Joshua Nuernberger, Week 10

Instead of working on our actual presentation during Week 10, I had the privilege to attend GDC in San Francisco this year. For about three days, I had the opportunity to demo a game I made on the show floor to hundreds of passersby. This experience taught me many things, some of which I thought might be helpful to share.

The first thing I realized was just how critical physical playtesting is to a game. I've had games playtested (and playtested others' games) over the internet, and that suffices well enough. But when you physically get to be in the same airspace as your tester, you receive so much more critical feedback that you would otherwise probably never get. Every little action a player performs, be it a mouse click, reading a line of dialog, or walking across a room, is conveyed back through them through a twitch of the eye, the raising of an eyebrow, a small grin, or an exasperated keyboard dab. Little non-verbal cues like this tell you so much about the psychology of the player, and what is specifically working and not working in a game. I would say that to undergo minute testing such as this, and specifically remove every element of unwanted frustration from a game, is to successfully playtest and debug that game.

The second thing I learned was about gratification. Since other attendees usually only had a couple minutes to spare on the show floor, that meant they would only play a game for a minute or two, several at most (usually). What this means is that those players need some sort of gratification or reward to justify their playing of your game. For platformers, this is easily achieved as players get instant feedback as whether or not they successfully jumped over a pit. For fighting games, players know when they've killed the enemy, and when they've succeeded. However, since my game was more story/puzzle driven, I found it much harder to give that sense of gratification to players in such a short time span. I realized that players needed instant goals, and instant objectives to achieve; nobody wanted to be wandering around, or figuring out what to do on their own. Once I switched the demo scene from a free-world, exploratory section, to the most linear tutorial section of the game, that's when I found out that players would actually play the game for 5-10 minutes, instead of the normal 1-2. So, the lesson learned here is to hold your player's hand--they don't want to be lost, they want your help.

Overall, it was a very surreal experience, and one I'm glad I had the opportunity to go through. If any of you has ever made or will make a game, I hope this helps.

SUSANNE WEJP-OLSEN WEEK 10

It was very exciting to have a panel of pros last night to look at our work. Even though the evening was our FINAL, it felt in a way like a pitch meeting and all the real work is ahead of us.

An area I hope to explore more in the future is portable gaming devices – like the one Sony is rumored to put on the market which is expected to work with Sony’s new online media platform (a sort of Sony iTunes) due to launch later this month.

All three projects presented last night told fairly elaborate stories – sort of parallels to a movie feature. Perhaps more game playing will take place on mobile devices, requiring simpler, more circular story lines – like the 30 min. sitcom. With the usage and capabilities of mobile devices it’s going to be interesting to see the effect on the gaming industry and what types of games more people will enjoy playing if perhaps there’s a shift in playing habit from something stationary at home to a mobile environment out in the world.

Michelle - Week 10

So todays the final day. Actually i'm pretty jazzed, cause i really love our game. I'm really excited to what the other groups' games have become too. Congrats to everyone.

Roni - Week 10 - the final hurrah

The end is in sight. But wow, the ride getting to the end has been a doozy! As my fellow team members have stated in their posts, we've had our ups and downs as a group. All-in-all, I've enjoyed the process, despite the frustrations. We have a concept we all like and agree upon, and one we feel we can sink our teeth into. It's unfortunate that we came up with this particular concept so near the end of the process, but at least we came up with something that we would like to see expanded upon.

I've had a similar experience to what Kelsey talked about in her post: as I'm working on compiling our group notes into the powerpoint, it's an interesting challenge to make the presentation interesting, but not too long. What are the key words that will help sell our ideas? What is the most succinct and clear way to say what we mean?

I'd like to give a little shout-out to Google Docs. My group has been using them since day one, and it's been a very good method for us to stay on the same page. We've had two "running conversation" kind of documents, where we've posted thoughts/questions/ideas to the group, as well as expounded on ideas from our group meetings. I posted the powerpoint template I created earlier and we've all been able to look at it and edit or comment so that it's a much more manageable task.

Lauren Percivalle - Wk 10 home stretch!

