Blog - Unenjoyable Play and "The QA Game"
Monday, June 29, 2009Today marked the start of Ian Schreiber's free online game design course, Game Design Concepts.
In the first 'class' posted to the blog, posted today, there was ironically a mirroring of a conversation thread happening just yesterday in the Writer's SIG mailing list.
Both spoke of trying to define games, and trying to define play.
To clarify a point someone else was trying to make there on that thread in the mailing list for the SIG, I suggested the person was saying play did not have to be enjoyable.
I'm interested in the idea, now that I've stumbled upon it.
It is already taken for granted in some circles (although many violently disagree!) that games don't have to be enjoyable.
(I will refrain from using the word 'fun' because that's a rather ambiguous word. Does fun = enjoyment?)
Many art games and serious games work off this premise, and intentionally use gameplay which is somehow unpleasant to make their point.
But, well, as I just suggested again in the above sentence when I said "gameplay which is somehow unpleasant", I suppose that one can say play itself can be enjoyable or not. This seems a little odd. 'Unenjoyable play' sounds kind of like an oxymoron. It makes sense, though, and it's easy to come up with situations where there can be play that is not enjoyable.
However, the person I was helping to clarify their argument used as one of her examples the situation of when QA testers are playing through a build of a game, hunting for bugs. Even though they've got the game in their hands and they're playing through it... it's hard to say with confidence that the tester is really playing the game.
I couldn't resist linking this to my experience last week... I was given the task of helping find bugs in a build of a game in production.
This was decidedly work, and not at all like 'playing the game' -- not only hunting down bugs but also figuring out how to reproduce them is a seriously tedious business.
But yet, I noticed I did find some enjoyment in it after all.
Not through the game I was supposedly 'playing' to find bugs in...
...but through the act of hunting for bugs itself.
I realized it was a completely different game in it's own right, layered on top of of the game in my hands as a strange sort of metagame or something.
I was on a quest to hunt collectables, and my collectables were all manner of crashes, bugs, and glitches. Not only did I have to find these bugs... I had to grok them, understand them enough to reproduce them so I could provide the most helpful report possible. It was like a disturbing version of Pokémon, where I had to "catch 'em all", only every pokémon was MissingNo, but different... each with their own bizarre means of discovery and capture.
(And if that wasn't the geekiest reference I've made on this blog to date, I don't know what is...)
And when I thought I was hot on the trail of reproducing a major bug there was definitely one of those "a-ha!" moments that Raph Koster would call "fun".
Getting there required slogging through some really long and tedious grinding, however. ;)
Of course, if you read through the link above to the discussion from Ian's class today, you could argue "the QA game" I'm suggesting doesn't count as a game at all.
But I tend to define game fairly broadly... and it certainly was fun to think about.
Labels: defining games, play, QA
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 10:21 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - The Button Game
Sunday, June 7, 2009For one of my game design class projects, I was put on a team and asked to develop a non-digital game that, using the MDA framework, would get players feeling a specific emotion.
Our team chose "paranoia", and for some reason so did most of the other teams in class.
I ended up talking to a friend and fellow SCAD game design student about this project and he said that when his friend was in the same class, they had the same project and ALSO picked the same theme of a paranoia-inducing game.
And he proceeded to tell me the same idea he had suggested to his friend for the project:
"You need to design a game that induces paranoia? That's easy. Just give everyone a button, and when your button gets pressed, you lose."
Although for the project, my team ended up developing my best board game, Rats, me and that friend ended up actually making this game too.
It became simply known as "The Button Game" and for a few days enjoyed some play testing experiments around our department.
We simply purchased a 2 four-packs of tap-lights. At the start of the game, each of the 8 players who had received one of these "buttons" were instructed to tap their lights on. If their light was tapped out, they lost.
Sadly, the lack of further rules lead to the game's failure in our actual playtest sessions. People found clever exploits all around that made the game unfair or simply out of control.
So, I'm considering reviving the button game with the following rules:
Your button must remain on the table, where it was first placed at your spot at the table.
I'm remembering from our playtests back then were that several people tried to place large protective objects over or in front of their button as shields. I'm not yet sure if this should be allowed or not, so that's something for future play tests.
Labels: design
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 5:55 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - Pwong - 1972 Remixed in More Ways Than One
Tuesday, June 2, 2009A friend of mine on facebook linked to a Pong-remake you can find and play here, called Pwong.
It's a flashier version of Pong with colorful, trance-electronica aesthetics, and some new additions like heavy use of multiple balls and temporary power-ups.
But none of that is anything I'd bother to write about. Instead, what fascinated me about this game was the music:
The music for the game I instantly recognized as a trancy remix of the synthpop classic "Popcorn",
A song famous for being the first piece of primarily-electronic music to ever make it onto popular music charts.
Note that the song's most famous release (the one that hit the pop charts, making electronic music history) was made in 1972.
If I'm not mistaken, that is also the same year Pong was released by Atari.
I can only assume the music choice in Pwong was then deliberate, and if so -- brilliant. Finding two separate, highly influential and historically relevant works of electronic media created more or less at the same time (Pong and "Popcorn"), and when creating a revamped new take on the former, choosing to enhance it with a revamped, new take on the latter.
