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.

Final Fantasy games are narrative-driven, with marvellously realised characters whose actions match their motivations. They deal with a vast array of themes without the prevalent sense of ignorance seen in Hollywood film productions. All games are visually breathtaking, with attention to detail in settings and character costumes becoming much more obvious as Square Enix moves on to more powerful platforms. The seamless integration of wonderful FMVs are a trademark of the series that no other game or series can begin to compete with.

Visual candy isn’t the only offering by any means. The soundtracks for these games are a major effort, with the recent instalments being accompanied by four-disc soundtrack albums. Moods range from the upbeat Chocobo renditions to those expressing the panic of warfare and the shock of defeat. Sound effects are employed to enhance the battle experience, and also in the field to add to the authenticity of character actions, or even as cartoon-like shorts that add to the comic value of some scenes. At no point are the sound effects over-bearing, and the music and effects combine harmoniously.

Beneath the surface of these games lies a compelling narrative, heavily grounded in a meticulously balanced and conceived battle system that features a fantastic selection of arms, armour, magic and items that supports complete player customisability; deals with all kinds of wonderful beastlike enemies; and relies heavily on the player responding to the situation at hand and acting in response.

The grand battle systems are revised with each instalment, and are facilitated by what I believe to be the best interface designs in the entire industry. At all points throughout the games, players have complete control through the excellent field navigation, battle command and general menu interfaces, all of which are laid out clearly and intuitive to use.

I can see that I won’t be able to write all I want about this series without hurting your (or even my) eyes. But if there’s one thing I must get across, it’s this: the Final Fantasy series is one that should be experienced by all budding game developers. Not just ones interested in developing for consoles, or ones interested in making role-playing games, but for every person interested in designing games. Square Enix have plenty of money to throw around, and they are intent on using it to develop games like those I have described here. They’re not content to re-release the same game and pretend it’s any different than its predecessor, nor do they rely on gimmicky, repetitive game mechanics that are limited in nature.

Despite what some game ‘reviewers’ and ‘industry experts’ may say, there’s no denying that Final Fantasy games are brilliant pieces of software from both a game designer’s and software designer’s point of view, and, more importantly, brilliant examples of games that produce fun and engaging experiences for their players. Games don’t need to be grand, nor do they need to span four discs to be fun and engaging, but those who pass off the series as ‘games for fangirls’ are missing out on one of the most valuable examples of game design in history. After all, good design inspires good design.

Many thanks to my design team-mates Dave and Jeremy for their efforts this semester, and for partaking in civil conversations about the games we like (and dislike).

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). I commented earlier on how the comprehensive manual is a core element in the beautifully realised games package. Gothic typefaces are used as headings and backgrounds are printed to resemble the parchment used by authorities in those medieval times.

Another game manual I should point out is that of Railroad Tycoon 3 (Win). While it’s not as grand as the Age of Empires offering, the manual has features some nice finishing touches. The cover resembles a formal notebook or diary, with a leather texture and metal corner protectors printed to look convincing. Inside, the different aspects of the game are split up into appropriate sections, with each featuring a relevant quote from an original railroad tycoon, tips on game play and appropriate screenshots. Railroad Tycoon certainly isn’t the blockbuster series that Empires is, but the effort put into something as seemingly trivial as the manual is something I for one appreciate.

Our game will not need a particularly large manual; the game idea is easy enough to pick up. It will however need to contain a comprehensive detailing of the game’s major mechanics, particularly movement, use of power-ups, and most definitely, engaging in battle. In terms of presentation, I think we should create something similar to the worn tome appearance of the Age of Empires II manual/reference. The cover could be made of thicker material, like card, and resemble a cover material such as leather. We should use gothic fonts and illustrations instead of photographs to maintain the narrative and look-and-feel of the game.

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.

As the game design stands, this is generally a good occurrence, in that it allows players to advance unchecked in collecting resources for the first (and lengthiest) tier. We wanted this situation to eventuate, in order to make sure individual players don’t fall behind from the start (as discussed in PvP design considerations in the Game Balancing lecture).

