Final Evaluation

My evaluation for this unit is that I am finally aware of how much pressure I put myself under when I leave things until the last minute. Instead of leaving myself time to do and finish things up to the best of my ability, I wait and then do everything half way thinking ‘This will do’. That kind of mentality has followed me all my life and it hasn’t stopped yet.

I have also realised how difficult it is for me to write down my thought processes and keep a journal of my work. I do the majority of my work in my head, which means that I fixate on early concepts and struggle to explore them fully. I find writing my reflective journal extremely difficult, despite the fact that I don’t struggle with the tasks we’re given and I’m competent enough at the practical work we do in workshops.

The content of the year has not being extremely difficult content, but has been challenging me far more in terms of my organisation. The projects we are set have such amorphous deadlines and seem simple enough to me that I put them off so far that when it comes time to do them I found I’ve left myself with a very large stack of time-consuming projects that even though they aren’t extremely difficult to complete, take up enough time that I end up doing them all half-way.

Similarly, I also wish I’d more taken into account the scope of this project. The game I set out to create in September I now hate and despise, and I after I hand in my work I will scrap it and never look back. This is probably an overreaction and a combination of my own frustration at my lack of work ethic and the fact that no-one likes their own first ideas, even though they seem great at the time. This is another example of my being far too much inside my own head, as I feel that if I’d have shared my ideas of the game during it’s creation I would have learnt earlier if the idea could be rescued and how, instead of realising it over the Christmas holidays and immediately regretting being born.

A heavy sticking point in this project has been the business plan. I’ve struggled a lot with it as I have no real idea of what to do with it but if there’s something I hate slightly less than my own lack of motivation, it’s asking for help.

I am looking forward to working on the next project as I feel like I work better in a group that has leadership and direction – whether I am the one providing that or not. On my own I tend to flounder in ideas and I don’t have the mental pressure to get myself to do something, even if it really matters to me. However, letting down other people in my group is a much different guilt, and I’ve found it motivates me a lot more, not to mention I get inspired from their ideas as well. I don’t know if I’ve done well enough to get a decent grade, but I will be more than happy to put BA2a behind me and try to learn from my mistakes.

Game Jam: Summary

The game jam was a lot of fun, and also a great example of the ability a group has to create a viable, workable prototype in such a short space of time. The idea of scope and delegation were big themes in our group, as I think our idea was not weighted correctly for the project.

Our group decided on a mechanically complex and visually interesting game, but our team dynamics were made up of 60% 3D modellers, which I think would have made us more successful if we’d had less of a focus on mechanics and more on the assets themselves. I believe I could have done a better job if I’d have focused on supporting the strengths of our group rather than taking the role of implementer for all of the assets and having to juggle both that and the development of the mechanics for the game as well.

Nevertheless, it was very fun and an amazing opportunity. I found my group excellent and easy to work with, and I would happily work on other projects with them.

Blog Task: Week 8

How would you scare a player with a mechanic in an ordinary everyday workplace/domestic context?

I find more effective than jump-scares, chases, or an unconquerable enemy, an overwhelming sense of dread can be more much horrifying in the right context. Creating a fear of the unknown is useful and easy when paired with a situation in which the player expects to feel safe and secure. The notion of something being not quite right, the noise one might hear that you don’t recognise, or the feeling of being watched. As mechanics, creating this sense of dread can come by the player anticipating something scary or the slow introduction of scary things at a pace that catches the player off guard. Something seemingly innocuous, like the computer freezing for a moment or the mouse not responding, or even accidentally typing a letter you didn’t mean to type can add up into a ‘ghost in the machine and it’s trying to strangle me’ kind of scenario, creating a pervasive feeling of mistrust.

How would you create a ‘ludic’ joke? Sketch out a concept for an in-game joke involving mechanics, assets or self-referential humour?

Something easy like an in-joke to do with gaming terminology. A spelling element that spells LAG or PING or something. Simple but effective.

Something social media related that references an event or well-known occurrence. Runs the risk of being dated past the point of being funny.

Hypocritical humour. Having your paladin in full armour shivering because of the cold, but the scantily-clad female ranger has a fur lined bikini so she’s fine.

4th wall breaks and in-game references. Calling out the player for trying to seduce an NPC by saying this isn’t a BioWare game. Deadpool style.

