Posts Tagged game
Vogels!
Posted by Adriaan in game design, game related, games, personal updates on June 6, 2010
Vogels! is a rehabilitation game that helps patients with a hemiplegia recover. The game, or rather the red bird in it, is controlled by a gravity-compensating supportive arm of which its position is tracked and ‘copied’ in-game.
For each new game, the patient calibrates the game to fit the level of impairment of the patient. In-game, the patient flies, following a path, through various parts of the world and grabbing birds.
Vogels! was created for Focal Meditech as a proof of concept by Team KOMODO, five Utrecht School of the Arts students and two Utrecht University students. My role in the team was Game Design and Project Coordination.
Post Mortem: What went right!
- Translating real life mechanics into game mechanics. In essence, we took what the arm offered us, combined it with how the patients would use it and then created the mechanics for our game. The process of taking all the elements and concluding them to what would now be our core game went very smooth, as all decisions seemed very logical thanks to the great base of research we had done.
- The additive process and checkpoints. Every two weeks we had a milestone in which we would have a next version of the game ready. Because we were more or less finishing added features to the game every two weeks too, it was possible to remove 60% of our game just 4 weeks before deadline without any trouble, giving us the opportunity to focus on what was truly important for the game and to prove the concept we had been working on in the past months. Fortunately there was enough room for this hacking and slashing – killing your darlings is painful, but we have to stay realistic!
- Implementing research into game design. Having one designer (read: one guy who takes the final design decisions) on the team that is also the man on the research appeared to work great. Because we did research specifically for game-related information and issues, a lot of data could directly be distilled into our game, e.g. the length of the game, how instructions work, calibrating, role of the therapist, etc.
- External help. There are always people who can do something better than you do. Asking for help is never wrong. I think we were very lucky to have Lies van Roessel as our supervisor as she got us help from all around.
- From exchange student to sound designer. I think none of us even though of Eri, our exchange student from Japan, becoming this good at audio design. She literally started with zero knowledge of audio and music in games and managed to fully equip our game with immersive game sounds and effect which most of them, she recorded herself. She created sound moodboards and already knew in the early phase of the game how it was supposed to sound like. Again, she couldn’t have done it without the external help of audio designer Richard van Tol, who gave her lessons and critique on her audio design.
Post Mortem: What went wrong!
- Scattered group. During the whole project, we had 2 part time programmers. If you have ever made a video game, you know where most of the work and effort goes into; code. We met the programmers two days a week which was the bare minimum, and emailed most of the remaining days. Eventually, I had to help the programmers with lots of game code to make sure we would make it, which was not the ideal setup since I was slacking on design tasks in the meanwhile.
Beside this unlucky fact, a major mistake that we made was ‘finalizing’ the concepts of the game without the programmers involved. They missed most of the concept phase because of their busy schedule and thereby did not feel as much connected as all the full-time members. I wonder if there was anything we could have done to prevent this – the project had to continue and we couldn’t wait for the programmers. - Unspoken expectations about each other. The tension was incredibly high sometimes because we did not talk about ‘what was normal’ at the beginning of the project. As the team coordinator, I tried to keep everyone motivated and effective at work, and though I had a good idea about what ‘hard work’ included. I mistakenly asked team members to stop having fun during our project days and found out that there are many different work styles one can have. If we had just gone through this quickly at the beginning, none of this would have been an issue.
- Few world iteration. We had a round world which made it particularly difficult for the world artist to iterate on it. And lets be honest, lack of motivation did not make it any better. It also came to my mind that, when you go into crunch time not fully motivated, you are going to have a problem finishing your work.
- Documentation. Nobody was checking the design wiki, I had a lonely time in there… All communication was done outside the wiki, which is not a problem at all, but it did make the documentation redundant. Art used their wiki to put together their images, which did seemed to work fine.
