Scared and amazed

Last week I took a trip out to Thorpe Park for the day. I was looking forward to the SAW licened rides and the atmosphere as I haven't been to a large theme park in a while and rollercoasters are a big passion of mine.
The day went fantastically with all the rides meeting expectations and especially the Sa Alive horror maze scaring the hell out of me and my family.
What most impressed me however was once it became dark, the whole atmosphere of the park changes due to the fantastic lighting and sound used throught the park. I thought I would post a few pictures to better show what I mean.

 This shows how high the rollercoaster 'Stealth' is (205ft) it just dwarfs everything else around it.

 This is the aptly named 'Tidal Wave' which has the biggest splash pool of all water rides in the UK, lit up at night it is amazing to see.

 This is the 'SAW' rollercoaster, dimly lit to aid with the frightening, operessive feel of the ride

This coaster is called 'Collosus' and this is my favourite picture of the bunch. In the day it looks like any other generic rollercoaster but when the sun goes down the green and red lights really make this stand out in the park.

Game tools to 'hook' the player

We have been reading works recently talking about different tools used in games (FADT's) and certain techniques games designers use to keep the player interested in playing their games for a long length of time.

We looked at things such as Intention which is where the player can analyse the game world and make a plan what to do next. Perceivable Consequence was another thing we looked at which is when the player does something wrong in a game (e.g. dies) they know exactly why that was wrong and how to change what they did before.

We also looked at the idea of how movement impetus (how motivated the player is to continue forward in the game) and the space of possibility (how many possible choices the player can make at any given time) can effect pacing.

For example if you give the player a huge space of possibility then they will take longer to decide their next move and the pacing of the game will drop, or they will make the wrong move but not realise what they did wrong, become frustrated and stop playing, so there is no movement impetus. On the other hand, is the space of possibility is too small then the time it takes for a player to decide their move is shortened, speeding up the pacing, but the player may master the game quicker, being able to instinctively know the best move to make at all times and this may make a game boring fast and therefore they wont continue to play, also halting movement impetus.

The trick seems to be gaging the perfect balance of the space of possibility so that the player never becomes frustrated or bored, but motivated to move on and this can be further increased of the game introduces new mechanics at regular intervals for the player to learn and master which keeps the game feeling fresh at all times.

Iterations

We have been recently looking at the process of iterating a game. This means to tweak the original concept to improve the game in a number of ways. This could be to change the flow of the game, make it more or less challenging, to add the ability for more or less people to play the game or just to make it more fun.

The process of iteration is a simple one, first the designer picks one thing about the game to change, implements that change, tests it either themselves or with others and then evaluates what happened to determine if the change should be kept or dropped. Then they move on to any other iterations they wish to do. This process saves a lot of time and money and is a fast, effective way of prototyping a game because it prevents the designer from committing a lot of effort to one idea only to have it not be worth it in the end.

When looking at my board game concept I designed in the first week, the biggest problem was that there were too many spaces on my board in which there was no effect to the player, this reduced the game down to just the luck of a dice roll which was boring. Therefore the first iteration I made was to shorten the board so that more spaces were interactive, when this was tested it found it made a faster paced and more enjoyable game. The second iteration I made was that since I have shortened the board, that games finished very quickly, because of this I decided to make the players have to get from one end of the board to the other and then back again, effectively doubling the playing time. This seemed to work for the time sense but it also added an unexpected strategic element when players met one another going opposite directions due to my rules on players landing on the same space.

My final iteration was that it was possible to have more than one player finish the game in the winning condition (having the highest life points) so I decided to introduce the element of bonus points for players depending on the order they finished the game (10 for first, 5 for second, etc). This seemed to solve the problem of players finishing on the same points and added another element of trying to get finished first to get the biggest bonus.

New ways of looking at games

Yesterday we took a look at some other ways to consider games. These were Paidea (play for pleasure), Ludus (a game constrained by rules with a clear outcome), Agon (competition), Alea (chance or randomness), Ilinx (movement) and Mimicry (simulation/make-believe/role-play)

Of the many games I have played over the years, most of them have been a mixture of these terms. A game such as 'The Sims' is a very good example of  a paidea game as it is a complete sandbox for the players to do what they wish within it whereas 'Sonic the Hedgehog' was an extremely ludus game moving the player from one world to the next. Recently there has been a trend in the games industry to make games that blend the two together, examples being the recent 'Grand Theft Auto' installments or the 'Saints Row' series. Both of these allow the player freedom as to what they can do and how they can do it in the game space but also have sets of missions which follow a linear path.

All of these games use the other terms stated in one way or another as well. 'The Sims' is entirely a mimicry game, players simulating a whole different life. 'Sonic the Hedgehog' on the other hand would be mostly ilinx with elements of agon due to the fast pace and incentive to beat high-scores. 'GTA' and 'Saints Row' however are fantastic examples on this topic as they again have elements of all of the terms agon, alea, ilinx and mimicry due to the wide range of activities on offer for the player in these games.

A strange sence of achievement

When I started this course the part I was most worried about was the scriptiung elements. Having never had any experience with Flash or any other creation software before I was afraid that it may be too much for me. Well today i have just completed my first code and managed to create a simple animation of two spheres bouncing around and colliding with walls and eachother, although it was hard to get my head around a first, once I grasped it and then saw something I had created bouncing around on screen i was oddly proud of myself and look forward to gaining much more skill and creating bigger and better things in the future.

Picking apart a Key Stage 1 game

We took a look at a shape learning game on the BBC Bitesize website today. We looked at it in terms of interaction, goals, struggle, structure, endogenous meaning and then evaluated the game overall.

We found that the interaction in the game was extremely limited, you chose from three possible shapes but whether you chose correctly or incorrectly, the game state did not change, it either moved to the next question if you were right or reset the question if your were wrong. the other thing that was discussed was that there wasn't any feedback for the player. By this I mean that if the questions were answered wrong, the game didn't explain why you were wrong, which could lead to the game just becoming a guessing game or an exercise in trial and error.

The game had one clear goal, which was to help build a robot, whereas to me this is not a very meaningful or motivational goal, I can see that it would appeal to the target audience of the game (KS1 students) and therefore is a good goal for this game.

In terms of struggle this game fail miserably. In only giving the player a multiple choice question, with no consequences if your answer is incorrect, there is no incentive to really think about the answer, the player may just guess until they get it right, essentially learning nothing and  bypassing the whole point of the game entirely.

The structure has a similar problem, by which I mean that the only guidance given is you have to choose one of three options, two of which will be a wrong answer and give an animation of a character getting electrocuted/blown up. The problem I see with this is that the target audience may find this animation amusing and therefore may intentionally get the wrong answer to see this happen again and again.

For the target audience there is endogenous meaning in this game, the goal of building the robot may be important to children of that age as they want to see what it looks like when finished and are also taught that helping people is good.

For an evaluation i think that this is not a terrible game but it fails in a few key areas as I have stated about. I just get the overall feeling that whoever designed this either ran out of time/money or just got to this point and thought 'meh, that that'll do' which I personally feel no game designer should ever think.

(proof reads this article back.......meh, that'll do)