That's too perfect to have been an accident. So, kudos to the developers of Pwong for that choice. It was a discovery that I, as a geek for both electronic music and video games, was delighted to find. posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 3:58 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - My game design degree:
Well, it's official.
I've graduated magna cum laude with a BFA in Interactive Design and Game Development.
:)
Labels: degree, graduation
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 3:51 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - Announcing the Random Game Design Challenge
Tuesday, May 26, 2009I mentioned in my previous entry that I had a new brand of weekly random game design challenge coming up soon.
Well, I unveil that today:
The Random Game Design Challenge is a collaboration project between me and another former game design student from SCAD.
This friend found he can come up with games very quickly based off of an absurd list of constraints. In one of my classes, I had built in Excel a random game generator, designed to generate, essentially, a list of wacky game constraints.
We decided to let our powers combine, and once a week I will spew forth another random game challenge from my generator that he will have to use to pitch a game back to me based on the randomly generated criteria. However, I might join in with pitches of my own sometimes, and we encourage others to do so as well. Yes, that means you. Go on, join in the fun.
So, please enjoy my new sister blog, the Random Game Design Challenge.
The first challenge is up already: design a space exploration RPG game that provides exercise.
Labels: exercise space exploration RPG, random game design challenge
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 9:14 AM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - Changes
Saturday, May 23, 2009I redesigned the site, if that is not already apparent.
I made the place a bit more user-friendly, snazzier, and cleaner.
You could say the changes here reflect some of the big changes going on in my life right now:
In one week I'll have graduated from SCAD, completing my game design degree.
I am also pleased to announce that I have accepted a position at 1st Playable Productions as an apprentice game designer. So not only am I no longer a student, I've now officially entered the game industry as a designer.
There is yet another change:
You may have noticed that I haven't kept up on my weekly game design submissions in the past few weeks. As regrettable as this is, that content is soon to be replaced with another weekly design challenge of a different sort as part of a collaboration with another SCAD game design grad...
...but more on that later. ;) posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 11:58 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - Weekly Game 8 - Intensity (Spelunky Custom Level)
Wednesday, May 6, 2009I'm doing something a little bit different this week, as I'm behind in my weekly design challenges.
Instead of doing a new non-digital game, I'll submit as my design challenge the custom level I made for Spelunky last week:
The level is called "Intensity".
Here's a video of it in action (at a tragically slow frame rate):
To play it yourself, first download and install the free game Spelunky, which can be downloaded here.
Then download my level here (right click the link and select "Save Link As" from the drop down menu, otherwise you'll just open the level as a text file), and save the file into your Spelunky levels folder.
Finally, boot up the game and in the opening title screen room, press F3, which opens the level loading menu. Find intensity in the list, click on it, and load it.
(You might want to try your hand at playing the tutorial and normal game first for a while to get used to the controls and what all you can do in the game...)
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Designing the game:
I had always intended to do a digital game for a weekly game, although was intending by that to at some point throw together some really simple flash game. I suppose a quick level in Spelunky will do.
It's a pretty nice little platformer game and so I was intrigued when I found out there was a level editor hidden in the game that I could play with.
In any case, I decided to try and create a level that invoked a particular feeling. In this case, that emotion I went with was sheer panic.
As such, the pacing in my design is an interesting starting point for discussion. I admittedly do not allow the player to stop to catch a breath for very long, if at all, although I won't say there isn't a sense of pacing either. There are a few moments where an enemy will approach soon as opposed to immediately. However, the intensity is kept at a pretty high level fairly consistently overall.
I originally had it so there were enemies on the opposite side of the player that forced him to start running from the get-go (immediate panic), but I eventually cut them. In a level that was already fairly difficult, having enemies charging the player from the moment the level is loaded seemed too harsh.
On the subject of it's difficulty, I'm a little torn about that.
I generally don't like to be the kind of designer that tries to outsmart or overcome the player. This level is definitely a level designed to challenge and push players, and I suspect many will not be able to beat it easily, if at all. (I myself have only beaten it maybe 5 times...)
I think in this case it's acceptable largely given the game I made it for. Spelunky is a difficult game in general, and sometimes completing even level 1 of the original main game is difficult. Some of the custom levels that 'ship' with the game are far more cruel than my design.
Of course, I don't know how solidly I believe in that argument: I used to often make levels/tracks for Freetar and Frets on Fire (PC homebrew clones of Guitar Hero), and was constantly annoyed with the community of track-makers making largely only expert-level tracks. Most were only making tracks because they had already beaten every level of the original Guitar Hero games, and craved new challenges, so only expert-level tracks were being made. So, I suppose that's similar to me making the argument that it's okay to make a cruelly difficult level for Spelunky as the main game is already so challenging.
Labels: weekly game
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 5:09 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - Weekly Game 7: Casually Devious
Tuesday, April 21, 2009Introduction: In this party game, players attempt to complete secret missions during the course of their normal conversation and behavior, all while preventing opponents from completing their missions.
Players: 2+
(game meant to be played with a group of people at a small, casual party setting)
Materials:
-index cards or paper
-pen/pencil
Setup:
On index cards (or small, identical slips of paper) everyone should write down 1"mission" for another player to complete during the next 15 minutes of the party.
These are the mission cards.
Example missions could include:
-"Get someone at the party to bring you a drink"
-"Get someone at the party to tell you what time it is."
-"Change the channel on the TV."