- Vision-less weeks during production. At some point in our process we stopped using our vision as the main argument of our choices. I think we were lucky that we eventually had the game vision that we wanted all implemented. Next time, I’d rather not leave it to luck and keep the vision of the game I’m working on in the back of my mind all the time…
- Mid-project Media Management students. I don’t know who at our school thought it would be a good idea to involve first-year media management students with the project while there was already good coordination and a steady planning. It was a stupid idea, they did not even show up most of the times.
Team KOMODO!
Supervisors:
Vogels! Exhibiting!
Many were interested in our game at the Cross Care Cafe, organised by Izovator.
Team KOMODO together. Francis his birthday was a lot of fun
At the Festival of Games 2010, our game was a huge success!
Toru Iwatani, creator of Pac Man, observes our hardware while playing the game
Totally unexpected, we win the Diamond trophy, 'Best-of-show' award of the Festival of Games, together with an iPad! Picture by Zuraida Buter...
Celebrity Fives
High five with [Space], post your score below.
By Adriaan de Jongh & Juliette Janssen.
Summer GameDev: Day 7 / 8 – Crunch, Night and Day
Posted by Adriaan in Uncategorized on July 16, 2009
When I started this post it was late, but I couldn’t finish the post because my eyes wouldn’t let me! Tuesday was rough, we started early and worked quite hard from the start. Again, Sherida couldn’t come because of her illness. A lot had to be done in one day and we agreed that this would mean working at night too…
Queen Mosquito
Because so many things happened the last two days and I can not remember exactly what and in which order all these things happened, but happily they did. The programmers slept 2 hours last night and spend the rest of the night coding implementing, while the artist worked hard to make all the art for the background.
Playtesting
The spawn pools were successfully added to the game, giving us the possibility to start the level design. We also got a menu which was made and animated, sounds were added along with Background Music, an awesome cursor was added that added a lot to the feedback to the player whether he was pushing or pulling the flock, the code was cleaned up so that it would run smoother, at least designed 4 levels were added, a lot background art was added, the game was playtested for the last time and a presentation was made.
In-game style
After the presentations our game was played and we all agreed that we had to playtest even more, but that happens when you make a game in a week; you have to make choises on what you are going to implement and do within tha week, when the time is up, time’s up!
Ronimo playing our game
The day ended with a very inspiring and cool tour through W!games. As a team we promised each other to remake the game to a version that could be played without a WiiMote, a web-version.
Starting Screen Style
It has been an awesome week in which we all learned a lot – not just about skills but also about teamwork… About the fact that creativity DOES come outside in the sun and not behind TL-lights. And working hard, as a team, working for each other, that’s what is most valuable!
To try the game with one player (not how it is supposed to be though) you can go here. Use the mouse to aim, press A to confirm or PUSH your mosquito’s and S to PULL them.
Summer GameDev: Day 3 – Flocking Awesome!
Posted by Adriaan in Uncategorized on July 10, 2009
After we decided to name our team GRASP, named after the first characters of our names, we started this day with a flocking awesome prototype of a flocking group of bees. With the mouse, we were able to push or pull the flock or part of it, we could try different types of flocks and we could see how external influences would work, e.g. wind. The next step would be to find the right variables that made the flock and how the player would have influence on these.
So, Paul and Guido started with building the next prototype in which not only all the WiiMotes would work (4 of them worked in an earlier prototype!) but also in which you can change the variables in real time, while we are playing and testing it. The plan is that we are going to tweak and change the flock and think of fun concepts after that, elements that could make this game challenging and complete. We already have a lot of ideas of how we could use the core mechanic, but we are still open for everything
Meanwhile, the artist are creating moodboards and going through heaps of styles which they could implement in our game.
This day went really quick and we did not book much progress, tomorrow will be better, I hope!
Some images of today and yesterday I haven’t posted yet:
Proof of Concept: Rotate & Move prototype
Posted by Adriaan in Uncategorized on June 16, 2009
I will try to explain the prototype I made by going through the formal and dramatic elements that are defined in the book Game Design Workshop by Tracy Fullerton:
- Players: This game needs two players and does not have any special requirements.