Blog Task: Week 6

Decide on your mini essay game: How does this game play with the affordances of its medium?

Plague Inc. is heavily themed and therefore can appear under the banner of an Ameritrash boardgame style, however the use of strategy required in the game may not allow for such a clear categorisation of the game to be drawn. Plague Inc. has frames a global pandemic as a strategic opportunity for the player – creating this dissonance between the player’s actions and what they are causing, as the objective is to infect the entire human population with a pathogen you design and mutate throughout the game.

I want to explore the way the game strips the player’s responsibility for their actions from them, preventing them from feeling bad or getting disenchanted with the game due to guilt. I also want to examine the game through the lens of a board game to see whether it’s medium of a digital game may have some impact in creating this dissonance between the player and their actions.

Week 8, summary

Last week we had the final week of play-testing, and then hand-in was Monday 12th. I eventually got the Enum/Struct working with help from George, and was able to figure out a few more bits to help the game make sense. The inventory is still janky, but there’s not much I can do, I just have to keep needling at it to get it to work, it’s not an obvious fix. 

Hand-in went okay, I only had the bare-bones of a journal to show George, so I just put up what I could and explained the rest. The pitch doc wasn’t truncated enough, a downside of using Prezi, so now I need to rejig that into 6 slides that work enough on their own that I could show them to a person and they would understand my game (but without being too wordy, right?).

My game decided to flop as I was displaying it so that was fun, but luckily it was a small enough bug that it didn’t matter a lot and George has seen enough of my game to know how I was doing. 

The journal was the big let-down, I have so many notes but none of them are in the WordPress so there was no actual evidence of engagement what with me being behind on Merlin’s blog tasks (in that I forgot they existed, oops). George passed me with the requiem that I update the blog with all my notes during reading week, which is totally do-able in normal circumstances, but I have to strong and horrible feeling that I’m working nearly everyday that week (spoilers, I was right).

I did enough to not be in immediate danger, now the 750 word essay for Merlin. This went well, I researched enough and had sources that supported my argument. I feel I may have weaved a little between the topic of wider contexts and subverting/conforming to conventions for my question, but hopefully that wasn’t to obvious/disconcerting, and I managed to keep on track enough for my essay to be somewhat coherent. 

I had to take a lot of out of it to get within the word count though, I ended up being somewhere around 100-150 words over even after preliminary editing. 

Week 7, summary.

We had two weeks of delivery on play-testing instead of Skills Dev session of the friday so we can focus as much on our games as possible. I’m struggling with the Enums and Structs thing for the bottle collectables, getting them to work with my inventory how I planned is eating heavily into my play-testing time. The lectures/delivery on play-testing was very useful though, it was intriguing to see examples of the different stages and development cycles big games go through. So much of this seems to me like ‘notes for the future’, like I need to remember this stuff for when I work in a company once I’ve graduated or something, I don’t know how much of it is applicable to making a tiny mobile game by yourself?

If I knew in Year 9 I would eventually have to use Excel again, I probably would have given up on technology. It’s so clunky and disgusting, and I wish I could just make a Word doc to fill out, but Excel it is for collecting data (which I understand but dislike). I don’t know what makes me hate it so much, but it’s probably in large part to the fact that I can’t quite remember how to use it properly, and also that I’m not quite at the play-testing stage still.

Merlin’s final seminar on games as toys was unremarkable, in so much as it was interesting but I have no idea what to do with the information. The lecture was much more practical, essay tips and planning which I’m sure I am going to use when writing the actual 750 words, which has come upon me very quickly and I really need to get a move on to the library. The main issue being, however, the next few days are – as ever – booked solid with other work, and every hour I’m not working, I’m sleeping. And I need to finish the game.

Week 6, summary

Last week of prototyping before our official play-testing section begins. I remember hoping that I would finish prototyping early enough to get an extra week of play-testing. Now I’m wondering if I’ll finish prototyping enough to get even one week of play-testing. At this point, the issue isn’t even that the game can’t be play-tested, but that I feel like there’s nothing in the game to test. The collectables work, but the game is still sailing. It still feels to me like the game is empty, so I have to try and fill it before people can play and see if it’s any good. This mentality makes no sense, George said today it’s ‘never too early to play-test’ but I’ve yet to feel like that’s true. At least, from what I can see, the others in the class aren’t necessarily in a much different position to me. I hated that about last year, that so many people seemed to know what they were doing and I didn’t.

