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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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Game Design: Color Design and Palette Choice

What makes a room easier to navigate, items easy to discover, paths easily discerned? Intricately crafted scenes, artistic renditions of the imagination to a tangibly-cognizant interact-able space are all important, but how is the player going to be interacting with the scene created?

  • Contrast to the surrounding environmenthuecontrast

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Let’s Talk about: Shovel Knight

I know I talked about it before, but Shovel Knight is probably one of the few games this year that I was hard-pressed to put down. Aside from being a fun Castlevania-Megaman style Platformer, attached is a great soundtrack, a style that references games of the past but is still able to carve out its own image and gameplay that is never “too easy” or “too hard” but consistently finds the middle ground to keep the player lingering in the “I know I can complete this” mentality.

You've come a long way NES-Dracula. Fighting me in a graveyard instead of near your shining throne.
You’ve come a long way NES-Dracula. Fighting me in a graveyard instead of near your shining throne.

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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.

Continue reading “Teaching the Player p2.2 – More on Reactive vs Planned Gameplay” →

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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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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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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.

Continue reading “Dialogue Delivery p5: How, not what.” →

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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.
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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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.

Continue reading “Dialogue Delivery part 4: Short but Provocative” →

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