- Objective: A player has to move the marbles to the two squares with the same color as your own on the farther side of the board.
- Procedures:
- When the game starts, each player takes 3 cards from the bunch. The youngest player starts.
Prototype Turn & Move
- Each turn:
- The player lays down one of his action cards.
- The number on the card represents the number of actions the player can use this turn.
- The player either moves his marble on another board piece in the direction of the arrow of the card he is standing on
- OR
- Rotates a card on the board with 90°.
- Each of these procedures – move or rotate – cost 1 action.
- When the player runs out of actions, he takes one action card from the bunch.
- The turn goes to the other player.
- When a player strikes the other player, the stroke marble goes back to the beginning.
- When a player lays down a rotate-a-row card, he can use this card to turn all the cards clockwise or counter clockwise in a horizontal or vertical row.
- When the game starts, each player takes 3 cards from the bunch. The youngest player starts.
- Rules:
- A player is allowed to move a marble or rotate a cards in the same turn.
- A player is allowed to move both marbles in the same turn.
- A player can not rotate the card where he or she is standing on.
- A player can rotate a card twice (180°) but it will still cost 2 actions.
- A player can move on a card from all sides but can only move off at the side where the arrow is pointing at.
- Board cards with a no-rotation icon can never be rotated.
- When a marble is struck, the attacker chooses to which beginning it is going back.
- The direction in which the player has to rotate all the cards with a rotate-a-row card depends on what the card says, CW or CCW.
- Once a player is ‘home’ or at his begin spot he can not be struck.
- A red marble can not stand on a blue card.
- Conflict: What causes conflict in this game is that both players have to move in opposite direction while they can only move in 1 direction from each card on the board. This results in players irritating each other and making sure the other player doesn’t reach his goal.
- Boundaries: The boundaries of the game lie withing the physical board, cards and marbles but interaction also take place between the two players.
- Outcome: One of the players wins and the other loses. There is no draw.
Dramatic elements:
- Challenge: What creates challenge in this game is the urge to win from your opponent.
- Play: The only sense of play that emerges from this game is the freedom of rotating any card on the board, including cards that are right in front of the opposing player. This is more social play than formal play.
- Premise/character/story: This game doesn’t really have any premise, character or story, unless a player imagines one himself.
Time from idea to ‘final’ prototype: 45 minutes.
So what did I learn? It’s better to have more control over what the player gets and can do and leave less to chance. This way, the player has enough choice and is able to plan and make strategies. I also learned that a lot of my decisions were made to make the game monkey proof, for people trying to explore the boundaries of the game and hunting for ways to win – fair or unfair.
And is it fun to play? Hell yeah!
Toys vs Games
Posted by Adriaan in game design on April 22, 2009
I recently made a prototype for a game and some of the playtesters mentioned that my prototype was more of a ‘toy’ rather than a game… But if they could ‘play’ my prototype, and everything you play is a game, what is a toy?
Let’s take a look at this fantastic tone matrix, made my André Michelle. With this very simple so called ‘toy’, people make the coolest tunes and medleys by visualizing shapes, text and lines in the 16×16 matrix. The tone matrix also uses the right mouse button with which you can copy and paste your matrix and rythm and share it with others. If you take a look at what people make and paste all over the nternet, you’ll find that half of the people really tries to make music and the other half is visualising shapes and text. It was not the toy who challenged these people to make shapes or text or great music, it were the people themselves.
A toy is a game without a challenge where the player chooses its own challenge.
Play – what is a game?
Posted by Adriaan in game design on April 8, 2009
Play pt.1, Play pt.2 and Play pt.3 have been real eye-openers for me, and even while I can still discuss about these definitions for ages, I’m going to come to a conclusion in this article.