-"Enter and Exit the bathroom."
-"Make at least 2 people laugh simultaneously"
-"Tell a story involving a school bus."
etc.
Once all players have created a mission card, have one player collect all the mission cards, and after shuffling them face-down distribute one random mission card to each player.
Once all players have their mission cards, begin a new round of play, which lasts 15 minutes.
How to Play:
At any time within the 15 minute round, a player can attempt to complete the secret mission they have written down on their card.
If the mission was completed successfully, the player announces that their mission has been completed, and reveals their mission card, which is kept as one "point" of score.
Once under suspicion that another player is attempting to complete a secret goal, players cannot touch, trap or bind the opposing player in any way when attempting to stop that player's completion of a goal. The only way of completely stopping a player is to make an accusation against that player.
Making an Accusation:
If a player thinks they know what another player's secret mission is, that player may make an accusation at the risk of losing their own mission card.
The accusing player must declare their accusation to all players, stating what they think the accused player's mission is. The accused player must then reveal to all players their mission card.
- If the accusation was correct (the accused player's mission was approximately what the accusing player stated) then the accusing player collects the accused player's mission card as their own point.
- If the accusation was incorrect then the accused player gets to collect the accusing player's mission card as a point!
Group consensus shall be used in case of doubt as to whether the accusation can be considered accurate or valid. If no consensus can be reached, the accusing player is given the benefit of the doubt and earns the mission card as a point.
End of a Round:
Once the 15 minutes are up, players can decide if they want to play another round.
If so, new mission cards can be created to replace the ones that were collected as points. Once the new mission cards are distributed, another 15 minute round begins.
Mission cards collected as points are kept as an indication of total score.
Winning the Game:
The player with the most mission cards collected as points when all players have decided to cease play is the winner.
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Designing the game:
I thought it'd be interesting to do a party game, and thought the idea of blending the game play into what players are already doing at the party was an interesting twist.
As I've mentioned before, I really like working with hidden information in my designs, and this can clearly be seen in the design of Casually Devious.
It's a completely last minute addition, but I really like the way the missions are created and distributed (each player creates one mission, and players get a randomly selected mission from the entire set created by all players) because it means your particular mission is only known by you and the original player who created it, which could be hypothetically the same person.
This leaves what most missions even are completely unknown to most players, and as the missions are designed to be blended into the normal behavior of the players, one has to question any activity the players are engaging in as a part of the game even if the action was not intended to be.
It allows players to still be free to engage in normal interactions/behaviors at the party, but makes all of those activities a part of game.
Because this game is so open ended, this was another game that needed a tie-breaker system of some kind. I like to try to tie such systems to the other mechanics/materials used in the game itself. For example, in Pennies and Dimes, a game played mostly with coins, the tie breaking mechanic was the flip of a coin. So, for this game, I decided to use group consensus since the game is meant to be played at a party, with a large group of people, and meant to be a very social game. (Again, the mechanics of this game are entirely built around the social behavior players are normally engaging in at a party.)
I feel this one is still pretty rough and messy and could use some play testing and more iteration to clean up the clunkier elements of the design.
Labels: weekly game
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 10:47 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - Notes on my Talk
Saturday, April 18, 2009Darius Kazemi posted his notes of my GDX talk on his blog.
Check it out, if you were interested in what I was speaking about.
Labels: speaking
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 2:01 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - Another Speech
Friday, April 10, 2009Next week I'll be speaking at GDX.
My talk is about improvisational performance in games.
If you are attending GDX (or considering it), do stop by.
Labels: speaking
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 1:17 AM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - Weekly Game 6: Tape Worm
Wednesday, April 8, 2009Introduction: In this game, players compete to have their tape-worms eat the most points, growing them one segment at a time.
Players: 2-4
Materials:
-standard sheets of paper
-1 roll of scotch tape
-1 pen or marker
Setup:
The game's board is a single sheet of paper, and meant to be disposable.
Draw a grid on the paper using the pen or marker.
Each player must then tear 5 pieces of tape for themselves, at whatever lengths they choose.
It is recommended you read the rest of the rules before doing this step, so you can decide what lengths of tape may be appropriate.
Once all players have all 5 of their tape segments, each player should compare their largest tape segment to the largest tape segments of the other players.
Whichever player's longest tape segment is the shortest of those compared is the player that gets to go first.
How to Play:
Players attempt to build a worm out of tape, growing it in ways to eat the most points. This is done by placing the tape over intersection points on the grid.
Tape Laying:
Players take turns selecting one of their 5 segments of tape, and placing them on the paper.
Tape is always played only at right angles.
A player's first tape segment must start with one edge aligned to any point along any edge of the sheet of paper.
An example legal first move.
Tape segments cannot cross over other segments of tape, regardless of which player owns the tape. In other words, a tape worm cannot cross over itself or any other worm. Worms can share edges however, running parallel to each other or themselves.
On a player's future turns, they must build onto their own tape worm by selecting their next tape segment and attaching it at a right angle, touching but not overlapping, to the end of their tape worm.
Examples of legal additions to your own worm:
Players are attempting to place their tape segments down so they cover more intersection points of the grid than their opponent, as each intersection point covered nets one point.
Note how the 2nd player's worm has earned twice as many points as his opponent, just by placing his tape slightly differently.
