So, I’m doing Ian Schreibers online “Game Design Concepts” course. It’s been great so far, and I’m learning quite a lot. This is a post that I’ll keep updating throughout the Game Design Concepts course, just so I can keep track of my work easily. I may split it up into multiple posts or pages, if need be.

Main course links

Blog: http://gamedesignconcepts.wordpress.com/

Forum: http://gamedesignconcepts.aceboard.com/index.php?login=336227

Wiki: http://gamedesignconcepts.pbworks.com/

Twitter hashtag: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23GDCU

My work

(These assignments are completed in a set time, and are generally early prototypes in need of further playtesting and development to become decent games. Some are experiments that are unlikely to ever become decent games … while others may be developed further in the future)

Level 1 Challenge: http://gamedesignconcepts.pbworks.com/Race-Game

Level 3 Challenge: http://gamedesignconcepts.aceboard.com/336227-2700-1245-0-Simpson-Abdul-thier-Donkeys.htm

Level 4 Challenge: http://gamedesignconcepts.aceboard.com/336227-3124-1566-0-Battle-board-game.htm

Level 5 Challenge: TBC. Make a rule change to the dice game Bluff to eliminate the positive feedback loop (which comes about due to the information assymetry between winning player and losing players).

Level 6 Challenge: TBC

Some  notes on some ‘art game’ playings:

• Passage: Mechanic reminds me of Ico (Playstation2) – your movement is restricted by your NPC partner which must follow you (potentially a dead weight, although one you aparrently don’t mind, indicated by the little love heart upon meeting). Aesthetic/Surface, despite being ‘lowfi’, reminds me of the feel of Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon”, particularly the track Breathe. Damn you artists for making use think about inevitable things we can’t change and don’t want think about !

Level 7 Challenge: Make a modification to the simple card game “War” to add some interesting decisions. http://gamedesignconcepts.aceboard.com/336227-4682-2357-0-Counter-attack.htm

Level 8 Challenge: Create a concept for a game that is built to appeal specifically to griefers (ie player killers in MUD terms, campers or teamkillers in FPS terms). My notes are here. I never posted these to the official forum since it’s still a bit of a ramble and needs refinement – I couldn’t bear to subject the other course participants to actually wading through the text, but it’s posted here anyhow just in case you have precious time to kill (yeh right ).

Level 9 Challenge: Create an embedded backstory for the game “Pente“. What is the setting? What do the pieces represent? Why are you placing them? Attempt to make the backstory that fit the mechanics. TBC.

Level 11 Challenge: Brainstorm ideas (over 48 hours) for a board game, post the best three. This is the beginning of a month long design project. At the “Easy” green circle level, the game ideas cannot include the overused roll-to-move mechanic, and cannot be a trivia game or trading card game (eg Magic: The Gathering style) due to the time consuming nature of producing content for those types of game. http://gamedesignconcepts.aceboard.com/336227-5708-2723-0-Commuter-Turn-based-tactics-mother-Seat-pants.htm .

This is a scratchpad for some game design analysis vocabulary from the Game Designs Concept course. I’ll continue to update it throughout the course … it’s simply a place I can go to remind myself of good terminology to use.

MDA

(from Hunicke, LeBlanc and Zubek, MDA: A Formal Approach To Game Design and Game Research)

Mechanics, Rules, “core mechanics”, (Struture in McCloud terminology).

Aethetics (Surface in McCloud terminology).

Dynamics (closest to “Craft” in McCloud terminology).

Other

Objectives, Goals

Genre (Idiom in McCloud terminology).

Setup / Progression (game loop) / Resolution (”Winning condition”)

• Mario Kart Wii
• Guitar Hero World Tour (Wii)
• My Brute (Somewhat embarassing. The tab is just left open in my browser, and I click Fight from time to time …)
• Trails 2 - a neat little motorcross game I bought on Steam. Free Flash ‘trial version’ here.
• Wario’s Woods (Wii Virtual Console) – one of the greatest two-player puzzle games I’ve played. It gets revisited now and again.

Two links I found interesting:

Playing Counter Strike and Call of Duty 4 can improve visual perception of contrast

ABC Australia is funding the production of Serious Games

And a random extra; there have been a number of hyped-up articles about small-time developers making it big with iPhone games recently. A few of the Ludum Dare regulars have been among them. Here’s another one of those stories, closer to home – local Melbourne developer Firemint has apparently had some success with Flight Control. Good for them ! I have no real numbers, but I’d say for every successful iPhone game, there are one hundred or more that never make enough money to break even (assuming the developers makes games for paid work, with real costs, taking wages etc). It’s no doubt a tough market to crack – glad to see some Aussies getting a piece of the action.

Well, it’s not an official entry, since it’s way too late. You can see what I was trying to achieve here and here. Essentially, I was attempting to entertain myself in the boring parts of a plane flight from Rome to Melbourne, via Hong Kong, by making my Ludum Dare entry. Various problems, mainly to do with finding working laptop power, prevented me from submitting it by the deadline.

This is the product of about two laptop battery charges (~2.5 hours), and one hour to polish, fix the odd bug and package .. so in total it’s about a ~6 hour game. It’s based on the garbage compactor scene from a particular space opera that had it’s heyday in the late 70’s and early 80’s. You could imagine it was one of the ideas that was considered, then discarded, before the early arcade developers went “Nah, we should do a 3D X-Wing game with vector graphics. That would be much cooler”.

You are the (inexplicably) green hero. You play with the arrow keys. You move bits of junk (grey) such that you can jam the compactor before it crushes you. Some bits of junk (white), are too large to move. There is only one level and no sound.

Play it here (Java applet, requires the Java plugin that you most likely already have installed).