However, as players made their way to the middle tier, there was still not enough motivation to attack one another unless there was an urgent need to do so, and I wanted to give players a bit more certainty in their tactics. One suggestion I made was to let the challenging army roll a twenty-sided die in battle and only allow the defending army a twelve-sided die. My team-mates decided this was not the best idea, as it would encourage unnecessary battle initiation (which would also hinder our efforts to facilitate ally and betrayal dynamics), and possibly make the game play a bit too confusing (we already had two types of dice and a third may have been too much to deal with). I agreed with their reasoning.

My next suggestion was to introduce a power-up where a player could effectively double the strength of his army. Each player would be given a token that could be played only once during a game. This token would double the value of each of the player’s dice for that roll. David and Jeremy met the idea enthusiastically. What this would mean in terms of game play was that a player with a power-up token knew he had a much lower risk of losing a battle when playing the token against a player without the power-up. It also introduces another aspect to the decision making in that a defending player with a power-up played against him has to consider whether battling with the distinct disadvantage should play his own power-up to lower his risk of losing, or save the token for a more devastating effect later in the game. It would also be possible that one player wins the game before all players have used their tokens, so this places extra pressure on players to find the best time to use the one-off power-up.

New resource tokens

We also tested an additional power-up where a player could double the number of spaces he could move an army by doubling the face value of the six-sided die. The implications of including this power-up are fairly trivial compared to the first one discussed, so I will not go into its effects in detail.

In the second test game we played with these power-ups, their potential became very clear. Jeremy had one army at the summit and had an unchecked path for his remaining two armies to reach the summit and thus win the game. I used my movement power-up to catch up to his army furthest from the summit, and then my attacking power-up to assist in defeating that army. As a result, one of his remaining armies had to restart the ascent from the outer tier, while my armies all reached the summit before he could get his recently defeated army anywhere near the finish.

In another instance, Jeremy and David had formed a serious alliance, one that they did not seem to be willing to break until the final move. They performed an allied advance towards my three armies, all of which were on the same space. Their two armies attacked my three, with both my opponents playing their attacking power-ups. Their doubled attack value barely beat the value of my three-dice roll, but all three of my armies were forced back to the start as a result.

The attack power-up has integrated smoothly into our game and given a greater sense of power to the players who still hold the token during the game. As I have mentioned previously, we feel that our game has been designed well, effectively combining the aspects of design taught this semester. Resultantly, the power-up adds to the excitement of the game, without making it unbalanced and compliments any decent playing strategy without causing any single one to be dominant.

I’d like to add a third power-up into the mix, just to see if the power of three works well for our game. This could be in the form of a defensive power-up (causing the current attacking power-up to only be usable by a player who declares a battle) that doubles the defending armies’ strength. Another option would be to introduce an immunity token, whose effect would be to nullify an opponent’s declaration of battle. I think that both options would enhance the game experience, but I prefer the idea of the immunity token, in that it adds to the unpredictability of the game, and could be worked into out game narrative well (in that historically, primitive armies have been known to avoid battle through non-violent means such as trickery or bribery). Ultimately, our power-ups have added another enhancing element to the game experience and we are looking forward to using them in future tests.

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.

The King then sets out three identical cards, face-up, to form the stack (identical cards share the same suit and pip count, for example three Aces of Spades are identical). Since there are four instances of each suit-pip combination, one other player has to have a single card that is identical to trio of cards the King has initially played. The player who holds this card at the beginning of play is called the Jester, although he does not make his identity known to the King or the other players. At this point, there are two teams: one being the King and his Jester; the other consisting of the three remaining players. As the name suggests, the latter team’s objective is to capture (or rather defeat) the King (and Jester) by discarding their cards before the opposing duo.

Play passes to the right after the king’s initial turn, where the next player attempts to make a discard by matching the number of cards the King played (three in the first play) but with cards of a single pip-value that are higher than the cards played by the car. So at this point, if the King has played three Fives of Hearts, the player with the fourth Five of Hearts becomes the Jester, and the player sitting to the king’s right (who could incidentally also be the Jester) must play three cards whose pip-value is six or higher. Players take turns trying to trump the last discard until all players pass (on account of not wanting or being able to trump), or the highest-value combination is played; in this game the Two is ranked the highest, then the Ace and all the way down to Three.