Where I stopped last was where I said that ‘serious games’ were games with it’s purpose not being ‘fun’, games in which you could not imagine being someone else and games where the consequences would affect real life. So what are examples of serious game? Anything obvious?
Learning games you (have most likely) played when you were 14 years old: you would write down a word on one side of a piece of paper and the same word in another language on the other side, with which you could test yourself by only showing one side of the paper. Or maybe even more simple: put your hand on the words in your book and test yourself. It’s the same principle as hide and seek, but then with words and a different purpose: you find a word and then try to remember it… the next time you play the game you should remember the word and if you don’t, you will have to remember it for the next time.
And what about Russian Roulette? That definitely has real life consequences! And as for digital games, I’m redirecting you to Globetrotter XL on Kongregate: it’s purpose being ‘to improve your geographic skills’ – and hell it works, it is fun and you learn from it – a serious game. Serious games are there, they are just hard to find because the big mass doesn’t know what they are!
What have I learned?
A game is not what defines play, play is what defines a game.
A game is a challenge with its purpose being ‘fun’ where a player interacts with objects with properties that lead to a quantifiable outcome.
The question is not how to make fun games serious, it’s how to make serious games fun.
A serious game is a challenge with its purpose being not ‘fun’ where a player interacts with objects with properties that lead to a quantifiable outcome and where the player can’t imagine being someone else.
So the next question is, how do I apply this to my game design? How can I make use of this definition to make great games? I guess… welcome to the wonderfull world of game designers!
Genres? Anti-Innovation!
Posted by Adriaan in game design on March 25, 2009
Action, First Person Shooter, Action Adventure, Adventure, Construction, Management, RPG, MMO, Strategy, Simulation, Music, Party, Puzzle, Sports, Board, Card, Adult, Singleplayer, Multiplayer, Fighting, Platform, Racing, RTS, Turn Based Strategy, Third Person Shooter, Arcade, Adver, Text Based, Casual, Art, Chrisian, Educational, Health, Side-scrolling, Audio, Console, Mobile, Online, Handheld, Violent, Web based, Flash and Serious games. I believe that’s all?
You come out of a brainstorm session with this really cool and awesome idea. Everyone is excited about it and people start drawing on the whiteboard about how things will and should go. ‘Wow, this has never done before!’ Then, some guy comes up to you and says: ‘So basicly, this is a side-scrolling turn-based adventure?’ ‘Ehhh… Yeah.’ Sounds familiar?
When you think of it, placing you game into a genre says so much about your game that it’s almost like a game is a combination of elements, being already done in other games. As shown in the previous example, this demotivates a lot. There have been so many games in the past that defined these genres, genres that could all be recognized by certain elements or specifications… When you are trying to make something new and innovative, people tend to place your game in a corner – too fast.
As for the industry, categorizing games is essential to sell: games don’t sell when you promote them as ‘the new and innovative best game!’ but sell a lot, and I mean A LOT better when you promote them as ‘the next-gen first person shooter.’ For game designers, categorising games can too easily lead to not-innovative games because most elements and mechanics have been predefined.
I would like to ask any self-respecting Game Designer to not think in terms of genres and NOT confronting fellow designers with it. Just, stop!
Play – part 2
Posted by Adriaan in game design on March 24, 2009
This article continues from Play.
We have come to a point where we could ask ourselves, is everything you play a game?
Lets talk about a presentation of Stuart Brown about Play. In the first part of his presentation, he says:
Play doesn’t always have to have a particular purpose.
I must disagree: I believe that every form of play has a purpose, whether it is a purpose of which the player is conscious of or not. I even believe play can have neurological purposes, like Stuart Brown himself even explains in later parts of his presentation, but I’m not a neurologist. Lateron, Stuart Brown says:
If it’s purpose is more important than the act of doing it, it is probably not play.
