Game Elements Reading

Having read "Formal Abstract Design Tools" by Doug Church, published in July of 1999, I have opened my eyes a little more to the fast progression of games in the past two decades. It is amazing to see how the same design principles that we use today were only being termed around the time of games like Mario 64 (1996), which is used as an example in the article.

Some of the tools that Church talks about in the article are "Cooperation, Conflict and Confusion". Church talks about how the player of a game like Mario 64 or others, will experience intention or consequence. When performing tasks in the game there are only so many ways a task or action can be performed (which are created by the game designers) so it is up to the designers to create tasks that are challenging enough that the consequence is not completing the task to advance in the game, but that the player can work out the intentional action to perform the task and progress.

This is all about the balance between the players having control and the designer having control. Finding the perfect balance between the two can be tricky but when it works, and the player is totally engrossed in your game, that is the payoff. That is the most important thing that I believe I have taken from the article.

Super Mario logo - Source

Comments

Unity Tutorial 01

Unity Logo - Source Having started with the three Unity tutorials I can say I am excited to delve further into game development over the next few weeks. The first tutorial is a bit slow and of course I sat there frustrated because I wanted to dive straight into making games but towards the end of the video it picks up a bit and we get into making basic hills on a blank terrain. In the second tutorial we get into using assets and adding texture on to the terrain. I found this simple enough and was happy to play around with the brush tools and the opacity and height to create different hills, and to smooth them out or make them jagged. I am already getting ideas for how I can use this in future projects/game worlds and I can see how they utilised it in mountainous areas in games such as Skyrim. It was nice to use the dirt and grass textures to add colour to the world, even though they were quite basic looking to what would be in a finished game. The third tutorial shows us how to w...

Wikipedia Trail, from Christopher Nolan to Intuition

by Friedrich Eduard Bilz dated 1894 - Source Today I followed a Wikipedia trail starting with a topic that we covered in college. I decided to start at Christopher Nolan 's Wikipedia page as we had watched scenes from Memento (2000), as part of our Digital Video Techniques. I am really fond of Christopher Nolan's work, and Memento is a great movie but I particularly love The Dark Knight Trilogy (2005-12) and Inception (2010). His most recent film Dunkirk (2017) is a cinematic masterpiece, and won Nolan the Academy Award for Best Director. In the article it mentioned how "Nolan's films are typically rooted in epistemological and metaphysical themes", and I decided to follow the link on the word " metaphysical ". Metaphysics is "the branch of philosophy that studies the essence of a thing" meaning it questions "being, becoming, existence and reality". The word Metaphysics comes from the Greek word meaning 'beyond nature...

Game Design

Cover of ' The Art of Computer Game Design ' by Chris Crawford, 1984 After finishing reading through the Reading Material for Week 2 I have learned some things I didn't know previously. For instance I did not know that the card game 'Magic: The Gathering' helped to " triple the size of the hobby games industry ". I also did not realise there was such thing as a cross between a LARP (Live Action Role-playing Game) and traditional theater, such as the play ' Tony & Tina's Wedding '. Reading through the articles made me realise that game design goes much further past the traditional board and card games and usual video games. I had heard about LARP and "Choose Your Own Ending" books, but they do not come to mind when you think about game design. I know that when it comes to creating my own game I will have to take different game types into consideration, and they could in turn become influences and inspirations for my own game...

Multimedia Development

Search This Blog