The hippo game is finally done! I really enjoyed working on it, I wish I’d’ve picked something similar for my own game this term. Despite the fact that mechanically my game couldn’t really be simpler, I hate that I still feel I’ve got so much left to do. The game is too abstract.

George brought a lecturer in from the Games Dev course to talk to us, and he really helped me with the collectables idea. I was using Enums so far because it’s what I was introduced to through the Hippo game and they’ve worked for the most part, but now I’m going to look at Data Tables and Structs, and see if I can use some of these to alter my blueprints, hopefully without replacing them all. This is also making me feel a little better about how empty the game is.

This weeks lecture was on games as toys, or intractable objects. I didn’t understand most of it. I’m still struggling to decide on a game and subject combo to pick for the mini-essay, I wanted to wait until I’d had all the lectures. Next week I’m going to the library to research a little about a couple of topics to see if I can find something decent to write 750 words about. Oddly enough, the big 3000 word essay in February feels easier to write for at this point.

Blog Task: Week 5

Take your example game for the mini essay:

How inclusive is it of differently able players, do they make assumptions about the player’s body-type or exclude those with certain disabilities?

How does the meaning of your games change when they are played competitively or by a speed-runner?

 

Plague Inc. doesn’t require a lot in terms of physical capabilities from the player. It does, however, have some. For one, the mobile and PC version require that the player have the physical and mental means to operate said devices, and both version contain what essentially amount to quick-time events. These are the bubbles that the player gets as rewards for their disease spreading, mutating and otherwise progessing in the game.

The game is difficult to complete without popping these bubbles before they shrink away, as these give you the points necessary to upgrade your pathogen. In terms, of competitive play, Plague Inc. doesn’t recieve much outside of typical high score boards.

Speedrunning Plague Inc. however, has led to some interesting discoveries. There’s a specific pattern to follow to complete the game in as little time as possible, the first of which is picking your country of origin. It quickly became obvious that there was one country best to start in, and even completing the game at a high-enough level was near impossible unless you did pick it. In this sense, speed-runners helped to bring awareness to specific tactics in the game necessary to progressing further, not just per level but throughout the player’s experience.

Week 5, summary.

Week 2 of prototyping and I feel like I’m doing well and simultaneously nothing at all. I’m working on mechanics that feel like fluff, but there’s really not much else in the game to work on, so I’m doing what I can. The collectables have morphed into something actually useful though. Figuring out a Message in a Bottle thing has been fun and actually makes me feel like I’m doing something. Increasingly, I forget I’m doing a university course and every moment feels like a waste of time.

The hippo game is fun, and feels useful, the mechanics are very much like Ella’s game and it’s great to think she can use a lot of this. I wish now that I’d done something 2D, why do I keep giving myself 3D mechanics to work with. Next time, next time…

Merlin’s seminar about theme parks was very interesting, and got me thinking a lot about horror games. They have a weird parallel with parks as both require the player’s attention to specific elements in order to progress and gain the full experience. Funnily enough, I thought of Resident Evil 7, which was the same game that Merlin used as an example, so maybe I was on the right path? I should have made a horror game.

The lecture on games as sports aka. the history of basketball, was very entertaining and somehow also very weird. I wasn’t quite sure what to do with the information, but I have notes to look back on and that’s something.

I have to keep trying to get this game to work.

Blog Task: Week 4

How would you make a modern theme park sim or management game? Blue sky: an endless runner, or maybe a post-apocalyptic strategy game?

Something inspired by games like Kerbal Space Program, Elite Dangerous, Subnautica, Oxygen not Included, Cities: Skylines, Caesar III. Something space and resources management related, but mission-based so the player doesn’t feel overwhelmed with the task ahead. A free-play and mission mode, for more comfortable and experienced players.

The player is given an overview of basic world building controls and their objective, then is left to figure out the best/most efficient way to get to the milestone. This may be a population milestone, a city/base expansion milestone, a resource milestone, anything depending on the mission.

The missions take longer and get harder every time, and start combining milestones later on; the player must have a stable colony of 25000 and also provisions to hold another 30000. The player must support two separate colonies, one planet-bound and one ship bound of a combined population of 30000, but the ship can hold a maximum of 12000.