Errrr…. Let’s think of something that has always been on the edge of being a game: ‘simulators’. Let’s take Flight Simulator for example. If I think of it, there are two ways of playing Flight Simulator: you can play with the purpose of having fun, or you could play Flight Simulator with any other purpose. When you are playing with the purpose of having fun, the act of doing is the only way to achieve this feeling and Stuart says it’s play. But when you are playing Flight Simulator with any other purpose, lets say, training your flight skills, its purpose would be more important than the act of doing it and, according to Stuart, it would not be play. But would it still be a game?
From here, all remains a very unstable theory of my own. Please comment if you totally feel something is off!
Lets state the following:
There are two types of play where the only difference between those is it’s purpose, ‘fun’ or anything else.
Let’s say this is true. Now, the only question left before we could come to a conclusion is whether all games are fun. Let’s get out of this mental slug for a second and think of our own past: not talking about your personal feelings, were there any games you remember of which it’s purpose was not ‘fun’? This is a very hard question since you might have been playing games without knowing it! And to use my definition of what a game is, ‘a challenge in which a player interacts with objects with properties that lead to a quantifiable outcome’, we can conclude that we have been playing alot of ‘games’ that were not fun! Your history tests at school, buying new shoe’s, even riding your bike home could be a game!
Or not. Maybe it isn’t that weird to think that there is no game without fun. Maybe there are indeed two types of play in which play with the purpose of fun is a game and play with the purpose of anything but fun is not a game. Maybe not everything you play is a game.
That is what I claim. I challenge you to prove me wrong.
Continue to Play – part 3.
Play
Posted by Adriaan in game design on March 20, 2009
With this being the first post about games and many to come, I start with saying to myself that while I am writing this I am totally going to reinvent my vision about games. I’m going to try to write down all my thoughts about games and what defines them… How else could I be making a game if I don’t even know what it is?
So, where do I start? I asked my little brother what he thought that defined a game and while he was making a joke, he came directly to the core of what a game is.
A game is something you play …
You must be thinking ‘Oh really?’ right now, but the solution is right there. Play. What does it mean ‘to play’ something? What makes play possible? Again, my little brother helped me out by saying that he plays with the mouse and the keyboard. Now, not every game plays with a mouse and keyboard, but the core of what he is saying is right: part of what playing is has to do with what you put in to it, with input and feedback, with interacting. Note that it doesn’t even have to be digital: imagine all the war games you played when you were young, in times we would still get out of our house to have fun.
Okay, so… Let’s say I’m going to interact with a small rubber ball. First I’m adding myself to the game, a player. I’m throwing the ball to the ground, expecting it to come up again. It indeed comes up, I position my hand to the location of where the ball is going to fly and I catch it. Alright, that’s all good, but it is not a game. We could make a game of it by adding a goal or better said, a challenge! Lets say I will have to throw and catch it 20 times in a row without dropping it, making use of my focus. Or maybe I could make an endurence game of this setup by keep on throwing and catching the ball for as many times as I can for an hour long! Now it’s a game!
A game is ‘something’ a player can interact with and which challenges the player.
‘Something’? I missed one step somewhere. I went from ‘nothing’ to ‘a rubber ball with physics’ and it seems that without these, there would not be a game. There wouldn’t be chess without a board, chess pieces, an opposing player and your hand. There wouldn’t be a Yeti sports game without the Yeti, his club, the gravity pulling the penguin down and the air velocity of the penguin. There would not be soccer without a ball! All of these games have something in common: They would not be games if they did not have objects with properties that lead to a quantifiable outcome. It explains the rubber ball with physics, the ground, the hand and maybe even the air.
And there we are, at my current vision about a game. Only time will tell me if I’m right. Or you.
A game is a challenge in which a player interacts with objects with properties that lead to a quantifiable outcome.
Continue to Play – part 2…
My name is Adriaan de Jongh and I am a student at the Utrecht School of the Arts where I study Game Design. I like to sail, to kite surf and to play drums.
I worked on games including:
