t know if it was right after it became released or if it was during the beta or whenever it was.

In any case, it is a way of thinking of your game, as a cash cow, looking at how much you can earn on the game, what you need to accomplish in order to make a profit. Also it seems to be working well with free to play as well as games you pay to play. It is a framework model worth having in mind going forward, but it is a model I probably will have some problems applying without refreshing this lecture and having a specific game that I want to apply it for. Which to be perfectly honest is what I think you need to do. I think you need to apply the framework depending on the type of game that you are working on. If the key element is to have a free to play and that you get revenue from an ingame store, then I would apply this model, because that is what decide what you are earning money on. However if it is a game you sell, it might not make as much sense to apply this model. I think the deciding factor should be the type of game you are creating rather than setting for a specific model and just run by that. I’m not so sure there’s a right and wrong answer for this though.

The eternal beta part was also very interesting, because one of the things mentioned was that a game could be in beta for quite a while, let’s say you start inviting people early. The early adopters get to play around with it, as a developer you have a couple of builds ready to be deployed, which to the user indicate that the team is working very hard in pushing content, you give a better impression. If the changes doesn’t work you have to make a new build and start over, but it will give the players something positive to say to their mates and be more invested into the game. This makes me think of how Age of Conan did this, they did the same thing, had a closed beta, then added lots of new people. A week later or so they released a mammoth patch that was really huge and you started thinking that they were working their asses off trying to fix stuff and polishing the game. That said seeing how bad Age of Conan was at release, I’m a bit dubious if this was the case for them or not.

Board game

Two days ago we finally agreed upon the aesthetic goals of the board game that we are creating. We also began working on the wiki-page that we are going to use for the project. If we manage to get the game as we want it to be I believe it will be exciting. Since we don’t have that many details about the game ready yet I’m not going to write about it here, but instead I’m going to write a little about the process we used to get to the idea of the game that we currently have.

Aesthetics

We began with trying to define some aesthetics, we wanted people to trade, we wanted them to co-operate and we wanted resources. After a fairly long discussion, trying to build some sort of basic prototype we quickly saw that it wouldn’t work to do it like this. As it turned out we didn’t really go for the aesthetics at all, instead we started building something that looked more or less like a deviation of Settlers of Catan, which wasn’t really surprising as we used the tiles, resources and everything that came along with the game. We decided to clear our minds, stop what we are doing and just start the whole process over again, because we figured out that right there and then we didn’t want to make Settlers of Catan, we wanted to make our own game.

After having cleared our heads, we just started thinking about how the players should feel when they play the game. We came up with certain keywords like paranoia, feeling like a prey and other similar words. The good thing here is that we while we talked about all of the things that the players should feel we didn’t have any rules in mind. That was the important part, reason for that is that once you start going into the rules when you have an aesthetic you get lost into a type of game, most likely one you are thinking of when you say the aesthetic goal, but also you create rules making it difficult to get more of the aesthetics down. So when we started with rules we just stopped people and didn’t move forward.

Once we had enough goals we started thinking of how can we achieve this for the players? What can we do to enhance certain goals? What kind of groups in the Bartle system do we want to play the game if we look at the keywords. What we came up can be a very good board game if we succeed in making the movement system good and make it balanced. The thing we need to do now is to figure out how to balance it, our first iteration of the paper prototype is something we need to agree upon and start to build, and we also need to look into having a set map or not. Of course we want to in the first prototypes just create a basic map, but that we can have that in mind even if we aren’t going to use that in the final prototype. We will most likely not be a 100% done with the game when it is done, but if all goes according to plan, I hope we are able to have a map with a balanced movement system by the first week. Then we can have someone look at making the map pieces modular, while the rest work out the combat system.

In any case, it is interesting to see how working with the aesthetics instead of the mechanics can be so different, and gives us a system that is better than what we thought we would be able to make. The game probably isn’t that unique in the grand scheme of things, and although we could identify at least 2 games with the same kind of mechanic, we have reversed the mechanic. This is the bread and butter of the game, so if we get the basics down, we hope we can add some goals to the game to make it more exciting and to add to the aesthetics that we have.

Another thing that I believe we have done right for now is that we haven’t locked anything. We just have a basic idea going forward, while that is both good and bad, the good part is that for now it allows us to be flexible. The bad thing is that it may be difficult to get a coherent view of the whole project. However I’m personally willing to sacrifice a little bit of coherency for flexibility at this point, because we need to be able to reiterate fast and change something that might be dull and/or bad.

What I’ve learned is also to see the creation process in a different light. For me it has been really hard to begin thinking of how the players should feel when playing without thinking of rules, but looking at it now, I don’t see why I have had such a hard time doing that, because I’ve always had a tendency to look at rules while thinking of how people should feel. For instance: We want the player to feel triumphant. I’ve thought ok, so you need to have a combat system where the person feeling triumphant should kill hordes of enemies using a combat system like …. etc etc.. and the whole thing derails fairly quickly into specifics. Although this following statement might sound like it is easy, it is not, but in reality it is “just” a matter of teaching yourself to look at the creative process and figure out what do we want players to experience? Why would that particular feeling be any interesting in a game? Without thinking of how to accomplish it. It is hard, but for my part I think I’ve just made it harder than it needed to be, because it is easy to derail into thinking of specifics. If you haven’t put down all your aesthetic goals and have enough to work with, try continue with goals you like.

Next step is to see how you can get something to feel like the feeling you want the player to achieve. It could be that the feedback the player gets make them sad, and that is what you want for instance. How to make the player sad by gameplay? What can we do to make the player sad? Why would the player be sad when you put them in this or that position? Even if it is an aesthetic you want in the game, sometimes you might have contradictions and need to sacrifice something. Basically the three most valuable questions are what, how and why.

Now it might sound like I’m expert, by no means, still a noob in game design, but it is nice to see that I’m starting to understand that although you can create a game based merely on rules, it is good to see that you can do it the other way as well, and that more often it might be a better game because of it. Starting with mechanics might be something you have to do at some point. Our teacher (in serious games) gave an example which was a good one, if you have a certain hardware that you need to make sure the game works for, you have to start with the mechanics. You have to figure out how to use the particular device and how it can be fun using it. I can mention two examples, first is a gamepad. If you have to use a game pad to play your game, you have to think of what its limitations are, how you can go about the limits and create an experience from that. Of course a gamepad isn’t that unique and you can do all sorts of games suited for it. Let’s stretch that a bit further and look at the Wii mote. The Wii mote is operated in a different way, you can use it as a gamepad, but if you want to extend the possibilities you can look at what kind of stuff you can do and how can that Wii-mote be interesting to use in a game? Will you swing it like a golf club? Will you swing it like a sword? Are you going to mimic how you play tennis? In those cases you might look at the mechanic you have for the console and create a game around that. That said, I don’t see why it wouldn’t be possible to start with the aesthetics in those, but you have to know when creating certain aesthetics that there’s a limit for what you can and cannot use. So that if you want the players to feel like they are surfing on the beaches of Malibu, the game might need a Wii-board and for other systems that might not be possible unless you create the hardware for it.

If you are at all interested in our board game in progress the wiki for it is here: http://hemmalaget.wikidot.com/ .

Serious games “case study” & board games

This week we have only had 1 lecture, which was yesterday (Monday). The lecture was from a former student, who now works for three games and has a past experience as a developer for serious games. The interesting thing to note is how coincidental it seems when some people are lucky enough to land a contract in the gaming industry. They knew someone who had created a webpage (iirc) and that client wanted to create a game about their company.

The lecture was fairly long and as usual impressive when it came to the presentation itself (Jakob rules when it comes to presentations). That said, I don’t really have that many reflections, because I’ve been working with client based contracts before and kinda knew a lot of the information on beforehand. What was new however is that the client should be aware that everything they want to add will cost them. I mean of course it will, just that it is smart to get that down on paper, because I know a lot of companies think that a job will just take this and that many hours and it will be done, however in reality it takes longer.