When no other players can make a move, the stack is removed from play and the last player to trump the stack sets out any number of cards with the same pip-value (for example, two Jacks). The play passes to the right, where the next player has to try to trump the first play of the new stack (to continue the example, the next player can trump by playing two Queens, Kings, Aces or Twos, but not any fewer or more than two). Play continues until the King and Jester are both out of cards (at which point the Jester reveals himself and declares victory) or the other three players have discarded their hands and declared themselves non-Jesters (and thus win the game for themselves).

We only had time to test the game once, but it is easy to see that this is a fun concept for a game. There were several issues however, some of which I raised to the designers. During card dealing, players became a bit bored while waiting for the 200+ cards to be dealt. I suggested that cards be split up in stacks of approximately 40, and each player shuffle his cards without looking at them. The cards should then be put together and then distributed crudely in small stacks of ten or so cards at a time, When the cards had all been dealt, each player could count his cards (without looking at their faces) and place any cards exceeding his share in the centre, where players who needed more cards could take them. There is certainly a need for the four decks of cards in the game, but given the bulk of physical cards in that quantity, it is important that the designers make the initial set-up as quick as possible, so as not to detract from the game experience.

Another issue I raised was that the game should have individual objectives for each player. For example, if a player won the game by being on the winning team three rounds, it would even out the slight imbalance created by the two-to-three makeup of the teams. Since all players would compete under the same conditions, it would make the game fair for all players. Furthermore, the game doesn’t take very long to play, so by introducing the need to win several rounds, the significance of winning, and thus the attention paid by players towards the game, would be greatly enhanced.

Capture the King looks like a promising game design. Its props are minimal and simple, and the game concept is very straightforward. But since the game takes a while to pick up, the designers need to ensure that they can convey the rules clearly to new players. It is quite clear that it is this aspect of the design that will make or break the game’s success, and I hope that our feedback can assist them in doing that.

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. However, it is very easy to see the possible moves by each player over the next few turns from the current game state. The small number of player pawns and the symmetrical board layout contribute significantly to this.

Match between system and real world – The game has a distinct military conquest theme, so we have included objects and events, such as armies and battles, whose roles in the game match their significance in real combat. We believe that players only need a few games to get understand the game mechanics and start developing their own strategies, but that comprehending the significance of the game’s objects is very easy.

Recognition rather than recall – at each turn, players perform the same process to make their move. First, they roll their six-sided die and choose an army to move. Then, depending on the opportunity to battle an opposing army, they declare a battle or ask the next player to make their move. This heavily repeated sequence means that players do not have to remember a range of different options in different scenarios. There are more complex elements to moves that can occur during the game, but they follow the basic moving process described here.

Aesthetic and minimalist design – while we have not finalised our board design for the presentation, the shape and layout is very clear, and we will only need to make decisions regarding board materials and colours. Player tokens are easily identifiable and are well distinguished from the resource tokens. The board spaces form clear patterns and there is no unnecessary information present.

Green is very close to a win

Our design satisfies the other of Neilsen’s guidelines, except for help and documentation, mainly because we haven’t produced a formal game manual. We may compliment the manual with a cheat sheet that quickly illustrates how to make a move and how to execute a battle.

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.

We’ll start with NPC conversation. Speech is represented by large text sitting in the lower portion of the screen, much like closed captions. In fact, the captions appear even when the speech is voice-acted as part of a critical path-related conversation. Any important people, places or objects are highlighted in gold text, to stand out from the basic white text. Captions are shown on a transparent black background, so that environment elements do not interfere with the readability of text. Finally, when the player has read through a long passage of text, he (or she) can close the dialogue window, or scroll back through the conversation to go over parts he does not fully understand. This prevents the traditional RPG problem in which players who miss important parts of dialogue are forced to readdress the NPC and read through the entire passage of text for a second time.