If a player can no longer place his remaining tape segments, his or her turn will be skipped until the game ends. Players can also elect to not place any more tape segments onto the paper.
Winning the Game:
Once all players have placed all 5 pieces of tape or cannot make another move, the game is over.
Count all the grid-intersections that each player has covered with their tape, and mark them with the pen or marker.
Each grid intersection covered is worth 1 point.
Intersection points that fall on a worm's edge do count as points earned for that worm.
The highest scoring player wins.
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Designing the game:
Back from my hiatus from doing these weekly challenges. (It's been a hectic past few weeks...)
I am currently working on two card games which I didn't do for this week because A.) I felt they needed more time to develop and be balanced, as I feel they have a lot of potential to be made into truly successful games... and B.) Both do kind of shy away from the notion of making games people can easily make and play with junk they already have lying around.
As for the latter point, this game really shines. I made it because I found a note I wrote myself a long while ago that simply stated "Make a game using only tape."
I have no idea what I was thinking of when I first wrote that, but it seemed like an interesting challenge.
I decided doing a sort of tape-based version of Snake seemed like a good starting point, given the properties of tape. In a very early version of this game, I just had a blank sheet of paper with pennies randomly scattered on it, and players took turns building up their tape snakes to try to reach the rapidly dwindling population of uneaten pennies. Although the end result of a bunch of pennies taped to a sheet of paper looked pretty rad, the scattering of pennies was always too random, and the player who went first could often decide the course of the game with his first move.
Even when I later went to the grid system where the 'points' you were trying to eat where the intersections of the grid, the first player still proved to have an unfair advantage. The workaround I created of having the shortest of the longest pieces makes for an interesting twist I enjoy. There's still a big benefit, at least early on in the game, to have a huge segment of tape, but now it's a gamble of whether you want to try to go for collecting those extra few points or going first. It's difficult to gauge exactly how much larger or shorter your segment is to your opponents as you're tearing it off, so it provides some interesting tension.
I really liked the idea of having the players create their tape segments in advance and having to live with the strategic implications of that choice. I love character creation systems in games, as they allow players creativity and to personalize their game. By being allowed to create their own tape units, players are given a choice that is creative and meaningful expression, which greatly affects the outcome of the game.
Trying to plan ahead for having the right sized segment for the right situation leads to interesting strategic thinking, but in a way that doesn't slow the game down too much as it happens before the game actually begins.
And by limiting the players to only 5 segments (and having to fit on the page) it also reduces this analysis paralysis time as there's not actually that many choices possible left, especially as the game goes on. I wanted to make this game a strategy game that was pretty quick and disposable, so that you could play more rounds than just being stuck on one epically long chess-like game of contemplating possible moves.
This game really feels like it's just a prototype for a game that wants to be digital, like a flash game. In digital form, rules like proper placement and perfect right angles could be enforced. I'd have to ensure that the grid was created just randomly enough to still be interestingly varied though.
Labels: weekly game
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 3:18 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - Fun With Time Pressure
An old trick for making game play more emotionally intense is to add time pressure.
As a fun example, my sister and I for a brief time enjoyed a variant of chess we invented, and it used this technique. The core rules remained the same, although we did experiment with new starting locations of the pieces. For the most part, however, it was the normal game of chess but with one new rule:
For every 1 second you had not yet moved one of your pieces on your turn, your opponent was entitled to slap you in the face.
It turns chess into a rather different game.
Analysis Paralysis is long gone, replaced with panicked, rash decision making.
The anger and fear of being slapped tumbles together with your amusement at the hilariously stupid moves you're making to avoid the slaps. We also blasted high bpm trance music to keep the energy levels high and the heart racing. It's a strange roller-coaster of emotions all at once.
I don't know if too many more people are insane enough to try it, but at least it amused me. And yes, we actually did play this more than once. :)
Labels: emotion, game design, time pressure
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 1:42 AM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - Theme in Artificial Evolution
Wednesday, April 1, 2009I've written before on how developing a game based around a theme is very similar to the concept of building a game around a core mechanic.
One of my past projects, Artificial Evolution, benefited from being developed around a theme, and memories of this floated around my head at one point today and I feel they should be shared. After all, part of the function of this blog is to give people a look inside my design process.
When the project fell into my hands, it had already been determined that the setting for the game was a world where robots had already long since killed off all living things.
It may seem strange then that we chose the theme we did, which was evolution, with a particular emphasis on Darwinian survival of the fittest. A process that is entirely natural and biological.
Yet the game's core mechanics involved defeating other robots and stealing their parts to make your robot ever more powerful. The survival-of-the-fittest theme made at least some degree of sense given those mechanics. Why it stuck then, I'm not sure, but it did and we ran with it. Over time the game's back story and plot and even combat mechanics and aesthetics were all being influenced by the decision.
For example, we had been debating for a while how to do ranged combat. Nobody could agree on anything we came up with and it just never felt quite right for our game. We started to question why these robots would use guns or lasers at all. Wouldn't the player just be damaging the parts he was trying to harvest? How much would such weapons really damage a robot anyway? If there's no people or animals left, would guns become obsolete?
So, it dawned on us that the theme of the harsh animal-like conflict of a Darwinian world should be reflected in the combat system. Even though our robots are not animals, and for the most part don't even resemble animals, our combat began to be inspired by nature. Our robots wouldn't use weapons, they'd use their claws and go savagely for the (metaphorical) jugular. Combat became fierce, personal, and brutal.