Another great takeaway form the lecture is to put a time limit for how long a project should last. Now I agree that you should put a time limit to how long you should maintain a game, especially since this was a web based game (or flash based, but it is basically the same). What I think maybe they should have opted for was a way to extend the maintenance deal. That said I don’t know if they tried, I should have asked about it, but forgot… Ok, ok I didn’t think of it until now…

As I mentioned however, the lecture was interesting, but a lot of it was self explanatory. What is great about Jakob’s lectures is that he usually talk a lot about stuff that isn’t on the slides and he always seem well prepared. Not that the others doesn’t seem that prepared, but he has a flow that at least for me works well. I have time to write down what is on the slides and summarize what he says in between.

Last year Serious games was dubbed unserious games (according to some students), this year I don’t think that’s the case at all. So far we have a clear goal and agenda all along, it was good with a refresh of MDA, it was really nice working with machinations, although what I did sucked, unfortunately I had no clue what kind of a game / resource system to use. I did however play around with the software a lot so if we get the same kind of assignment again I’m prepared, at least more prepared than I was before. Also the gamasutra article on machinations did explain a lot. For the interested it can be found here: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/176033/the_designers_notebook_.php
and the machinations can be found here:
http://www.jorisdormans.nl/machinations/
Read first, then create is my advice, but keep the machinations up and replicate the examples, that way you see how it works. And also go to the wiki and replicate the examples there, gives a greater understanding of how it works.

Anyway to continue the train of thought, Serious games has a structure and we have an assignment at the end of the course, so it seems like a course that has been improved and upgraded by the teachers, at least if I compare it to what I heard about it from people that had it before. I didn’t know that before I applied for it however, so I’m glad that we have a serious agenda.

Board game presentations

Today, Tuesday, we had presentations based upon our analysis, the goal was to discuss in a group and agree upon best and worst sides of the games we played, the core system and generally talk about the game and answer questions from the audience.

The problem with these kind of assignments is that they become boring quickly. No offense to fellow students, but we are not good at delivering a summary of games, explaining what the games are about and how to play them. Getting the best and worst sides I think all groups did well however. I think it boils down to us not preparing for it, for instance I wasn’t even supposed to be on stage today, but at the last minute I joined in because the one that wanted to have the presentation wanted to bring us along, in case of questions I assume. Honestly said though I don’t think I would have been able to explain a board game quickly, without being boring. I guess what we could have done is to bring the actual board game so that people could see the real deal. That said I guess it would have taken too long. We could have used video maybe to record a 2 minute intro of the game showing cards, items, etc. And a typical game round with bullet points and freeze frame. Nah I’m only joking, but at least something to make the audience understand the game. Because presentations with games that I have played before was much more interesting and I believe it is because I knew the game already.

However, when I think about it afterwards there was one good thing that came out of this. We’re introduced to more board games, we get to know about them, what the good parts are, the bad parts, but also some of the groups said what was fun about it. So if we take that a step further, we also get to know about certain systems. Systems that might be useful to know about when we are creating our own games. I also find it interesting to see what other people think is the best and worst. Although it is said to be objective, it will never be because what might be a bad side for some, might be something another group never experienced.

One example in particular comes to mind. In Smallworld for instance there’s a random race and a special ability. Some combinations can as some groups claimed be powerful, which is true, however if you look at how the game is played, you can see that even if a race is powerful you can only use it limited amount of times. Bivouacking trolls I believe was what they mentioned as an example, that means you have 10 trolls in total, to conquer a basic land you need. To be able to conquer a land you need at least 2 race tokens, which means that you can have a maximum of 10 lands with a race, however the regions they control are fortified with a trolls lair and encampment. However at some point you lack the necessary tokens to conquer new lands, and even if you have a high defense, not all parts of your land has that high defense. You tokens might get killed off after a certain time and you have to go in decline. So even if a race and special ability combo seems more overpowered than others it won’t be because you reach a certain limit and it is strategically better to go into decline, because it takes time for the other players to take over your lands you have a couple of rounds where you can really stack up on points with the new conquering race.