The game world is not easy to navigate – but it is easy to find your way around.

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.

Movement is performed by holding the stylus tip (or thumb if I’m feeling lazy) on the touch screen, between the character and the intended direction. So to move north, I would press an area of the screen above Link, and he would move in that direction until I stopped pressing. Jumping from or up to high areas was integrated into this movement gesture – if the Link was commanded to walk off or into a ledge, he would respond by jumping and then resume walking.

Link can be made to somersault – useful for dodging enemies – by drawing small circles in the edge of the screen. Even though the game world was generally presented in a top-down dimetric view, the circles drawn mapped well enough to a side-view representation of somersaulting, so the gesture wasn’t too hard to understand or recall.

To throw the boomerang, equip it and draw the path you want it to take

Wielding Link’s sword was also intuitive. To perform a stab, I would have to ‘draw’ a quick stroke from Link’s position to the point I wanted him to stab towards. Swinging the sword was simple a matter of drawing a line in front of link, parallel to his shoulders, to simulate the path taken by his blade’s tip. Finally, Link could be made to hold his sword outwards from his body with two hands and spin full circle, to slash enemies close by in all directions. This was done by quickly drawing a circle around Link.

There are other interactions Link can make with the game world with the stylus. One of the trademarks of Phantom Hourglass is making notes on the area map. Instead of important messages and locations being marked on the map by the game, it was up to the player to record this information. In order to do this, I would select the map from the game menu, and then use the stylus to write or draw on it. Instead of a command to erase text on the map, I would also have to select the eraser tool, and run the stylus over the screen to erase my markings.

These are only a few of the interactions in The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, but it is easy to see what Nintendo have achieved with an excellent mapping technique. On top of the decent narrative and melodramatic characters, the controls have made the game a pleasure to play.

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! Actually, I rather liked the idea of out-of-the-classroom learning and hope that future offerings of this unit continue this teaching method. We had to come up with two games using some of the provided props. Our idea for one of the games follows.

Our first game involved taking turns to throw a football at one another (can you guess that the group was entirely composed of males?) in order to force eliminations. We created an order in which players took turns to throw the ball. Player A would toss the ball high in the air, at which time the other players ran away from Player A, without leaving the designated playing area. When the ball hit the ground, Player A was to rush to pick up the ball, declaring stop when he had retrieved the ball. The other players would stop in place and Player A would attempt to kill a player by throwing the ball at him in attempt to hit him. If the player was hit, he would lose a life – three lives lost resulted in elimination. If the player moved from his position (that is, moved his feet – dodging with planted feet was permitted) he would be immediately eliminated.

After the throw, once the ball had touched the ground, the player designated Player B would then run to pick up the ball as fast as he could, also declaring ‘stop’ when he acquired the ball. In the meantime, the other players moved as fast as they could to get away from the ball (and thus the player whose turn it was to throw next). This play continued until the last player had his throw and then Player A had his second turn. If a player threw the ball out of bounds on the full, he would lose a life.

There were several instances of the actor-counteractor relationship observed. The player throwing the ball was attempting to attack a player, while the targeted player counteracted by leaning away from the ball. If a player knew that he was going to be targeted in the next turn, he could also counteract by ensuring he ran with greater effort during that turn. There is also the action of the next active player to grab the ball quickly at the start of his turn while the counteractors attempt to flee out of range in the same interval. Lastly, there is the role of defenders as actors that attempt to lure the attacker into losing a life by standing close to the field boundary and hoping that the attacker throws the ball out of bounds.

Some of the rules were made up directly out of a need to satisfy the requirement that there were distinct actor-counteractor roles in our game. As a result, I felt that our game was more exciting that if we had just been told to make a game without applying any of the theory. I feel that we have already applied this particular aspect of the unit theory to out board game effectively, but it has been interesting to see its direct effect on something as simple as a game we made up in a few minutes.

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. Players that choose to advance their armies together are defensively stronger but move at a much slower pace, while those that move armies over large distances can reach the top faster, but are at greater risk of encountering (and losing) a battle.