And as your player's robot was attempting to harvest new appendages and components for itself, this form of combat made sense. You want that arm that robot has? Tear it off. I found I really liked this system as it avoided a lot of what you think of as 'typical' robot combat... there's no laser beams or buzz-saws or anything stupid like that.
And so we developed a really clever little control scheme for how to pounce onto your enemy, grappling the part you want, and tear it off their struggling, fighting body. It was pretty simple and fit perfectly.
The story that developed out of the theme was also an interesting and very atypical of robot uprising stories. Once evolution became the dominant theme, as on the one level the player is literally 'evolving' their single robot, the story actually tackled evolution in a more proper form. If robots became a species, how WOULD they evolve?
We already had established that you play a robot who goes rogue to explain the fact why you're killing all other robots, trying to take out the master computer that controls them all (the game needed some sort of end goal, a 'master computer system' seemed like an obvious choice). Just going rogue, however, wasn't a very good solution. First of all, there's too many damn robot stories out there where a robot goes rogue. And playing a rogue robot is just kind of weird when you start to think about it... players are generally too logical to be playing something that is essentially a force of pure unpredictable chaos.
So eventually the story developed where every now and then the robot species creates random variations of itself, and allow for a Darwinian run to see if any of these new robots can defeat the stagnating old robot species. The player therefore is playing one of these random variations. It made a lot of sense for explaining how the robot species works, fits the theory of evolution better than anything else, and explains the players actions and goals. The player is behaving unlike the rest of the robots but still more logically than if it was just malfunctioning because it's not malfunctioning - just a special robot designed to attempt to overthrow the rest of it's species as part of the evolutionary process. The machines created a system to improve themselves by imitating life, but yet, put in this context points out how very mechanical the process of natural evolution really is, which is a dark irony I always did love about the project.
So, the game really benefited from having a theme. And note that picking a theme that seemed initially counter-intuitive with our characters and setting caused us to create something that, even though it uses a somewhat cliche game topic of robot uprisings, caused lots of new developments that defied the typical trappings and made things fresher. posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 11:51 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - Ada Lovelace Day Bonus Feature
Tuesday, March 24, 2009I already wrote one entry for my earlier pledge for Ada Lovelace day, but here's another one, because it's a story I don't think I've had a chance to tell yet.
As I wrote about one of my mentors, now time for a tale of one of my students...
At nearly every session of the Emagination Game Design camp I taught at, there was at least one or two girls attending.
The first single female student out of all the sessions I taught has stuck with me the most.
She was very shy, I'm guessing from being the only girl stuck at camp for 2 weeks with a bunch of geeky gamer boys. I always felt a little sorry for her for that.
So that's why I was particularly impressed when, as her team was in a complete panic crunching on their game as the final milestones loomed near, and their team was beginning to fall apart, she suddenly became very outspoken and took the reins. She took charge and pulled their team through crunch and got their game done on time, acting as a producer and developer both, helping to complete miscellaneous art assets, testing, etc. I'm fairly sure the game wouldn't have been complete without this.
I have no idea if she plans on sticking with game development or what, but I hope so because that's just great and inspiring. You go girl.
Labels: Ada Lovelace Day
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 3:23 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - Ada Lovelace Day Posting
Greetings from GDC!
Today is Ada Lovelace Day! If you don't know who she was, go find out right now.
A long while ago, I found and signed up on this site, pledging to write about a woman in technology that I admire on this Ada Lovelace day.
As I highly support the women of the games industry (both present and future) through groups like WIGI and the IGDA's Women in Games SIG, I felt like supporting this cause.
My choice for who to write about was obvious.She's been my mentor in game development for the past 3 years now -- Brenda Brathwaite.
It's rather awkward to write this as I'm almost certain she will find and read this.
Especially awkward, in fact, because after certain events at GDC so far she is certainly owed a favor or, in this case I suppose a tribute. Keep in mind though that I pledged to write this over a month ago. ;)
You could with some searching online find out enough information about her that I won't bother with any sort of biography. Her accomplishments are certainly worthy of admiration. Instead, I'll simply tell of my more personal admiration:
I came to the Savannah College of Art and Design after realizing at another university that my initial declaration of major as a film student just wasn't for me. Although I loved writing screenplays and editing footage, the actual process of filming a movie I found to be a dreadful bore. Those film classes gave me enough of a taste of media analysis though that I, as a gamer, began to apply it to the games I was playing. In search of more voices studying games in that fashion, I discovered gamasutra and the game development community.
I had, as a creative and artistically-minded person, dabbled in game development for fun but for some reason never saw it as something I could actually do for a living. It didn't even cross my mind as an option. But as I read more and more about game development as an art form, I became fascinated. I decided to change my path in life and transferred to SCAD.
However, I originally did so as an concept artist. I've always been drawing strange characters and creatures and doing so at a level far above my peers, so I was interested in doing concept art for games.
But in the process of transferring, I needed a portfolio, so I grinded away doing concept art and it wore me down. Then at SCAD, taking foundational art classes required before you can even get into any of the game development courses, I was worn down even further. I realized that although I'm talented at art and like doing it casually for fun, actually doing it all day became work that I didn't enjoy. Also, living with other artists there made me no longer as confident about my skills as an artist.
