Exploration in Games

What does that even mean?

During the Design Club Meeting this week we discussed the subject of Exploration and what it means.

There were many ways to look at exploration in games, some thought that it was exploring the game world further and others thought it could be about finding that one strategy to beat the game. As in a tower defence game for example. In a tower defence game you can win by using all the tools available but what they meant was that finding that one combination of tools to beat the game was a kind of exploration. This led to a very interesting discussion about Exploration vs. Experimentation.

The thought behind it was that the tower defence game belonged more in the domains of experimentation and not in exploration. The tools are all there to be used and there is not much to explore as in an open world type of game for instance. In a lot of games you start with a set of tools and can search or get others during the journey. That is more like exploration.

However, I think that experimentation in that sense is like exploration. It is experimenting to find different solutions or combos that work, it is exploration of the game’s limitations and/or possibilities. With that said, there is a lot to be discussed about exploration and its definitions.

To conclude this post, I think that experimentation and exploration are in a sense the same thing but looking at it from another angle it could become something completely different. It is all in the eyes of the beholder and based on their experiences with exploration it could indeed mean something else to others.

Feel free to leave some of your thoughts behind 🙂

Doom’s Date Another Update

Yesterday, me and my fellow programmer spent the entire day working on the game. We made some progress but not as much as we wanted to. However, the hurdle that we overcame was a big one. Now we can print out dialogue with a typewriting effect 😀 It also proves that there is always good to have a brain but even better when there are two! Looking forward to our next session and I really have to get going on the dialogue because that is really going to be a tough one.

A small update but just letting you know that we are still working on it 🙂

Board Game Decisions – Design Document

Yesterday we made a few decisions on what was left to be done in order to make the game and system better. We wrote down a list and divided up the work.  I decided that I wanted to work on the design document. It is something that I think is good to learn how to do, even though we have done a few of them I don’t feel confident about doing one.  Our second prototype will be really interesting to test if we manage to get it done until Thursday. I do hope that dividing up the work won’t come to bite us in the ***. 😛

My own goal for this week is to get the outline of the design document done and posted on the blog. It should probably already be up there but I will let it go through at least one iteration before it gets posted.

Today I have been hard at work to make the outline of the document and when I feel as though that is done I will show it to the others and get feedback on it. I’ve also sat down and written a few posts on the group blog. It feels good to get things done, if you just decide to focus on one task instead of fuzzing over every task that you have to do. It’s easy to forget that, I’ve noticed.

It feels as though our board game has the potential to become something worthy of a few rounds of play 😀

 

Doom’s UpDate

Today we discussed how we wanted to structure our work. Me and my fellow programmer wrote down what we wanted to structure it with classes and stuff.

I know I said that we would do this in Unity but after some research and testing we decided that it was not the best platform for our game. SFML was our second choice and we will make it work the best we can 😀

Besides the programming I will focus on the dialogue tree and make that work as well, together with our artist.

Final Project in Serious Games

It’s a lot of posting going on at the moment but it has to be done. Today we got our final assignment in Serious games. We are to develop a board game on a serious subject. So now I have two group assignment that both have to do with making a board game, I can’t wait to see how it goes.

It is a group project and for this friday we are going to have a concept document done with our chosen subject. We decided to tackle the situation for homeless people. We also discussed which focus our board game should have, the homeless’ perspective or the organisations that try and help them. It was decided to be the organisations perspective.

I think that it could have been interesting to build it in the perspective of the homeless, at least trying to convey the hopelessness and despair that one could feel when trying to survive day by day without some sort of security. If the player’s felt like that when playing the game I would have felt accomplished 😀

I will update this when we have done more on the project.

Board Game System Meeting

Yesterday, we had our first group meeting discussing our board game system that we are going to make.

We decided on our aesthetic goal for it. We wanted the player to experience different emotions of excitement, intense competition and an element of strategy.

I get excited about the challenge in meeting those requirements in the game and I hope that we will be able to make it happen.

When we had discussed the aesthetic goal that we wanted to achieve then we moved on to a system. We went back to the system that we had created earlier during the course which was a system with cards that had different colours on them and numbers. We thought about integrating this into a movement system.

We decided that for this week we were going to make something playable with this movement system and we planned to meet up another day and discuss it further.

Below is a sample picture of our system that we made:

We plan to keep most of it but tweak it so that it represents the ideas that we have in mind.

Game Jam: Doom’s Date

A couple of days ago we had a game jam at our university. In a game jam usually you get words and you have to create a game containing those words. The words that were given to us was “Everyday” and “Doom”. We had 7 hours to complete this game using game maker, we decided pretty quickly about something that we thought was doable during that short period. We decided to make a dating game where the player had to win the heart of Dr. Doom. 
Art: Spader7

It was greatly appreciated at the show floor and we won the prize for best interpretation of the words. 😀 Because of the fact that we had to cut a lot of content some of us decided to continue and make it better using Unity instead of Game maker. I will update as the project progresses 🙂

We have begun to work out the dialogue tree and hopefully it will work out great 😀

A Reflection of System Analysis

Let me tell you a story.

Once upon a time there were 2 board games and 1 role-playing game that wanted to be analysed. They wanted to be broken down into their tiniest pieces and then they wanted to know what their systems were. The biggest box Setty was confident in his systems and he feared no one.
– I have a wonderful system that brings shame on others!
Ani said in response:
– I have more cards than you’ll ever have!
Fias just watched them and rolled her eyes.
– I have no limit and I will never tell the same story twice.

At that both Setty and Ani looked depressed and never uttered another word about their own superiority.

Okay so that was a good story 😛 (The games were: The Settlers of Catan, Anima-shadow of omega and Fiasco)

Analysing a system is no easy task, finding their weaknesses, strengths and breaking the games down to find their core. Using MDA (Mechanics, Dynamics, Aesthetics) to analyse is a good way to understand systems. However, breaking systems down into Objects, properties, behaviours and relationships gives a clear picture how things are connected and how they work together at least according to me :). That is because I haven’t grasped MDA fully.

I must confess that I feel as though there is an enormous amount of more intricate things to learn about systems and it is something that I want to learn more about.

A Serious Problem for Serious Games

It’s been a while since I wrote in this blog but it has been a couple of busy weeks. So I’ll give you an update on what I have done and what’s coming.

The problem for serious games that I decided to do was Global Warming. It was a big problem but I felt that the focus on global warming has decreased in late years. That is because I remember it when it was all over the news and everywhere and then it vanished from news and I think that it would be good to get the focus back on it. I do know that it could still be a hot subject in certain areas but in the public eyes or rather my eyes it has vanished.

I thought that global warming could be a good subject for a serious game. The one idea I got in mind is that you control the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and depending on what you do it will increase/decrease and you could integrate the suggested solutions. As with all games it would take some work to make this a playable game but it would certainly be interesting if you could make it work.