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IGB220 Assignment 3 - Playtesting

My role within the group was that of conducting the playtests. I found this to be an overall enjoyable and informative experience that further adds to the appeal of playtesting, as well as giving me extra experience within it, conducting playtesting in a more professional manner. I believe this will be a very valuable skill and look forward to utilizing it further in the future. Our testers were all experienced and generally had a similar testing outcome. Found the same bugs, hit the same snags etc. We were able to quite easily identify problems within the game, including some that we hadn't noticed ourselves during early look overs we did ourselves.

Overall it was a good experience and our group conducted the tests well.

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Racing game Elevator Pitch

Stable panic (placeholder name) A racing game in which you play a horse trying to escape it's handlers. Outrun the other horses and dodge the handlers and reach victory! left and right arrow keys to shift side to side, A and D keys as alternatives. Spacebar to jump Unique selling points: Jump over obstacles, avoid enemies, time limit to reach the end

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Assignment 2 - finalized onesheet/onepage

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Asteroids Elevator Pitch

Asteroids Elevator pitch

A static asteroids experience in which your player character cannot move, instead needing to shoot down enemy projectiles and enemies as they come towards you, all the while trying to shoot moving upgrades in an attempt to gain new abilities.

Controls: Wasd or mouse to aim, click to shoot. Perhaps spacebar for extra abilities

3 Unique Selling points:

Immovable character

moving upgrades you have to shoot to gain new abilities

Shootable enemy projectiles

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Gdevelop - Platformer postmortem

Fiddling around further with the platformer led to me adding some more enemies and platformers, nothing particularly complicated just getting the hang of messing about with the engine. Aside of that I altered the gravity, max speed and jump speed to add a more fluid and responsive feeling jump with more agility and speed.

Overall I had to rush through due to external constraints, however I enjoyed working through and attempting to make the jumping mechanic feel a bit more fluid and responsive. It's a far cry from what my pitch was though I'm happy how responsive the mechanic feels.

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Gdevelop - Initial thoughts and platformer ideas

I started off with Gdevelop in the first workshop, running through some basics and made a basic level. This was in a uni computer lab so I was unable to save it and have since not had the time to continue making anything new. As such this post will mostly just cover my initial thoughts on the engine and some potential ideas for a prototype. Overall as someone who is both not very programming savvy and not very tech savvy in general, Gdevelop seems like a solid starting point to begin my next steps into actually making games. It's simplistic nature makes it both easy to start off in and get the hang of, aswell as interesting to try and make something within the constraints. Often times people see such constraints as a downside, however I try and view it as a challenge to see how far you can push the engine or how creative you can be in solving the problem. I'll definitely be using it outside of class time in an attempt to start mocking up basic prototypes to get the hang of such concepts and ideas before shifting to something more high end like unity or unreal. While I ran out of time, an idea I was tinkering with was just a simple platformer with hopefully a bit extra speed, aswell as danger in the form of enemies that can't be killed. I'm not a big platformer player so I generally don't know if this is a common idea or an extremely bad one, I hope to create a basic mockup and undergo some testing amongst either classmates or people outside uni over the weekend and make a future blog post about the results.

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Fullerton readings

The readings provoke some interesting thoughts about the nature of game design. The "playcentric" approach seems like an excellent method for design, allowing designers (and the team as a whole) to iterate upon feedback and narrow in what will make their game great, rather than taking a shot in the dark and hoping for the best. I appreciate the phrasing of 'the designer is to be an advocate for the player'. As they mention it's very easy to get lost in making a world or a story that's just the one you want to see and it's good to have a reminder that you're here for the players, not just yourself. I also like the highlight and focus on playtesting (both in the readings and in the unit itself) as it relates back to experiences I've had in the professional web design world aswell as in a previous unit in the degree, in which we started off with an app that we thought was fine only to have it mostly shot down when we did some testing with potential userbase. Given our current gaming world of games being released buggy messes or even unplayable playtesting seems more important than ever yet also ignored more than ever and it shows painfully with some of the bigger releases as of late. It's an interesting thought to compare designing a game to being the host of a party, a way I've never looked at it before. It once again helps separate from the 'I'm making this for me' mindset that's very easy to fall into with design and would be a good analogy to use to keep yourself on track.

I attempted to try out exercise 1.1: Become a tester but ran out of time before being able to get another friend to play a game. The game I played was dying light, and given it's one of my favourites it was interesting to try and take a step back and be critical. Some of my thoughts were the interesting but rather slowly paced initial start to the game, where you see this vast open world but are relatively locked in at first, unable to explore it as you'd like. I believe I understand why it was like this, to try and give you time to adjust and prepare, though on repeat runs it's a bit of a slog. Another thought is the weird initial combat. You start out being able to oneshot a zombie, then on several early quests you do plenty of damage and can make your way through them easily. However immediately after, almost jarringly so, it begins taking your entire stamina bar and sometimes more to kill even a basic zombie. It remains this way for a reasonable while and then it flips to the other extent, killing most zombies in a single pass again like at the start. I believe this may have been to try and force you into using your environment and equipment to deal with zombies, but it ends up feeling frustrating and jarring rather than a 'oh yeah I need to try something else'. This is made worse by the fact that other equipment (such as consumables) doesn't really do a great deal outside of a few particular examples, and others that are decent also have downsides in the form of noise that attracts fast and dangerous zombies. Overall it's my first time really trying to look at a game from a critical 'playtesting' perspective so I felt a bit unsure on what other things to comment on and look out for, I hope future posts will improve! Overall the readings thus far have improved and changed the way I look at design, since I'm the first to admit I often continue to fall into the trap of designing something for 'me' rather than for the players. I hope to continue to improve on this and other areas brought up in the readings, like teamwork and communications.

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Elevator Pitch - Platformer

A rapid pace, high maneuverability challenging platformer. Player has to perform challenging jumps and tricks at a high pace to beat the level before the timer ticks down and they have to start the level over again. Basic controls would be along the lines of standard wasd keys, spacebar to jump and double jump, most likely a dash of some kind with shift. Capability to rebind keys too. 3 unique selling points: Rapid pace, high maneuverability and a time limit.

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Intro

Hi, I'm Jacob Stevenson and I'm studying to become a game designer! I'm primarily interested in the design and narrative side of making games, with a lesser interest in programming though I intend to become competent enough at it to be a more useful member of a team and have a better understanding of how to create different aspects of games. My aims studying this unit (and course overall) are to gain a better understanding of the design process for video games and develop new skills to achieve the capability to make my own games. I'm formerly a web designer and it's interesting to see what skills transfer over and what is entirely new about the different medium. I love games and have played them for as long as I can remember and would like to give back in a manner of speaking, hopefully creating new experiences for new players. I'm mostly interested in more story focused games, with an emphasis on player-choice that have various outcomes and consequences. Current games I'm playing include total war warhammer 3, war thunder, deeprock galactic and dying light.