So I was actually jumping BACK onto the path to becoming a film student again despite my earlier misgivings when I managed to finally get into my first game design class, Brenda's introduction to game design course. She has mentioned before in our classes that some students have an epiphany moment where they discover that game design is what they were already destined to do, meeting the people who have been just like them all along that they never know. Count me amongst that tribe.
I fell completely in love with game design, at just the right time. I don't know how I never saw it before, as I was not only a dedicated gamer, but I had made a handful of games before that point as just fun diversions while in high school and even earlier.
Unfortunately, she does not teach the introductory courses anymore. I'm glad I had the opportunity to be 'saved' when I was. Thanks again Brenda, for all the help you've provided to me as a student (and hopefully beyond), and again, thanks for helping me discover that game design is the love I was destined to find.
Labels: Ada Lovelace Day
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 2:35 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - Fun with Search Terms
Sunday, March 22, 2009Viewing your website statistics to find what search engine queries lead people to you can be an enlightening and entertaining experience.
Thankfully, the majority of people get here by searching for my name.
I can't tell you just how pleased I am that the next most common search that got people here was "Fluffy, Destroyer of Worlds."
This makes me seem far more cool than I suspect I actually am. ;)
A lot of the search terms that seem to come up are baffling though.
More than once, for example, someone apparently got to my website by searching for "shmup vegetable."
What does that even mean?
Imagining what a shmup vegetable would be takes me on whole new exciting (and disturbing) adventures of the mind. posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 4:33 AM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - Leaving for GDC
Friday, March 20, 2009Now that the quarter of intense pain is over, hopefully I'll be back on a more steady posting schedule. ...Starting next week. ;)
This past week I was spending a nice week out of town with some friends.
And this upcomming week I'm going to GDC, and so all my time will be spent trying to make the most of that experience!
But once I'm back home I'm starting my last quarter of SCAD, and kept my workload light to help give me more time for the inevitable job-hunt. That should also give me plenty of time to post here.
So, off I go to GDC! I hope to see some of you there. :)
Labels: GDC
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 8:59 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - Weekly Game 5: Jerks in a Minefield
Sunday, February 22, 2009Introduction: The title of this game says it all: in this game players find themselves in a minefield with the goal of being the only one left alive.
Players: 2-4
Materials:
-1 6-sided die
-25 square tiles (you can make your own from paper, index cards, etc.)
-tokens to represent the players (coins, beads, etc.)
On 10 of the tiles, draw a skull on one side - these tiles are the tiles that have mines.
Setup:
Take 9 of the unmarked tiles, and lay them down on the table in the shape of a cross, with one tile forming the center and 2 tiles out in each of the 4 directions from it.
Shuffle the remaining tiles and add them (face down so the skulls are not showing!) until you have a 5 x 5 grid of tiles, with the initial cross forming the center lines for each axis. This grid acts as the game board.
place your character tokens on the center square of each outside edge of the grid.
-In the case of a three-player game, one edge will not be used.
-In a two-player game, each player controls two tokens, set on opposite sides of the board.
How to Play:
In the game players attempt to move around the board, avoiding landmines, and attempting to get into position where they can shove opposing players into the mines.
Movement:
There are two kinds of movement in this game: cautious movement and fast movement.
In cautious movement, the player's character is attempting to navigate the minefield using their minesweeper. A player attempting cautious movement can only move one tile in that turn, but has the choice of revealing one adjacent tile (to either their starting OR ending position). The player does not have to reveal the tile to any other player - it can be considered that player's own strategic knowledge.
In fast movement, the player does not get the luxury of revealing tiles but can potentially move much faster. Players using fast movement may roll the die and travel that many tiles on that turn.
In either case, for any tile landed on, players should flip over that tile to reveal it. The exception is the central cross tiles, which are always mine-free.
Should the player have stepped on a mine-tile (a tile with a skull) then his or her movement is halted immediately and they are killed.
Once a mine has been detonated, leave it skull-side up. This is an inactive mine, and players can travel over it in future turns.
[optional movement rule: have players allowed to travel over potentially mine-ridden tiles with a die roll: On a roll of 4, 5, or 6, the player crosses the tile fine, but on a roll of 1, 2, or 3, the mine detonates and the player is killed.]
Shoving:
When players are at any point in their turn on a tile adjacent to an opponent, they can chose to shove the opponent. The shove, if successful, will move the opponent up to 2 tiles in the direction the opponent was from the player.
Example: If the opponent was to the left of the shoving player, the opponent will be shoved 2 tiles to the left.
If the player is near-enough to the edge of the board that they cannot travel 2 tiles, then they'll only be shoved as far as they can.
To perform a shove, both players involved will roll the die. If the shoving player rolls equal to or higher than her opponent, then the shoving player was successful and the opponent is moved 2 spaces. Again, as the opponent crosses each tile, flip each tile over and if that tile contain a skull, the mine is exploded and that shoved player is killed.
Ghosts:
If you're a player who got blown up by a mine, don't despair! Although you've lost the chance to win you're not out of the game quite yet.
When a player gets killed, they lose their next turn, but then return as a ghost.
Ghosts no longer have a token and therefore no longer move.
