Week 13 - Assignment 2 Game Design Progress

This should be my final entry for Assignment 2 Game Design.

I spent the last couple of days (outside of my normal 50 hour working week) fine tuning the design document a little and working on the power point presentations for the demonstration.

I originally started working in Microsoft PowerPoint 2011 on my Mac Book Pro (I think I just vomited in my mouth a little for admitting that :P). After spending some time in PowerPoint I remembered coming across a PowerPoint alternative / augmentation application for natural teaching / delivery of presentations called Prezi: http://www.prezi.com/. After spending some time watching how to tutorials I must say this is a fantastic product which is free for educational purposes. Hopefully I will impress the team and the class with my basic yet imho snazzy PowerPoint presentation.

I met with my team today and showed off our PowerPoint / Prezi presentation. We also did yet another play-through with some others external to our team in order to garner some final feedback and decide upon how to tweak our presentation for tomorrow given the rather limited amount of time offered to demonstrate our game.

The team seemed quite happy with the presentation and everyone is clear what their role is. We are all a little concerned that the play-through demonstration may not be long enough to clearly demonstrate the game concept and mechanics however we are going to preset our game board in such a fashion as to trigger most of the different mechanics and hopefully impart on the audience what we are trying to achieve with our game.

I am both a little nervous and excited for tomorrow but now that we have come up with a fairly unique and enjoyable product and hopefully all will go well with our presentation tomorrow.

Week 13 - Assignment 2 Game Design Progress

I spent some of the weekend working on the design document for our project and also completed my level design for a digital rendition of the game. I notice too that the guys are also working on the document which is awesome to see.

I forgot to mention in an earlier posting that I somehow managed to sink a few hours into a flow chart for our game. I am not sure even until this day how I spent so much time on it but at least we have a good flow chart now.

I have shared the flow chart out with the others and asked for their input.

Week 12/13 - Assignment 2 Game Design Progress

Once again, silly me I do not have a picture but will be sure to get one as the game board is now in it's final state.

We met again on Friday, outside of class in order to put some extra time into our assignment given that is only a week away from submission.

The game board as I have mentioned has now been complete. After I left on Thursday, Tom coloured the starting zones for each player and darkened some of lines on the game board that I had done the day before.

We then proceeded to laminate the game board and I drew up the different game squares with permanent marker for the final game board low-fi prototype. I also took the time to go shopping in Overflow for various odds and ends for the game and came up with some multi-coloured notepad paper, some magnetic strips and finally some double sided tape (grand total of $7.00 :D).

Mark assisted me with making up some new tokens and player pieces using the coloured paper, magnets and double sided tape. Tom was able to redo the game cards with a nice custom Stainless Steel Rat backing. Russell assisted Tom and also did some more work on our documentation. 

After another play-through and some third part consultation we decided to meet yet again on Wednesday (this conversation took place over a couple of tankards of ale!). Wednesday is unfortunately the earliest we could do due to other uni and work commitments.

Week 12 - Assignment 2 Game Design Progress

I forgot to take a picture today however if one of my other team members has done so I will be sure to upload it at a later date.

This week involved yet another redesign of the game board. Last week we were happy with the outer ring but had not yet finalized the structure of the inner ring. I also brought up the idea of having a shipyard adjacent to each player's starting zone were we could build the ship. The idea being that this are could be sabotaged and parts could be stolen from this area rather than having an area off board where the ships are built.

Furthermore we decided that there should only be 3 ship parts rather than 4 in order to speed up the game. We decided to adopt one other recommendation from Colin from last week which was to always have a player acting as an agent even from the very beginning of the game. This coupled with having only 3 ship cards and some reworking of game rules has resulted in a much more fluid game which is slightly faster paced and much more interesting to play.

I spent quite a great deal of time re-drawing the game board by calculating the size of each game board element meticulously in order to maximize the size of the board within the margins of the A2 canvas. I also created a digital game board on Google Docs that we could edit as we like in order to try different things without effecting our 'production' game board.

After spending a few hours drawing the game board I had to leave however the rest of the guys from my team mentioned they would continue on without me, go team!

Week 11 - Assignment 2 Game Design Progress

A view of the ship cards

The latest iteration of the game board

Progress! As can be seen from the above pictures we re-worked the design of the game board which Russell then kindly drew up neatly with a ruler. Tom did some more work on game and ship cards whilst I worked on the concept document online and tried to determine the amount of cards of each type and a list of current game rules etc.

We then proceeded to perform a couple of more play-through's of the game in it's current state to determine what other tweaks may need to take place. 

Colin was kindly able to provide some of his time a sat through a play through of the game and provided some invaluable insight from someone external to the development team. It was concluded that tokens would be preferable to agent cards when placed as a trap on the board. It was also concluded that we should create a cheat sheet indicating some very basic game rules and give them to first time player's rather than let a player discover the game without any prior knowledge.

Week 10 - Assignment 2 Game Design Progress

A week of from Uni and yet for me whenever there is a lecture recess I feel as if there has not been a break (side effect from working on campus full-time).

