Games Design (Unit 65)

Thursday, 7 December 2017

How Did The Paper Mock-Up Go?

Practically, it went well. The pieces were all manipulated as imagined in the plan, the title screen going in to gameplay was seamless. No pieces broke or were damaged in production, and the multiple takes meant we got better at doing it as we recorded, and therefore produced a higher quality piece. There were a few problems though. The sheer amount of moving parts and lack of extraneous limbs meant that the amount of pieces used (in this case the zombie horde volumes and bullets fired) had to be kept lower than they would be in game simply due to the small scale of the mock up. There was a technical issue too; I forgot to focus the camera on the scene properly, meaning the footage recorded was a bit blurry. Nothing too bad, what was going on was still clearly shown, just not as clearly as it could've been. Oh! and the pieces in the mock up moved slowly and sluggishly as a pose to the game, which was designed to be fast paced

What have we learned from the mock up? While the paper to game comparison has its own problems, we learned quite a bit. For starters, the game itself might have a bit too high of a scale. Not in workload, but in the literal amount of things we are trying to show on a single screen. The idea was to have large hordes of zombies, but this might cause serious performance issues with the volumes we had intended to go for here. We will have to greatly consider performance when we develop the game, especially since the fast pace doesn't leave much room for error, and the game may become unplayable at later rounds.

Friday, 10 November 2017

Games as Inspiration - Hey, Who Turned Out The Lights

Mechanics

Devil's Tuning Fork
This game is one that plays around with the ideas of visibility. The main character of the game is blind, and uses a tuning fork to perform an echolocation-style daredevil-esque visibility mechanic. Every second or so the character can chime the tuning fork, which send a wave of lines out that reflect off of objects in the environment, allowing a sort of visibility. This game was fun because of that core mechanic; it made the game feel constantly tense as anything could be hiding just beyond the waves of visibility your character sends out.

Silent Hill 2
Silent Hill 2 really is a game that made use of its limitations. The PS2 wasn't as powerful as the Silent team needed it to be to render the environments how they wanted it to, so they just did it anyway and covered the whole game in a thick layer of fog and cranked the render distance down, restricting visibility to a few meters in every direction. This created a constant feel of oppression coming not from the enemies that could lurk but from the town itself; it made the environment feel hostile and that it didn't want you there. This atmosphere is what made Silent Hill 2 great; and what could elevate our game too.

Fran Bow
Half insane traumatised little girl whose parents were murdered is in an insane asylum, and the meds she got given to help with her psychedelic episodes did exactly the opposite; induced them. This created a sort of duel worlds mechanics where the player could drug up to change the environment and the things they could interact with, helping with puzzles and allowing the player to move to new areas. Using these meds was very often horrifying; as environments turn from normal - as normal as a psychological game can get, that is - to blood-wretched terrifying. This added a feel of trepidation to using the meds, but since it was necessary in some cases, it gave a weight to their use. This could be incorporated in our game as some grizzly environment design could add another layer of reasons to not light up.

Theme/ Flavour

Knock Knock
This is a game that confuses. The story is kept vague in that sort of incredibly artsy way, filled with metaphor. The art style is the very paper craft that I wished my own game to be inspired from, and the constant feel of being hunted and having to put yourself against the games monsters - by having to explore the whole house and light up each room - to get the better endings and more of the story makes the game feel so oppressing and manipulative. I know this is the theme category but I still need to mention the prominence of a light/darkness mechanic; you need to turn the lights on in every room to get more story but you can't see monsters when the lights are on; allowing them to sneak up on you. It gives a definitive feeling of dread to the light that is unmatched by other games featuring such mechanics or features.

Nightmare Ned
This is a more obscure title - but its in the dark sides of the internet that the truly horrible stuff surfaces. Things that can happen in the game: being strapped to a giant roulette wheel which dictates what organs a deranged scientist will add or remove; a platform level where you have to traverse your own broken, damaged mouth. The art style as well; reminiscent of games such as Don't starve or a really demented Professor Layton.

[screenshots being dicks right now!]

