GameIntrospection

Teaching the Player p2: Reactive vs Planned Game Design

Past Articles in the series can be found here

Old Man: It’s dangerous to go it alone. Here, take this.

Link: But, what am I supposed to do with it?

Old Man: <shrugs>

Some of the more thrilling parts of life are the times that you’re anxious, you don’t know what’s coming up, but it’s approaching fast and all you can do is traverse yourself through it. You’re given something new and unexpected and you are forced to adapt with the goal of thriving in a new environment. This can also be a source of fear and concern because you aren’t in the normal comfort zone that you once thrived in when getting to this point, yet you’re expected to perform at the high quality that got you to this point? You don’t even know if the rules have changed at this point, the tools being the same, or the uses of any new tools that you may come across.

Of course I’m referring to game design and not my previous post, silly person. But why can’t these causes for frustration and anxiety translate between gaming and real life? If the tools you’re given aren’t explained to you and the tasks that are presented to you require a certain level of proficiency using those tools, how are you supposed to operate at a level of high proficiency?

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June 27, 2014 1

On Creativity and Change

What is irritating is when you try to start something, but because demotivation has set into other aspects of your work, it creeps into work that you care more about. The creative energy comes from being productive all around, but by not putting full effort into one creative production it takes away from all creative productions. Maybe it’s a part of the self that worries I’m shirking responsibility causing myself to not write with a clear mind and further blocking the creativity to flow, or that I don’t deserve to be personally creative when I’m not being professionally creative. It’s not about being Creatively Stagnant or Creatively Irresponsible, but I feel that I’m being Creatively Demotivated. Bouncing around from idea to idea, but having little motivation to expound and fulfill each idea.

Whenever being creative comes up, I’m always brought back to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. I’m brought back to this more and more often because finding happiness from creativity and purpose comes as a very in-essential need of the human life. When I listen to podcasts like the Joe Rogan Experience where the topic of Subsistence shows come up often, or “Happy People” from Werner Herzog where people live essentially with the tools and expertise of the 1800s, they emphasis that the people living in these communities that focus more on their physical needs than their psychological ones are living much happier lives than those in a more civilized, modernized community. I’m not going to say that I’m the first one to bring the two together, but I guess it’s a sign of how good our lives are. I have everything needed to live a physically stress free life. I have food, water, warmth. I’m healthy and have employment. Many of the base needs are already met, so we search higher on the pyramid to find things that are more fulfilling.

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June 22, 2014 1

Game Idea: The Chase

I had a game idea floating around for a while and only just started implementing it heavily over the past week. That might not be completely true, I’ve been working off and on for the past month but had too much going on to devote any meaningful time on it. I’m hoping that writing about it will help me get a better understanding of the game and maybe solidify any ambition with the project.

Idea: Deprogram your habits

The only way to reprogram out habits is to know what our habits are, so we need someone that learns our habits and forces us to unlearn our habits. In Behavior Psychology, we know that our habits become reinforced when our reward systems are triggered by our actions. Good rewards to actions reinforcing the belief that our actions are good. Hitting the ‘?’ block gives a rewarding sound, coin +1, power-up which reinforces the action for players to hit ‘?’ blocks as they appear in hopes of more “rewards” of appearing. Slashing the tall grass in Zelda teaches the player that life hearts, rupees, free weaponry can be found and when we are in need of that reward, we reinforce that habit by performing the action of slashing the tall grass. (Music Change) When we know we will be rewarded, we become more likely to perform actions that propagate that reward.

This game is gonna make me Operant Learn all over my new jeans, damnit.

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June 19, 2014 0

E3 Game Dump – Entwined

Genre: Rhythmic/Atmospheric

Console: PS4. Plans for PS3/Vita Cross-Buy

Controls

Twin stick – asynchronous

The basics are that you move the left stick for the Red character and the right for the Blue. The player then tries to go through the correctly colored gates until their “sync” meter (the top bars) fill up, extend and gently touch tips so they both synergize together.

The Rhythmic part comes in where the gates and sounds played arrive on beat to the background music, making the experience more unique to each player and helps build the atmosphere to each of its soundscapes.

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June 12, 2014 0

Teaching the player: Prelude and First Screens

You know what sucks in a game? Being force fed how you are supposed to interact with the world. You know what also sucks? Not knowing what to do, or knowing exactly what to do and making it nearly impossible to accomplish. There are a myriad of ways this can be done correctly or incorrectly and I’m sure there were active decisions as to why certain designs were chosen, but they all contribute to or take away from the player experience in one form or another and it’s left to a good level designer to understand what works best for their game and how to design the level around making the most out of the player experience.

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June 10, 2014 0

Dialogue Delivery p5: How, not what.

Obligatory Past Post Countdown:

Player Paced Dialogue Delivery [link]

Character Paced Non-verbal Dialogue Delivery [link]

Character Paced Verbose Dialogue Delivery [link]

Character Paced Short-Form Dialogue Delivery [link]

Stepping away from the focus on “what” is said, it’s still important to talk about the setting of the delivery. For all of the previous articles, we’ve only talked about dialogue and plot points delivered through extremely disruptive cutscenes. I don’t mean disruptive in the sense that it causes the player to drop the controller out of frustration, but disruptive in that it shifts your agency from playing to watching for a short while. The player stops “playing” the game and starts “watching” the game for a short or extended amount of time. This doesn’t necessarily cause a distraction for the player, but it does give an idea to the pacing of the game for the player. If the cutscenes feel long and troublesome, it can quickly demotivate the player from wanting to continue playing the game. So today, let’s focus on the two major pacing types used in gaming.

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May 29, 2014 0

Child of Light and the new “Indie” scene

Child of Light is another one of those games that is hard to categorize. It’s a game marketed as an indie game but clearly developed by a major developer, Ubisoft, which can be fairly misleading for players if they don’t pay attention. This usually means that Child of Light gets graded on an easier scale because of the “indie” aspect in mind and while I don’t believe it should, I still think that the game is exceptionally done for what it is.

If only all games looked like a PBS storybook.

It’s essentially a basic platfomer with classic JRPG combat using elements to try and make the battle system more active than simply being “turn-based”, a clearly defined art-style that captures a whimsy of 80-90s European ‘Storybook’ Animation, a soundscape that’s as euphoric and resounds with the environment as Ni no Kuni (PS3) and one of the only other games in the past few years that made me enjoy an older style JRPG (the other actually being Ni no Kuni). If you’ve read any other articles of me criticizing The Final Fantasy franchise, the reigning poster child of what’s right and wrong with JRPGs, you’d know that I’m not entirely too happy with the current direction of the franchise so it’s great to see another game that can get me to be excited about an RPG that is of a slower pace like older Final Fantasies.

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May 22, 2014 0

Dialogue Delivery part 4: Short but Provocative

The story thus far:

Player-Paced Dialogue Delivery

Character-Paced Delivery w/ No Dialogue

Character-Paced Delivery w/ Verbose Dialogue

Verbosity in games, much like any medium, is hard to get right. The dynamics of a game and the habits of a gamer are those that contribute a response towards quick reward systems. Run right and jump = Progression. Turn on console -> Start Game -> Join Game -> Start Killing things, all in a matter of a minute or two. But becoming programmed to this sort of habit goes against what verbosity tries to deliver. We’ve talked about how being verbose can be used correctly before, about not letting the mechanism for delivering the dialogue interfere with the agency of the player as they go about through the game. The delivery should only interfere when absolutely necessary but not for too long otherwise it pulls the player out from the immediate sense gratification that a game presents, but it means that shortened dialogue delivery needs to be discussed.

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