Instead, on a ghost's turn, the ghost can perform one of the following actions:
-Reveal a tile. Much like how players can reveal a tile to themselves during cautious movement, a ghost players can reveal any tile on the board to themselves on their turn.
-Re-activate an already exploded mine. Simply flip over the tile back to its original state.
This can be done to a tile that a living player is currently standing on, which causes it to explode yet again and kill that player!
-Swap tiles. Pick two tiles and switch their positions with each other.
This is the only way the central cross and player start locations can be rigged
with mines. Note that a deactivated (already exploded) mine does not re-activate when moved!
Whether or not a ghost is allowed to swap tiles that players are currently standing on should be decided by the players before the game begins. Should a ghost be allowed to, placing an active mine under a player causes it to instantly explode and kill that player.
-Shove. Last but not least, ghosts can also shove players. A ghost wishing to shove can roll the die and on a roll of 6, can shove any living player up to two tiles in any direction the ghost wants.
The rules shoving are otherwise the same as for living players.
Winning the Game:
The last player left alive wins.
In the case of a two-player game, the team with at least one token left alive wins.
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Designing the game:
Still interested in playing around with the idea of tile-laying games, I decided a mine-field would make for an interesting choice of theme for such a game, particularly as I also like playing around with imperfect and/or asymmetric information in my designs. Very early on I came up with the title of the game, and that influenced a lot of the design. ;)
I found early on in playtesting the game that leaving the whole board completely up to random shuffling often created situations where certain players were completely sealed up in certain areas. This is why I ended up ensuring that there was at least one safe path to every other player through the use of the central cross. However, the downside of this is it causes players to not want to ever leave this safe path, so the game often gets a little gridlocked. It also left the areas where players could potentially stumble into mines shoved off into the corners of the map where they seem less effective (for a game that's entirely based around the gimmick)
Unfortunately I thought only of the optional die-roll to cross through mined areas too late, and I haven't had the chance to playtest if that concept can be used to once again allow a completely random distribution of mines around the board, which is regrettable as it seems like that could work and would produce a game more like the original concept I was intending. I also feel like it empowers players with yet another strategic choice, with some risk-reward going on: to risk getting to move through a dangerous tile on a 50/50 chance...
While on the subject of the optional movement rule, the reason there's several optional, player-decided rules to this game were in part due to my lack of time to playtest this game properly (currently working on programming three different games all due this week! eek!) In the case of the optional rule involving whether or not ghosts are allowed to swap tiles someone is currently on, I left optional because I myself couldn't decide whether this should be allowed or not. On the one hand, being the victim of this move could make one feel rather cheated, but on the other hand one of the ideas I wanted to explore with this game with the ghost mechanics in general was the idea of not being too much of a jerk or else it will (literally) come back to haunt you, and the swap-to-instant-kill rule would be a prime example of this.
I decided to leave it as a player-decided rule to A.) empower the players with yet another choice B.) soften the feeling of being cheated should you fall victim to the move if you had agreed to the rule earlier.
For these weekly game experiments I've been tending to stick to games with short play-times because it's always handy to have something quick to play and because I make and therefore also playtest these games in a short span of time, producing a game I can playtest and iterate quickly is very helpful.
Therefore, because this is a game that goes by quickly AND is centered entirely around player-killing and a last-man-standing goal, I felt like it was a good game to try my hand at a mechanic that other students in one of my classes explored during one game project: the idea of having eliminated players return as ghosts to cause mischief in order to let players keep playing to prevent downtime. I felt it was especially suitable for this game, given the title and theme: players are expected to get into character and actually be a jerk in this minefield, but now it can literally come back to haunt them. Also, as a consolation prize for already being eliminated from the competition, the ghost players get to cause lots of silly chaos, which lets them be jerks even from beyond the grave.
Labels: weekly game
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 11:58 AM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - Weekly Game 4: Parkour
Saturday, February 7, 2009Introduction: This game attempts to simulate the urban sports of parkour and free-running, where participants overcome obstacles of the urban environment with feats of agility.
In free-running, runners attempt to keep moving forward despite all obstacles they may encounter. In this game, players are to try to live up to this philosophy and keep advancing until they encounter an obstacle they can't handle.
Players: 1 (Solitaire)
Materials:
-A standard deck of playing cards
-Plenty of table space!
Setup:
Shuffle the deck and lay the top card from the deck face-up on the table to act as the first obstacle card.
Next draw 5 cards for your hand of cards.
Set aside the rest as a draw deck, leaving space to discard cards.
How to Play:
It is first important to note the differences between the cards in your hand and the cards acting as the obstacles you encounter.
Hand Cards:
The cards in the player's hand represents the abilities of their runner.
The different card suits determine how these cards are used:
*Spades represent their runner's ability to jump or vault over obstacles.
*Clubs represent their runner's ability to overcome other kinds of obstacles through miscellaneous feats like sliding or climbing.
*Hearts represent their runner's endurance, and ability to push forward in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles. They are used to either modify the power of Spade or Club cards, or can be exchanged for a new random draw.
*Diamonds represent the runner's perception and quick-thinking - it is used to explore possible alternative routes and plan combo moves.
Obstacle Cards:
Throughout play, the game world will be built using cards laid down onto the table as tiles. These cards represent the obstacles the runner will face in the game world.