Despite all the last minute havoc that we've wreaked, our project seems to be coming together. I think a part of it that helps is the impending deadline, and the rush of just trying to fit all the pieces together gets people to think critically and at a much more efficient pace. It's nice, and also an interesting way to see how the group dynamic works when under pressure. All in all, a great, if hectic experience that I can say I've learned a lot from. :D

John - Week 10

Overall our new concept is much better. Our world is much more understandable and relatable, and the character’s motivations are clearer. We still had some of the same problems as last time, though, in making sense of it through gameplay. This whole experience has been quite a ride - I wonder if this is anything like what happens at real game development houses? It would be so cool to be a fly on the wall of their meeting room…

Ellen- 10th week- march 14th

I'm having a blast doing artwork for the project. The earlier story we had sparked little excitement and imagery for me- that should have been a sign that the concept was weak. I had chalked it up to me just not being into our topic. Too bad we didn't come up with this earlier so I could spend more time on the visuals!

Ellen

Kelsey Sharpe--Week 10--Countdown to Presentation!

At the same time that I'm typing this, I'm also working on the powerpoint for my group's presentation. One thing that I'm realizing is that 15 minutes is not a very large amount of time at all; apparently we took nearly an hour during our midterm presentation. Trying to figure out what information to include and what not to has been difficult--after all, for the last ten weeks we've been coming up with cool tidbits and background info for this world we've created and these characters we've brought to life. On Monday, do our Distinguished Guests really need to know that when your party has the Viking character and the acrobat character in it, the former can throw the latter so that he can reach higher ledges? Not really, no, but I still think it's pretty neat. Hopefully, if we do our job correctly, the bite-size chunk of our game's world that we reveal during our presentation will encourage our viewers to learn more in our game document.

Nick - Week 9

As we move toward the end of the process, looking back, one of the biggest frustrations with this process has been turning a story and visuals into a game. It is one thing to come up with great ideas and our group has come up with many of them, however when we try to think of the concept as a game, it falls flat. Even now, as we find ourselves almost starting from square one, there are a number of cool paths we could travel, but as I am trying to visualize different scenarios placing them into a 10+ hour gaming experience seems difficult. Also, with still trying to finalize the story (and a massive rewrite in the near future), it has been hard, as a visual artist, to really nail down a world. Every tweak of the story requires a tweak in the design and some changes, an entire redesign of the visual scheme of the world. With the deadline looming, I feel we’ll be lucky to have a concrete story and what will suffer is the accompanying world which will seem generic since there was no time to adjust the details and idiosyncrasies of the world. Although the primary focus on the class is narrative, it still is a little frustrating as a designer. However, I do remain hopefully that tomorrow our group will finally find the story we have been wanting to tell from the beginning and we can make it look beautiful and relatively fleshed out visually.

Kelsey Sharpe--Technically Week 10, But Here's to Week 9!

As we head into finals week and the arrival of our presentation, I've been trying to talk to as many different people as possible about my group's game and some problems that we've been having. I think that getting the opinions of lots of different individuals has been extremely helpful, and it can be very encouraging to hear somebody who hasn't been as invested in the game as I have been tell me that they would be interested in playing.

To anybody who is nervous about the presentation, I would suggest finding two friends--one who plays video games, one who doesn't--and explaining the game to them. In my experience the gamer friend will have good questions about gameplay and whether certain ideas about the character will translate to a feasible in-game experience, and the non-gamer friend will have questions about story. It's a good way to find holes in the game, and to build up confidence that you really know the ins-and-outs of your game for Monday!

Justin: Week Something - Story in the First Place

I don't mean to talk abstractly about any one concept, but I suppose that is often the design of the "concept". Story is the one mitigating factor within all forms of media and art. It persists throughout the novel and even the painting. A story can be told in many, many different forms and lengths, be it over the course of almost one hundred hours or in the span of five seconds. Story can be derived after careful scrutinizing and analyzing and all manner of careful self-investment, or it can be grasped and understood in the span of a quick glance.

What makes one story better than the other doesn't always rest on the content; it's often in the delivery. Certainly a troubled soul that you get to know over the course of several days through specific, omniscient insights and spanning events is one that we take to heart because of all the investment, but the most amazing characters are one that are presented simply, and yet not.

Doubling back on everything I say is a common thread amongst my posts, but damn the person who sees the world in binary. A human being is not simple by any means, we are complex, still-not-fully-understood creatures. Presenting us in a two-dimensional fashion does not do our existence justice, and the presentation through a complex string of hundred upon hundreds of pages is accurate, but it's rote and not nearly as dynamic as we humans persist to be.

The answer lies in a painting: a single image encapsulating an entire world in an instant. I do not mean to bloat the import of artwork as a whole to the art community--for certainly not all "art" is art--but story is most compelling when it is taken away from boiled, hard-coded presentation. An image of a person making even the simplest of gestures tells so much about who they are: such is the amazing complexity of the human. What is and is not there tells the story of the world around them, and what the work for and work through. One object placed to the side can unravel their whole world. Nothing stirs the human imagination more than a simple image of the human imagination.

