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!