The suits of the cards determine what kind of obstacle is encountered:
*Spades represent obstacles that players must jump or vault over, using spade cards from their hand.
*Clubs represent obstacles that players must use alternative means to overcome, by playing cards of the clubs suit from their hand.
*Hearts represent an open stretch, free of obstacles. No card from the player's hand is required to pass this card, but the card also awards the player with no new card either.
*Diamonds represent obstacles that the player can foresee multiple ways of overcoming the obstacle. Either spades or clubs cards from the player's hand can be used to overcome this kind of obstacle.
Defeating Obstacles:
The player can defeat obstacles with the cards from their hand.
To overcome an obstacle, play a card from your hand with a number matching or higher than the number on the obstacle card.
Example: If the next obstacle is a 7 of spades, if the player has an 8, 9, or 10 of spades, or any of the face cards (including Aces!) of the spades suit, then any one of those cards can be played to overcome the obstacle.
In the case of an obstacle that is a diamond card, the player can play a higher-or-matching spades or clubs card to overcome the obstacle.
Example: If the next obstacle is a 5 of diamonds, the player can play a 5 of spades, a 5 of clubs, or any higher card from their hand of the spades or clubs suits.
Cards from the player's hand of the hearts suit can be used to boost the power of the runner's moves.
Example:If the next obstacle is a 7 of spades, and the player only has a 3 of spades but also has in his hand a 4 of hearts, he can play both those two cards from his hand to defeat the 7 of spades.
The player can also choose to discard any hearts card from his hand to draw a new card from the draw deck.
Lastly, The player can spend cards in his hand of the diamond suit to find alternative obstacles to overcome if the current one looks too daunting, or if he wants to risk performing a combo.
To explore an alternative route, simply discard one diamonds card from your hand, and draw a new card from the draw deck to act as a new obstacle, placing it directly to the left or right of the current obstacle.
The player can then choose to tackle the original obstacle OR this new obstacle OR play another diamond card to explore yet another possible route.
Alternatively, players can choose to play a diamond card to draw and place a card directly behind the current obstacle or an obstacle of an alternative route.
If the player can defeat both obstacles (or more, if the future sequence was continued) with the cards in his hand, then the player is said to have performed a combo of moves very elegantly, and this will award the player with more cards for his hand (see the next section)
Acquiring New Cards for the Hand:
For every obstacle card the player overcomes, draw 1 card from the draw deck to place immediately behind it as the next obstacle (unless the player performed a combo, in which case, place the next card behind the end of the combo sequence).
If a hearts card was drawn, draw and place yet another card after it, until a heart card is not drawn.
Once the next obstacle has been placed, the player may then draw the next top card from the draw deck into their hand.
If the player performs a combo, draw an additional card for each extra obstacle the player defeated in a single turn. As hearts do not count as a proper obstacle, they do not award this additional point.
Winning the Game:
Once the player can no longer make a move (In other words, the player encounters only obstacles they cannot defeat) then the game is over.
Award one point for each row of cards in the sequence of obstacle cards - i.e. one point for every move forward the player made. This does include heart cards.
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Designing the game:
I had explored this game as an idea for an earlier weekly game, but ended up building the DJ game instead for that week's challenge. I lacked the materials necessary for my other game idea for this week, so I decided to revisit the Parkour game for this week's challenge.
I liked the idea of using playing cards as tiles for a tile-laying board sort of game ala Carcassone, much like I did in the previous challenge, Pennies and Dimes. It certainly made sense given that Free Running is largely about spatial awareness and use of space, so needed to make a game that involved some sort of game world to provide the obstacles the runner was to overcome. Tile-laying of cards seemed like a reasonable solution to this problem.
I liked the core idea behind free running that the participants are intended to move forward at all costs, regardless of what obstacles they may face, and that the run is done when they can no longer move forwards. (By comparison, parkour allows runners to change directions and is more free-form - according to my research that's the main difference between the two related sports)
In any case, I thought it was the reasonable basis for a game based on the two sports.
I took a bit of inspiration from a few earlier games I had done, namely the earlier weekly game Creature Battles, as well as a game I worked on for one class using a CCG as the basis of a tabletop RPG, in using the properties of various cards to act as the stats for your player.
I especially liked the mechanic of using diamonds as a representation of the runner's perception and quick-thinking to find alternative pathways or alternative means of overcoming obstacles or plan advanced combos.
Still, this system lead to a few clunkier features of this game I haven't yet found solutions to that satisfy me yet, such as what happens when the player draws hearts cards as obstacles.
The current solution works, but doesn't at all feel like the best solution yet.
Labels: weekly game
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 2:21 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - Global Game Jam
Monday, February 2, 2009Well, what an insane weekend.
Knowing there's a drought of programming talent at SCAD I volunteered to be a programmer for a team. A decision I later regretted somewhat as code definitely is not my strongest skill area in game development.
A game jam is difficult enough as is, and now I had to carry an entire team as the sole member of the programming department. So, the experience was especially intense on my end.
I will now have that much more respect for any programmer I work with in the future now. ;)
(Not that I took them lightly before this experience. In a game development department filled with only designers and artists, we at SCAD find programmers to be a precious, precious commodity)
In any case, here's the game my team made:
Gaseous.
Labels: global game jam
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 9:47 AM 0 Comments Links to this post