You, the reader (who may very well not exist), may ask yourself, "What the fuck are you getting at?"

It is, like my subject, very simple.

Creative visionists, regardless of medium, need to put more faith in humans. Too often is the word "drama" taken and blown way out of proportions: distorting the human identity and every possible motive along with it. A game like Heavy Rain posits itself as an interactive drama as if video games haven't already done this for years now. It's attempt decidedly removes most elements of what most rational people would consider compose a video game and fashions itself to be one long extraneous cinematic with inconsequential button presses. It has very little actual control over characters and instead presents the player with a series of button presses they may or may not hit to further progress the story, which even when missed, only slightly alter the events until the very end, which could take different paths in the form of "who dies this time?"

The entire focus of Heavy Rain is its supposedly compelling story, which it doesn't even present all that well and actually leaves in a glaring plot-hole that negates the entirety of the story itself, essentially rendering the entirety of the "game" moot. Aside from that, it tries to create compelling characters with the use of motion capture and compelling writing and acting. However, the acting is mostly performed by people who sound as if they have no idea what they're saying, which are then further butchered by horrible, fake accents, and further butchered by writing that is convoluted and never actually suits any of the characters and their positions. No person, ration or not, would consider saying some of the things these automatons spout.

Speaking of lifeless simulations, the motion capture technology seems sub-par compared with what has been presented in other forms of media and even in other games released years earlier. The faces, which are the most dynamic part of a human and are 75% of the way we communicate, fail to animate anything more than the eyes and mouth, and even then just barely. The faces in a multiplayer only shooter, Team Fortress 2, animate better. To top that off, nothing collides appropriately and often objects clip right through one another. Often when things need to interact with one another, the camera pans away, even though that is the direct action of the scene. Something as simple as bandaging shouldn't move the focus of the scene to the ceiling for a whole 10 seconds.

All of this isn't nearly as bad as all the failed promises that this "game" sits upon. It promised that every action the player performed and every button press made a difference, but that is simply not true, and anyone who plays through the game twice would notice that in an instance. The game was built up for years as a some expanding experience and all it really does is present some ridiculous situations that seem like they could have negative outcomes if done incorrectly, which drives the player to perform well, but actually have no really story sequential consequences, other than very rarely altering which ending one recieves, which is always a tattered mess anyhow. The games only driving factor is a lie, a trick, and it fooled so many.

How easy everything could have been if the developer had put more faith in the human complexity. There's no need to present some outlandish human fault and make a character where it as their centerpiece attire. All that does is render them a character. To make a fictional being a human, one need give them something more than a plain fault and let it color them. It can be an affectation, but it is not their world.

Games like Grand Theft Auto IV present the player with a sympathetic character in Nikos that has done horrible things in his past but he does not let that be his defining characteristic. He is still human and seeks friendship and companionship and struggles through day to day life searching for ways to make money whilst trying not fall back on old habits. He only really confronts his past when it is right there in front of him, and only then is it a driving factor in his being. The rest of his world is then shaped by the now, and he changes accordingly, as humans are apt to do.

Where this game falls apart is in the gameplay, which allows the player to run wild with no regard or impact to the actual plot. The player can use the character to murder millions of innocents outside of the storyline and then lament the death of one during a story sequence. The separation of the gameplay and story here are the traps that most video games fall into, which makes them less compelling as a whole.

Video Games are not two divergent products: one a movie and the other a board game. They are single entity and their contents need to reflect that. So of course, that human element needs to also be a part of the gameplay. Whether a character is a superhuman or Joe Everyday, they need to play in a way that reflects who they are as a person.

This is why Uncharted 2 won so many awards. It's presentation touched on everything talked about prior. The characters, story and gameplay were all merged together to drive the whole product forward. The character was an above average adventure seeker, who was driven by love and and companionship and this was reflected in his speech and his regular movements. Simply directing the character with the control stick would illustrate to anyone that this was a person who was capable of great things, but was not perfect. The gameplay often has you being helped by companions, and in turn helping them, either as smaller or greater plot points. The story itself was simple, but banked heavily on the human complexity that it soared forward as a compelling piece. It made the game that much more fun to play.

It is my hope that our work can maybe reflect this merging of story into the overall product of our video game concept, because that is yet another aspect that thrusts video games forward to height of art and media.

