Blog - The Return of Fluffy

Monday, July 14, 2008

We just started our last and final session of EGD this year, and gave them both of our basic non-digital design exercises earlier this morning.

I happened to snap a photo this time of the "Fluffy: Destroyer of Worlds" image.
Again, we draw the following on the chalkboard and ask our students to pitch a hypothetical game based on this image:



A couple of the ideas it generated actually seemed pretty fun or had some interesting mechanics I think I might try playing around with in Flash/actionscript.
I have, after all, been meaning to try to make some simple flash games this summer to add at least something digital to my game design portfolio.

Also, because it's a topic that interests me, I couldn't help but notice how the classic "box of crap" design exercise encourages play with affordances (again for you non-academics reading the list, affordances are qualities/properties of a object/material that are instantly understood: i.e. glass = transparent and breakable.)
I made the mistake of giving each of my students (among other random bits with which to make a game) a rubber band and a six sided die.
Predictably, nearly every group used the die for its original function as a random number generator. I was glad to see at least a few exceptions there which surprised me. However, every single group used the rubber band in some way to involve projectiles in their game design (sometimes using the die as the projectile...)
I suppose I should have seen that coming, given the nature (affordances, if you will) of a rubber band. Especially those rubber bands placed in the hands of rowdy high school students.
Oh well.

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posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 12:30 AM  0 Comments Links to this post



Blog - Design Challenges: Unusual Materials

Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Sorry for the lack of posting lately. Technical difficulties continue to plague me.
However, in a few days I'll be working at Emagination again, and will have enough free time around computer labs there to post nearly every day again.

In any case, one thing that's come up since I last wrote here (and has been rattling around inside my head again today) was finals. One team's final presentation on their game in one of my classes (Brenda's "Abstract Systems Simulation" course) has me thinking about an interesting thing to play with in my game design experimentation.

The team realized that due to one of their game's player classes (which 'moved' by merely multiplying itself to fill more squares of the game board) that the number of tokens they'd need for that class alone was astronomical. So, they devised a really cunning solution: they constructed a mold, and the game materials in the box consist of a couple of these molds plus various colors of clay.
Players use these to make their own tokens for the game by ripping off a tiny portion of their blob of clay and pressing it into the appropriate part of the mold to mark it as whatever kind of token they may need.

Not only is it clever solution to their problem, our class thought about it and realized clay is rarely used in games, which seems almost odd given as it is a staple of playtime in children. Smooshing clay around is itself strangely fun, and board games in particular almost demand a high degree of tactile stimulation for the players.
Playing with clay is a very tactile sort of fun, so it would seem to fit naturally.

And yet, the only commercial game we could think of that involved it at the time was The Grape Escape. A peek further into boardgamegeek reveals a few more games that involve clay, but not many. (I found less than 10...)

So, I think I might invest in some Play-Doh and experiment with some clay-based mechanics.

A few were predictably just a sort of sculptural charades game: sculpt an object or whatever instead of drawing it or acting it out while people guess what it is.
However, a fun twist on that mechanic was the mechanics used in Barbarossa and Cluzzle, where you have to make a sculpture that is just ambiguous enough as to what the hell it is. Too easy to guess and you lose points, but if NOBODY gets what it is, you also lose points.
Clay-O-Rama and its expansion set have some fun clay mechanics as well, what with the way you sculpt your character affecting how it acts in the game, and then the fun of getting to literally squish your opponents.


All of this, however, reminds me of an earlier note I had scribbled down for myself: "Design Challenge: Make a game using tape."

I have no idea what was in my head when I wrote that, but I bet there are quite a lot of neat game ideas one can invent using all the properties of tape.
Plus, everyone usually has tape laying around the house...

One term that's come up in my game studies that I hear is more academic in nature and not actually used in industry is the concept of affordances, which are the properties of an object or material. For example, present the player with glass and he's going to assume he can look through it, and shatter it in a giant crash of shards.
Affordances seem to be a great starting point for random design challenges.

Last summer at Emagination, in order to teach myself the FPS-making package our students use, I enjoyed playing with the physics engine and designed a puzzle game based entirely around the affordances of hand grenades. No enemies to blow up, instead you used your infinite number of grenades to solve puzzles: blowing open doors, tossing grenades to places you couldn't reach to activate/move objects to a place where you could, etc.
Of course, that was a case of virtual materials. Thanks to all the non-digital prototyping done in my design classes at SCAD I think I'll play around with the affordances of some real-world materials and how they can be used in games.

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posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 11:23 AM  0 Comments Links to this post