Today’s plan:
- Homework: Game Design Discussion Post / Mechanics and Inspiration
- Thursday: Usability testing project
- Kiele and Jordan from Armada Games
Game Design Discussion Post
Hi all, I’ve put a discussion forum on Canvas to help you begin to form groups and develop your concepts for a game. In Thursday’s class, I’ll ask you to form groups and lay out what I want you to accomplish while I am gone next week. Additionally, we’re going to develop a usability test for an assignment I’m developing asking you to test the effectiveness of game instructions (which will serve as a precursor to you developing your own instructions and testing the instructions of your classmates).
In your discussion post, you should address some (or all) of the following. Note that you are encouraged to respond to each other’s posts with ideas:
- Basic Mechanics: is this a dice game? A card game? A guessing game? A rock-paper-scissors game? A physical reflex game? What are the two to three things a player might do on a turn? BEWARE CONES OF DUNSHIRE.
- Inspiration: Are you transforming an old Atari game into a board game? qom84″>Or making a video game genre into a card game? De-Americraping a standard game (say restructuring Battleship to include more information or decisions, or making Clue into a collaborative interpretive guessing game)? What if you made Poker into a spaceship battle game? Or made a game in which somebody has to guess something about themselves? Are you taking an existing game that works and proposing a significant change? Are you designing a game around a historic event or a movie?
- Skin: Let me stress that this is the least important part of the game. What makes a game work is its mechanics. But you might want to be thinking about the universe or concept at this point, too. Since we are working on projects that could end up on Kickstarter, I will encourage you to stay away from copyrighted intellectual property–but there’s plenty of ways to work around this
I am looking forward to hearing your ideas! I’m going to be asking you to prototype your game in a few weeks, so while I want you to think big, I also want you to be realistic about what you can accomplish in 3 weeks (we need workable prototypes, with instructions, by Nov. 17th!)
Let’s Play Some Games!