In later games during the play test, I introduced a board with a slightly different layout. This new board featured tessellating hexagons that spread out from the central hub space. The spaces on each tier were now 18, 12, and 6 for outer, middle and inner tiers respectively. I personally found that this gave more room for players to make their initial moves without falling into battle, and discouraged trivial battles on the outer tier. Battles on the inner tier were not any more frequent as with the previous board, but this was because the middle tier was used more as a strategic platform that on the other board.

Even though I have encouraged my group members to create a different board design, I feel that the one we have now is very suitable to the game experience we are trying to make. The board encourages the forming of relationships between players, whether by working as passive allies on lower tiers, where battling is mutually destructive; facilitating destruction of ramps as a game tactic; or forcing battles on higher tiers between winning players. Three appears to be the ideal number of tiers, as two would be too easy and make ramp-building a frivolous game dynamic, and any more would make game tactics difficult to decide upon and also depreciate the board’s ability to convey the game state.

I suggested that we keep our current rule of army movement only being allowed in one direction (clockwise), but that players can move any number of spaces up to that shown on the die. Giving choice to the number of spaces to move gives the player more control over his tactics, but this is ultimately governed by chance: the number rolled. Restricting the direction of travel forces players to overtake opponents’ armies throughout the match, and sets up possibilities for combat. It also means that a player can’t simple collect nearby resources and build ramps near his base; diminishing the game to a simple game of chance to see who can get the highest dice rolls and thus reach the top unchecked in the smallest amount of time.

As I expressed last week, I think that the underlying theory we have applied to this game design has meant that it is very exciting and easy to tweak. We are much closer to realising a balanced game that rewards players for working with tactics that involve forming alliances, betraying those alliances, understanding risk and reacting to changes in the game state. I feel that all the group members are contributing effectively. If our game design creates a great experience, my part in that will be that I did not allow my team-mates to introduce complex passages of play when there were already other complex rules present. As the game stands, we don’t have any really complex concepts, and I’d prefer to keep it that way.

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. If this is declared by either owner of the pawns involved, a ‘battle’ ensues, in which the opposing players roll dice, the loser moving his/her token back to the start. Although I haven’t comprehensively described the game, I think that there is enough information there to give an idea of what we are trying to achieve.

The board consisted of three tiers, with the outer, middle and inner tiers having 16, 12 and 8 spaces on them respectively. This allows some breathing room for players on the bottom to get their pieces out onto the board, while increasing the chances of battles occurring on the top tier. It also makes the fight for resources much more intense towards the top. I felt that the board seemed a little too small, even for three players, and that there should have been more spaces around the bottom tier. This was because when one of us lost a few battles and had our armies (pawns) sent back to the start, he would find it difficult to get back in the game.

Resources were spread fairly evenly around each tier, and since each quadrant of the board had equal space per tier, distributing them evenly was easy. However, I think we need to explore the possibility of these resources being spread a bit more randomly. At present time, we are not allowing resources to be moved between tiers; they can only be used to create a ramp on their original tier. So it wouldn’t be an arduous task to test a different distribution of resources at the start of the game.

Battles are not as exciting as I would have hoped. When Player B moves his piece onto a space occupied by Player A and one of them declares a battle, each player rolls one die for each token he has on that space. The player with the lower roll total moves all of his pawns from that space back to his starting space. We used six-sided dice in this situation, although I had planned to use 20-sided dice, but hadn’t acquired them yet. In no instance did we see two armies (two dice) defeated by a single army (single die), even though such an outcome is mathematically possible. This is not what we wanted; however it supports my push for a 20-sided dice battle system. If my estimations are correct, using 20-sided dice gives a higher chance for the single-army player to beat the double army than six-sided dice do.

Of course, this is just an initial play test, and these outcomes are to be expected. What I must say though, is that we had the fun we expected to, and I believe that this is a direct subsequence of the aspects of competition, alliances/betrayal and chance that we have purposefully weaved into our game. I can see that the game concept is a great one, and that realising an excellent gaming experience will simply be a matter of tweaking the subsystems we have created.