I tried to organize two assignment 2 group sessions for this week. I discussed my desire with the team to meet in the study break on both Tuesday and Thursday in order to work on our group based project. On Tuesday Nobody showed up at all and I sat twiddling my thumbs in E1.015 for a few hours whilst waiting. This time was not entirely wasted as I got some work done on the assignment individually and then decided to work on this blog as I have not been giving it attention of late.

The Thursday session on the other hand was an entirely different matter and I was able to get 3/4 of my team assembled together. During this session we mainly worked on refining game mechanics and started to plan a new game board. 

Another great thing that came out of this assignment session was the creation of a shared Google Drive and some associated collaborative documents so that even though we can not always meet to work on our assignment in person we can chip away at it individually in our own time.

I have to admit, this is my first exposure to Google docs (although I am familiar with other solutions such as Microsoft SharePoint. I have to say, Google Docs is a fantastic tool, especially for Group based work such as this. All of the group has now been given full access to the G Drive so we can continue to collaborate on our group project. (Great Idea Russell).

Week 9 - Assignment 2 Game Design Progress

Early Game Board Prototype

Whilst we have only been working on our game for a short period of time, I am surprised  at both how much and how little has changed. Many of the core mechanics of our game have changed dramatically since it's first iteration and overall it is still distinctly the game we set out to make from the start.

Now that we have the game mechanics roughly fleshed out we started doing some internal play-testing to determine the current state of the game and what areas need to be re-worked or enhanced in order to improve player experience.

The game it it's current state is a roll and move style game with a nice amount of strategic elements and race to the end elements. From the beginning there have been some features that we have identified that we would really like to see in the game but at the same time we are being careful as to not be rigid in our thinking and not adapt the game as is necessary through the development process.

From our play-testing so far we have learnt that current basic game board needs to be heavily reworked and the distribution of game cards needs to be reworked as some cards are too powerful / appear to frequently whilst others that are not as useful seem to not be played much (note, this could be due to Tom's infamous shuffling skills).

Week 8 - Game Review - Path of Exile

Path of Exile

This week I decided to do a review of a game in development by New Zealand based developer: Grinding Gear Games.

I stumbled across this game some time ago whilst it was still in an early alpha stage. The developers offered ongoing access to the game in it's current state and access to every succeeding build through to game release for a nominal fee. By doing so they offered incentive for early investment by the gaming community whilst sourcing crowd based funding in order to continue development of the game (an increasingly common practice for Indie studios). Note the game will be free on release and will be supported by an ethical micro-transaction system.

Whilst it is important to research games that have come before in order to find inspiration for future titles it is also important to research the current market, PoE is a product of such research. Grinding Gear Games was formed due to the distinct lack of modern offerings in the Action RPG genre of games; from a small group of ARPG enthusiasts, GGG was formed.

As is typical of an ARPG, PoE involves real time interactivity in a hack and slash style of game play. The player is presented with a user-interface containing pertinent character and status information (health and mana globe, action bars, mini map etc). In so far as the interface is concerned it is very typical to the genre and is reminiscent of many such games categorised by this genre (Diablo Series, Titan Quest, Dungeon Seige etc comes to mind). 

The player is an escaped convict stranded on a remote continent home to criminals and dangerous monster and beasts. Hey this sounds familiar, doesn't it? The player, now given a new lease on life with their freedom must complete trials of ever increasing difficulty and face opponents of ever increasing strength whist traversing the continent and progressing through the story. This is achieved by obtaining powerful magical items and developing class based skills in order to survive this challenges.

The goal of PoE differs a little from that of traditional ARPGs. Whilst at first the game follows an act based structure (only two acts), end game content is served by finding and  completing maps (which are found with similar item qualities and affixes as items have). It this way there is no definitive goal condition, only continuing mindless hack and slash that some of us gamers love.

This game offers a number of challenges for the player. As the game progresses the opponents become more difficult to best, on top of this the game may be replayed with harder difficulty modes and finally with increasing difficulty map drops. To further offer more challenge the game may be played with a variety of different rule sets (permanent death, harder monsters, world player-vs-player etc).

From what I have played (only a few hours so far) the game offers little in the way of narrative but this is typical to the genre and is not really all that necessary for this style of ARPG.

What sets PoE apart from the myriad of ARPG games that have preceded it, is that it takes everything commonly found in ARPGs of the past and puts its own twist on it. The developers have taken what everyone loves about ARPGs and packaged it into a nice neat title. The game offers everything one would expect in an ARPG and more.

Below is a screenshot of the skill tree from PoE showing the amazing complexity and the literally endless character builds that one may design (some would say this is far too complex, I love it!).

This game has highlighted to me once again the importance of not deterring too much from the standard path / genre of a game. As has been mentioned to us in class, humans like something to be both new and yet familiar. PoE is a great example of this. There are far too many examples of what sets this game apart, too numerous to list in this review to be certain.

On that note, I might just have to fire up PoE and play some more :D