Detention
Detention is a game about monsters. Both the monsters of South Korean tradition, and the monsters we become under pressure - using a 60s South Korean setting. The art style too; its all just off in subtle ways that add so much vividness to the fear the game invokes. The use of South Korean monsters - creatures practically untouched by English media - makes the game just that more terrifying because of the unfamiliarity and cultural distance these creatures have.

Non-Video-Game Media

Nameless song
Nameless song is a track from the Dark Souls soundtrack - in fact its the song that plays over the credits. It may be unorthodox to reference a piece of music in game design, but games feature music and song can invoke feelings as good as any other medium. Anyway, the track may as well be the epitome of the whole Souls series; it fills the listener with an incredible feeling of emptiness and hollowness.

Mortal Engines
This book is set in a post-nuclear world in which what cities survived attached giant tracks and wheels to themselves and drove around the wasteland consuming smaller cities to grow itself and gain resources. The book was written on the dawn of steampunk and features many of its predominant themes - including the feel of being but a spec in a world far larger than you that neither needs nor relies on you. This feel is something I wanted to capture; the constant reminder that the world doesn't care about you; that you are but a fly buzzing around a world too big for you to ever understand.

London - By William Blake
Yep, I'm a literary nerd. Well, sort of not really; this was handed out in Creative Writing class. Whatever, it doesn't matter where I got it from. London is a poem that follows a man as they walk through the streets of London, highlighting all the abhorrent sights he sees: the 'cherter'd Thames', the 'Mind forg'd manacles' of the people he passes by. It all highlights how society entraps us, something that this game could touch on in its themes.

Friday, 3 November 2017

03/11/2017

Three Lessons From Cuphead

Pacing
Pacing is an incredibly important thing in game design. Cuphead has been designed with an incredible focus on pacing and controlling the speed the player can move through the level at. If no enemies respawned at regular intervals, a player could move through the level slowly, dealing with the threats and effectively reducing the difficulty at the cost of fun and enjoyment. Leaving a negative reward system like this in would be bad design; so Cuphead has several design decisions devoted to keeping the levels threat apparent and constant; pushing the player towards the end quickly. It has enemies that respawn at regular intervals (the first levels sunflowers), it has certain enemies that can be merely knocked down as a pose to killed (the blueberry/slime/waterdrop enemies), it has enemies that simply cannot be killed (the... helicopter plants? that come out of the pits), and even respawning non-enemy threats that shadow the player (the first levels acorn enemies).

The Effect Of Mechanics
You have to be aware of what mechanics and design mean or the effect they would have in the game. For the Cuphead example; it has an incredibly cluttered design. Enemies are everywhere, parts of the scenery move, projectiles move slowly bullet hell style, its a mess. But this is a purposeful mess. The cluttered design was intentionally engineered by the creators because they knew that the sort of experience they wanted to craft required the player to fail, fail, fail again. They knew a cluttered design would make it difficult to focus on all the threats, so they played it up, dressed it up and rolled with it. Now, i'm not saying 'make bad decisions so long as you know what it'll do', but simply highlighting how important it is to understand how each mechanic, design choice or element influences play and how you could use that to create a better experience for the player.

Balancing Multiplayer
One of the constant difficulties of game design is how to balance the amount of participating players to the difficulty of a PVE (player vs environment) environment. Some games simply decide to watch the player struggle, some games modulate the difficulty dynamically (Borderlands 2), some games just stick you with a half-braindead AI companion (Resident Evil 5, for one of many, many examples).

Cuphead has a frankly brilliant way of dealing with the issue; they don't change the levels or difficulty one bit, they simply make the other player a threat. Now, I don't mean the sort of grief-enabling systems that games such as the 'lego' series provides, but I mean in a sense relating to the visual design. As I've said, the visual design is exceedingly cluttered and busy; everything happens at once and if you're not paying attention then its going to kill you. Well, having another player bouncing around the screen, shooting rapid fire projectiles constantly just adds to the visual discourse. When I was playing it in the lesson, I kept finding myself confusing which of the Cup/Mug brothers (or I guess it would be the 'Man' brothers, if their names are anything to go by) I was controlling, just for a second, and I cannot help but feel that this was an intentional effect of multiplayer.

Moodboard Of Endless Games (Or Single Level Games)