I’d like to close my journal by trumpeting the most influential game, or rather game series, that has provided a significant part of my motivation for pursuing a career in the games industry. The Final Fantasy series is renowned across all demographics and geographical regions for the sheer brilliance of its games. Read the rest of this entry »
At this point in our game design process, we are very satisfied with our game mechanic and flow, and are moving on to articulating the game board and player manual. As I discussed earlier this semester, I believe that (electronic game) manuals should be considered a very important aspect of any games package. I think that this should also hold true for our game, given that it has been carefully designed.
Our game has a strong military theme, particularly relating to tactical hand-to-hand combat between the highly primitive days of sheer brutality and today’s technologically facilitated warfare. The best example of a manual I can think of whose design compliments this theme is that of Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings (Win). Read the rest of this entry »
Our design team had another major play test between ourselves today. Unfortunately, many of the groups in our tutorial did not have a prototype ready to share with us, so they spent time working on theirs instead of coming to have a look at ours. We have done some extensive play testing on our game, so we used the workshop session to give feedback to another design team on their game. This latest play test happened later this afternoon, and we are very pleased with the results.
What I have noticed in earlier tests is that we are generally only willing to initiate battle where it is necessary to stop an opponent gaining an explicit advantage (or if the smack talk has caused players to harness a temporarily dislike for one another). Since an attacking player has no reassurance that he has a good chance of winning an active attack, there is really little motivation for battles to occur during the first few rounds.
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Capture the King is a game designed by a fellow workshop group, and our design team, along with another, participated in play testing it today. Play involves four packs of cards and five players. A single Joker card is taken from the total of four decks and marked, becoming a special card (I’ll call it the King Card just for explanation’s sake). The King Card is inserted into the stack of decks and all of the cards are shuffled. After shuffling, players are dealt one card at a time until all the cards have been distributed. The King is designated as the player who holds the king card, and he publicly declares this by placing the King Card for all others to see Read the rest of this entry »
We went over Jacob Neilsen’s usability guidelines in the workshop yesterday, and then our design team went on to carry out some more play testing. I’ve taken some time to look over the sections of Neilsen’s guidelines, and will make comments about how our game measures up to some of them.
Visibility of system status – It is very easy to see where all players’ armies and game resources are situated within relation to one another. Part of the uncertainty of our game is that the physical position of a player’s tokens in relation to the finishing space does not accurately represent the temporal position of that player between the current game state and the end of the game. Read the rest of this entry »
Final Fantasy XII (PS2) features the best user interface I have experienced in a game to date. In fact, it is one of the best games to ever be released when considering the each of the aspects of game design covered this semester. Any Square Enix fan will appreciate that the development teams made significant advancements in interface design from Final Fantasy X to Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy XI Online. Indeed, all Final Fantasy instalments have featured excellent user interface, with each new instalment only seeming to surpass the previous because the interface fronts a more complex game world each time. Read the rest of this entry »
Nintendo’s Wii and DS consoles have controls that afford a more recognisable sense of mapping (as discussed in this week’s lecture). I acquired my DS earlier this year, and the first game I played on it was The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, a game whose controls were very intuitive and fun to use.
Phantom Hourglass does not even use the digital controls to control the protagonist, Link. Instead, these buttons are used to access menus and equip items, but all of the functional abilities of the character are performed using stylus gestures. I found the gestures to be very easy to pick up and they added greatly to the gaming experience. Read the rest of this entry »
In today’s workshop, we talked about the concept of actors and counter-actors. We even were forced against our wills to partake in outdoor physical activity! Oh the humanity! Read the rest of this entry »
We performed our second major play test today. First, we played on our original board (16 spaces on the outer tier, 12 middle and 8 inner) but included 20-sided dice for battling. This resulted in a much more fun and unpredictable experience. There were several instances where a single army defeated two armies, however it was not the common outcome.
I think we have found a good balance between chance and predictability. During a player’s turn, he (or she) may only move one army (pawn) up to the number shown on the rolled six-sided die. This means that each player generally has a good idea of which of their armies are at risk from an attack during the next round. Attacks are dependent on dice rolls and player tactics, so the risk is never fully known. This gives rise to a dual-continuum of tactics Read the rest of this entry »
Today we held our first major play test, and the results are encouraging. I must admit that we have left testing a little bit late, but this is on account of us being grounded on our highly theoretical approach to the design, and not because we’re lazy (not in this unit anyway).
Play takes place on a tiered, circular board where players start on the outer tier and compete by trying to be the first to reach the centre tier. To reach the centre, players move their pawns around the board, picking up resource markers as they go (we call these resources ‘rocks’ for the time being to suit our game story). A certain number of rocks on one space will form a ramp, and allow players to jump from that space to an adjacent space on a higher tier. When a player moves his (or her) pawn to a space already occupied by an opposing pawn, a battle can be initiated Read the rest of this entry »