Another thing I came to think of today is that a lot of people seem to think of what makes the game what it is as a core. If I mention one example, there was a lot of teams playing fiasco. At first I didn’t get what the whole thing was because it didn’t seem to follow any normal roleplaying elements that I’m used to. However from what I understood there was a system where you created characters and a system that put the scenes in place. People argued that the Scene system was the core because that’s what you play out and that characters wasn’t and vice versa. From the explanations that I saw, I would say that scenes sounds like the core, but not because of the arguments used, but rather because it is what people is doing most frequently. At least that’s what the core is according to the MDA definition. The action that you most often perform during play.

I might be wrong here since a lot of groups seemed to get it wrong. One example was one group that thought the resources themselves in Settlers of Catan was the core, however it is how you generate resources that is the core, because you do that every single time it is your turn to play. Again at least according to the MDA core explanation that I read from a short paper about MDA.

What I think though is that our teacher should have questioned that part more, because I think it is vital that we are able to identify the core of a game or not. That said, maybe we get that feedback on our individual reports, I don’t know, but it would be nice to get some kind of right and wrong answers on these things. That said, I believe what we did today is more an exercise in arguing for what we believed was correct, and that we at a later point need to either read up on the course literature or will get some kind of aha moment why something is the core and not. That we simply just need the practice in thinking in design and need the practice of discussing it and that right and wrong at this point doesn’t matter as long as you can argue for your point.

Analysis, MDA & reflections of today

I’m sitting here trying to figure out what to write in my analysis and I thought that instead of just sitting and writing on my analysis paper that I need to hand in this Friday, I wanted to write down some thoughts about it. Not only that but I wanted to add some thoughts about MDA and what we did at school today.

Starting out with the analysis that I have for school work, I’m in the middle of writing about Settlers of Catan, I’ve written a good part of it, that is I only have the part which is called “summary of how it correlates”. I’m kinda stuck on that point, I sort of was on my analysis of Last night on earth as well, however I think I managed to get at least some of it down as it should be. Settlers of Catan on the other hand is more difficult. Reason being that I know the game better and although that should be an advantage, it kinda isn’t. I don’t know why, could be that since I know the game better, I assume everyone does, could be that it simply is a much easier game with less systems and mechanics than LNOE got. I don’t know, it is difficult to summarize it and put it all in a correlation. I know it means how it is put together and how the good sides and the bad sides fit together, just that I’m not there. Which is why I have put the assignment to rest and write here instead.

A good thing however is that I’ve been thinking a lot about this which makes me realize what I might have been wrong before, which brings me to MDA. For the most part I’ve always kinda been looking at making games from the M perspective in the MDA tool-set, however I need to teach myself to think more towards what the gamer should experience. Hence I should focus on the A in MDA instead. I don’t know why I’ve been in the state of mind that rules should be invented first, then test it out and then see if the aesthetics is fun. It’s like well duh, of course you should think about how the gamer should feel and what you want the gamer to feel. I don’t know what made me realize this, might have been the lecture we had today or it might be that I’m finally starting to understand more and more of how game design works. I’m no expert though and I won’t be for many years to come, but it is a good discovery nonetheless.

Before last week the lectures we had haven’t been all that great. Starting from last week however the lectures and assignments we’ve had has been excellent. They have been difficult, but I think that is what we need. Last week we had sissyfight on the agenda, what we were supposed to do was to play sissyfight and then modify the system into a different playable game. Although I think what we made wasn’t all that great, it gave us some practice in how to do this, by as Adam always says: “cut it open and steal its power”. In this case we basically used the system provided to us and then changed it into a different type of game. Describing what a system is, is kinda difficult, because it varies a lot, also it has a lot of different names, some call them atoms (game atoms if you like) or a ludeeme. Now it isn’t called an atom because it can’t be broken further down, but more because it is a building block. If you think of it as a minecraft block, now that in itself isn’t what you would call an atom, but that block can be used to build many things. I mean same goes for real life atoms as well, but Minecraft is more “geeky” so lets go with that. Anyhow those blocks is used to craft items, build houses or whatever you want to build in the minecraft world. Now atoms in a game system works the same way, you use them as building blocks to try and make the game you are creating interesting and the forbidden word … fun. If you have devised a system that is fun, you can identify what is it about that system that makes it fun, use that atom for other games or improve it.