Rohit Week 9

A couple weeks ago I watched a video interview with Andy Park a concept artist working on God of War 3. I found this interview very insightful because it showed me the working process of a concept artist. After watching the video I was able to understand the process a little bit better and it gave me some questions that I been keeping at the back of my head as my group moves with our concept. One of the most important questions I have realized is asking ourselves whether or not our brilliant ideas fit within the context of the game. The idea can be cool but in no way relates to the concept so we cannot put it in the game. Also, in the interview Andy talks about having a story for every character even grunts because it helps him design the character. I thought this was very relevant to the class since we have been dealing with our character bibles. This was very helpful because it made me realize that everybody in the game has a purpose and a story. I realized that having these details in mind is very helpful when coming up with character designs for our game.

Here is the link if anybody wants to watch the interview:
http://www.cgchannel.com/2010/02/andy-park-on-god-of-war-3/

Joshua Nuernberger, Week 9

Going into the final stretch, there's always one important question that needs to be answered: is it fun? Games, at their core, no matter how much extraneous material they may have, still thrive on that one important aspect of enjoyment. You can strip away all the art direction, story, level design, character banter, but there still needs to be that one element in a game that makes a player say: Yes, I want to play this game.

Taking a step back at a project from this perspective puts many features in a new light. Sometimes unabashed intentions can be seen as distinctly good-hearted, but not necessarily fun. So, in that respect, it's useful to look at everything in a game as either supportive to that element of fun, or not supportive.

The bottom line is a useful one: Do you want to play this game? And is it fun?

Ellen- Week 8- March 7th

I'm not sure which way we need to go- completely restructure or try to slap more band-aids on what we have. With 2 sessions left to go I hope we can make our current story work!

Lauren Percivalle - Wk 9

Things are indeed going a bit smoother this week - we've managed to flatten out some of the creases, but at what expense? I think what needs to remain in the back of everyone's mind is the fact that this is still a game, where a player will be involved and who must stay engaged and interested in the overall story. We don't want to make something that could very well fit in a book, so that's where things like gameplay and interactivity come in. And visuals. There are games out there, however, that have succeeded in establishing a huge fanbase just from story alone (while the gameplay itself leaves something to be desired). It's just a lot harder to do, and I think out next task at hand is making sure we keep the player engaged.

Lauren Percivalle - Wk 8

I think one of the more difficult tasks in developing a solid storyline is being ready to pick out some of the unnecessary fluff so that things can go more smoothly. We've begun to do so, but it's hard letting go of some of the cooler ideas. Oh well! Save it for the next game ;)

John - Week 9 - The home stretch

Our group has made tremendous strides in the last week, but we still have considerable issues to tackle. Now I understand why game publishers love using establish properties for videogames - it’s really hard to come up with a compelling story and world! Unfortunately, what some publishers still fail to realize is that some stories simply do not suit interactive narrative. To some extent, our group is struggling with the same issues.

When we think “story”, we naturally gravitate toward the linear narratives we have experienced through literature, film and television. The difference, of course, between these mediums is player agency. People throw around words like “interactivity” all the time, but sometimes I feel like these discussions concentrate so much on how to tell the story that they lose sight of whether the player is having fun or not. One aspect I had previously not considered about game storytelling is that the player needs to feel like they are accomplishing something. What this means is that the player needs to feel the experience of being the hero, not just watching the hero. As a corollary to this, compelling characters such as Clarissa Dalloway in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway would not work in games not just because they do not have much agency, but because there is no “winning” in the conclusions of their moral musings. Their accomplishments are personal and subjective - accomplishments that are not black and white enough to be rendered in gameplay form.

As we head in to the home stretch, the question I will keep repeating to myself is: “Is this any fun?”

Roni - Week 9 - moving forward

Last time I wrote, I talked about feeling trepidation going into our group meeting, this time, I'm excited. Last time we met we as a group we made (what felt like) major strides in flushing out our story. We recognized that we collectively tend to latch onto one of our big points and then tree branch out with all the possibilities and all the minutiae of that one point and then circle back to the big picture just to be frustrated that all the little details that we talked about possibly negate something else. But this time we forced ourselves to look at the whole picture the whole time, and focus on the big issues, the big climaxes, the big goals. This approach helped us see things that potentially weren't working and to find the things that worked really well to advance plot. As Ellen said, we killed our darlings. A simultaneously terrifying and exciting thing to do while working on this particular project. As a group, though, I think we walked away from our last meeting feeling like we made strides in the right direction and that we're on track to continue moving forward.

