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Game Idea: Computer-Pandemic

Game Idea: Computer Anti-Rx (Computer Virus Pandemic)

Game:

The game pandemic is about creating a type of infection (bacteria, fungal or viral) and designing it in a way that will cause the world’s population to become infected and die from it. As your infection spreads through more of the population, you can upgrade the infection to be more resilient to the weather, easier to spread, or more severe symptoms and side-effects after caught. The more people you infect and the easier the symptoms are to notice, the quicker people start to find treatments for and treat the symptoms. So the upgrades need to start moving towards defenses against antivirals (and the like).

Compu-geddon takes a similar approach, but instead you engineer a computer exploit (worm, virus, web-hack) to infect as many computers as possible. As the exploit becomes more permissive throughout the ecosystem, the easier it might be discovered. But the more people who you can infect, the more valuable your exploit becomes.

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Game Idea: Blindfolded (e.g. Blind Unfinished Swan)

Game Idea: Blindfolded (Blind Unfinished Swan)

Game:

What Unfinished Swan did was create a world devoid of color where it was the player’s job to put color back into the world to navigate through it.

The idea for Blindfolded is that instead of adding color to navigate through the world, the sound that you generate by moving through it paints the world in front of the player for a short time. Like the image perception that bats have with their echo location, Ben Affleck from that horrible Daredevil movie or Toph has in Avatar: The Last Airbender.

And with great sight comes things your can't un-see.
And with great sight comes things your can’t un-see.

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Game Idea: Server Admin Simulator

Game Idea: Server Farm Simulator Tycooninator

Pitch

The backend of game dev tycoon, where the player maintains and fixes issues that occur when a web site or video game becomes too popular.

They grow up and obsolete, so fast. Time for the garbage dump
They grow up and obsolete, so fast. Time for the garbage dump

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Game Idea: Fun Evolution Spore

Game Idea: Fun Physics Evolution (Think Spore with less realistic evolutionary history)

What spore tried to create was a game about a single celled organism, following its biological descendants as it tries to follow the same evolutionary track as humans. The interesting parts of this were the evolutionary choices that the player presided over the creature that it created, e.g. long legs but stubby arms emphasizing defense over aggression, eyes predominantly higher on the creature to see objects and other creatures at a distance, no mouth making communication and “making friends” with other creatures next to impossible, these are all fun and biologically interesting aspects about the game. It takes real life animal psychology, animal biology and evolutionary postulation and tries to convey and teach these aspects in the most passive of ways, where the player isn’t reading text and trying to absorb information in order to progress (i.e. Edutainment games) but where the player sees their failures in their creature creation because they forgot to put eyes on so it can’t see it’s environment making surviving, or even simply navigating, a difficult task.

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Teaching the Player p2.2 – More on Reactive vs Planned Gameplay

Previous posts in the Series Teaching the Player

And a link to the part 1

Running for Speed

The Speed Running community is a fantastic example of people who take every opportunity to transition all games from a Reaction to Planned Gameplay. They approach every game with its predefined rules and regardless of how well a game teaches you a mechanic, the speed runners put in the time to perfect the most opportune route and routine in getting from the start to the end of the game. They epitomize the idea of “Reaction Gameplay + Time = Planned Gameplay” by learning all of the inadequacies of the player’s abilities and the gamespace’s rules and manipulating them to get a more optimized path for faster completion, and shaving frames, seconds or even minutes off of runtimes by understanding what can be done by the player and what will happen in the gamespace when the player performs the action.

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

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Dialogue Delivery part 3: The Wind Blows Long

When a character speaks, the player listens. When a character speaks too much, the player tunes out. Continuing with our look at Dialogue Delivery systems, we still need to look at when character-paced acting is mixed with dialogue as a means of delivering story, character development and plot points. The previous two can be found here and here which discuss Player-paced storytelling and character-paced dialogue-less storytelling, respectively.

There are various means for pushing dialogue onto the player. Text-based, dialogue-based, interpretive gestures and symbols. I don’t want to focus too heavily on what they are actually delivering, but instead focus on how each will be received.

Information delivery is important to think about when designing a game because you’re asking a lot of the player as they try and soak in the information presented. You’re dropping the player into a conversation among other people and expecting them to take the conversation as seriously as the other participants. If there is too much information, it becomes a chore to participate in the conversation.

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