Reasoning for “inventing” this analysis tool is to identify parts of the game that is lacking and figuring out what can be done to make it fun, what does it need in order to be fun, what can you do in order to make it a challenge worth while and what do you do to prevent others from bottom feeding on less skilled players. As such it is a good tool, although I’m trying to wrap my head around getting to understand the whole thing, it’s an interesting theory.

Yesterdays lecture was also quite fun, we had 1 1/2 hours to come up with a game where our pretend publisher came up with a game they wanted us to create. Our group got the assignment of doing sissyfight 2 where they wanted more players, more cards, more action, more more more. Getting more content in and still having a feeling of sissyfight was difficult. I thought we did a good attempt, the only card that I didn’t think felt as it was part of how sissyfight feels like was our reflect card where you reflect damage back. Not only does it give you full immunity in my opinion it goes against the whole “plucking the feather off the other player” completely. Using that card gave everyone else damage and sissyfight was about ganging up on people and “mocking” them so to speak. other than that I thought we had a good system, group card which gave extra damage and more hp for the players so that the group card wouldn’t be overpowered compared to the original. I think we should have added more to the solo card as well, with more players there are more targets, so the solo card should have dealt damage to two players instead of one, however that’s something that I just thought of and not something that I mentioned during the creation.

Lastly, that brings me to the lecture we had today. Actually it was more like a seminar than anything else, but it was a really good one. The story was as follows: “Mad professor created a robot to defend the city, but something went wrong, the wiring got crossed and the robot instead of defending the city was on the way towards it to attack it”. The gameboard was 8×8 squares, the robot had a program sheet, the goal was to give the robot some actions and we had to write what triggered the different attacks. Now the robot had a laser that went in a straight line attacking anything in that line of sight, but it stopped on the first tank and dealt one damage. It had a fist attack, it could drop a mine which damaged everything in a 3×3 grid. It could rotate and move. All of those had a trigger, so the point was to make a list of what actions it would do, so that one player would follow those actions in order and then execute them without using their own tactics. It was following a pattern.

The player had 4 tanks to his disposal and they each had 4 hitpoints each. The goal was to create a dramatic ending where almost regardless of what you did, you would end up with 1 tank left that would kill the robot at the edge of the board. We figured the best way to go about this was to start with the movement only, figuring out how the system worked. Checking what happens if we use 1 move first, then a second move afterwards. Then we tried to figure out what happens when you start with the laser, then rotate if necessary and move if there’s a clear path. In the end we managed to get it almost right.

Then we were to add a feature to the game, we thought that adding walls would make it more balanced so we added walls so that the tanks couldn’t line up along the wall waiting for the robot. The problem was that if you line up the tanks in a certain order they will end up almost oneshotting the robot, giving it 8 damage as the tanks could do 3 actions and it had to be at least 2 different actions, meaning that they could shoot twice and pass or move twice and pass. The walls helped solve that one problem and even though it wasn’t a very innovative feature, it was still one that actually made the game more exciting and gave it more drama as the teacher wanted, it was simple, yet limited the tanks to tactically move in a camping position. The thing was that the tanks would be stunned when they took damage, so the tanks couldn’t just go in a line from the beginning to kill the robot off.

Lastly we took the robots the different groups had made and put them on the board and tried to use the commands we created to kill off the other robots. Our robot was the third last to die, but the last two remaining killed eachother off, however they had some really crazy rules on their robots compared to ours, as the features they had added was insane compared to the simple walls we put into the game. We should have insisted on using the non feature rules, but it was fun to see how the other robots were totally overpowered, I don’t see how they managed to get the tanks to survive even once, because with the simple commands we used the tanks had a real problem, except for the one move that would obliterate the robot, which we discovered by adding walls.

Now I need to think of an aesthetic for our firefighter Yatzi game, once I’m done with the different reports. Needs to feel like Yatzi, but at the same time need to be a co-operative firefighting game, not going to be easy.