Ichha Arora #7

So our concept focuses heavily on narrative (which is the whole point of the class anyways) but this makes things extremely difficult sometimes. Keeping track of all of these different characters while still keeping true to our initial goal of and purpose of our story is proving a difficult task. Our story we have finally decided is going to focus on whether perfection is something to strive for or whether the world really is better with chaos. I know my opinion: that without chaos there is no passion, and a passionless world is not one that I would want to live in.

The issue though for us I think is getting the point across to everyone else, making it matter to our audience which ultimately is going to be the game player. How to make them care I think is the biggest question of them all. And it seems it will be the hardest to answer.

Many great authors and storytellers begin their own works in confusion so I guess its nothing to be worried about that none of our characters are solidified yet, that they all just seem cookie cutter, well not entirely cookie cutter but close enough that I'm sure their stories have been told before. I don't think this is something to be worried about though, since there has to be a reason for these stories to get retold anyways. And I guess there really must be a reason why we were all drawn to them in the first place.

Ellen Week 8 or 9 -March 1st

We made some good progress today in class! It seems we needed to kill our 'darlings'. Once we did this, ideas flowed much more freely and we seemed to get on track again.

Yuki Izumihara-Week 9

Josh was talking about, how to make the game interesting. And going along with that question, what makes the game re-playable?

What actually makes the re-playable?
For me, it seems like the game that has the strong character is more replayable than the game that has a great story.
I haven't played that many games, so it might be just be me that feel like this.

Great story does make me want to play the game at the beginning, but usually I play them only once.
There are several games that when you go through the story the second time, you can explore the backstory of the character, but even in that game, I only play 2 ot 3 times and don't go back.

Games like solitaire, minesweeper, tetris, and chess doesn't have a story, but has a strong(absolute) characters and people play them forever.
At the same time, all of these games has simple game mechanics and the game can be personalized (I cannot find a better word for this).
Whenever you play, it's either you win or lose, but each time, the game is different depending on your choice.

Is it the mini games that is not crucial to the story make the game re-playable?(collecting coins, stars, etc)
Or is it actually the story that brings you back to the game?
Or is it the immersive environment that you want to go back to?

We did talk about this at the first day of the class, but as we started making the game by ourselves, I started to think about it again.

Roni - Week 8 - a frustrating creative process

Going into today's class, I feel a little trepidation about our group discussion. I like my fellow group members, and think we're all creative people; unfortunately I feel like the last few times we've met as a group, we always take one step forward, one step backward. Perhaps this is all very well-and-good for group dynamics when it comes to the creative process (as a whole), but at the same time I do find it a little frustrating. I'm repeating a little of what John and Ellen said in their most recent posts, so my apologies for being repetitive. But I think this just emphasizes that as a group we feel like we're floundering a little.

I'm not trying to diminish the work we do as a group, because we do manage to come up with some interesting ideas and make steps in the right direction, which is always exciting. However, we find our selves having to step back and re-evaluate previous decisions just as frequently as we make progress. Perhaps in this academic setting, it is more frustrating because we are nearing the end of the quarter and we collectively feel like we only have a partial idea. And dealing with a large group, it also feels like we are not always on the same page with each other.

But here's to continuing on with determination and a desire to make it work.

Joshua Nuernberger, Week 8

Our team has been discussing gameplay mechanics--what may possibly be called the primary element of interactivity within a game world--and how we can make that "fun" for our game. In our case, the primary mechanic is most likely something such as this: the player must inject others with drugs in order to alter personalities and thereby possibly extract some form of information from said patients.

So how do you make that fun? Portal has a relatively simple gameplay mechanic: shoot entrance (blue portal), shoot exit (orange portal--or is it the other way around?), and then you have yourself an artificial transportation device. This doesn't necessarily sound too exciting on paper, but that's where development and re-iteration come in. What Portal successively does is add layers of complexity in each ensuing level in order to fully exploit every last drop of potential that this one gameplay mechanic of "portals" could have. The developers don't just use the "portals" as a transportation device--instead, they use it to alter gravity, momentum, speed, move boxes, catch glowing orbs, and more. The game takes one simple idea, yet re-uses that through various unorthodox iterations to create a complex and fun game.

In that respect, it may not be the complexity of a mechanic that matters, but rather the simplicity and uniqueness of it that can yield the most potential.