Gaming Project 2: Magic Writer

On October 7 2014, the freshman class was divided into 16 groups, consisting of 5-8 students. Alexander got into Team 13, consisting of 4 other students. The team previously had one additional member, but he quited very early because of personal matters. Team 13 consists of the following members:

Alexander Nordfors – Producer

Adam Salonen – Lead Art

Daniel Granqvist – Lead Sound

Olle Staffas – Lead Code, Quality Assurance

Sebastian Larsson – Game Designer

All the groups got the assignment of making a Speceshooter PC-game (where the player shoots large amounts of enemies while avoding their attacks) based on two random words. These two words diffirentiate between groups. Team 13 got the words Summer and Thaumaturgy, the capability of a magician or a saint to work magic or miracles. A representative of each group would later present their game on November 5 in front of the class, the teachers and some third year students.

Team 13 would present a paper prototype (a method that helps developers to create their software through testing and user inputs) of the game for our teacher on October 23 (the other groups presented on other dates that week). We would also write a Concept document (CD) to explain our game in great detail, a One-page Design (OPD) to summarize our game on a single page with pictures and bullet points, and, during the last two weeks, write individual Project reports to describe, analyse and summarize your process and role in the project. The CD and OPD would be submitted on November 7, and the individual reports on November 8.

Methodology

Social media

To get contact with each other outside of school, we used Skype and Facebook. Early in production, we started a Facebook group in our name: ”Team 13”. We used Skype to share files and exchange feedback/information. We also used Facebook for the same objective, but not that often since we used Skype virtually every day during the project.

Tools

We used the following programs on our Alienware laptops to develop the game.

• OpenOffice Writer: where we write down our ideas and such on the following documents: Concept Document and our individual Project reports.
• Microsoft Powerpoint: which we used to present the pitch for our game to the entire class.
• Microsoft One Note: which we used to write and design the One-Page design.
• Adobe Photoshop 2014 CC: a computer program that allows users to paint and edit pictures. We used this to paint some artwork for the pitch, the One-Page Design, the Concept Dicument and our individual Project reports.
  
  One of the main side assignments of this project was to make a paper prototype . We used it to test our ideas and see if they would work in our main game.

Theories

We used two video game theories to make this game.

* MDA: A analzying tool where you break down a game into three components – Mechanichs (The game's rules), Dynamics (The game's behaviour based on player imput) and Aesthetics (the player's emotional response when playing the game) – in order to describe the games various aspects and their relationships with each other.

* 8 Kinds of Fun: A theory which help you make a set of game rules into something fun. The different kinds of fun is: Sensation (Game as sense-pleasure), Fantasy (Game as make-believe), Narrative (Game as unfolding story), Challenge (Game as obstacle course), Fellowship (Game as social framework), Discovery (Game as uncharted territory), Expression (Game as soap box), and submission (Game as mindless pastime).

Result

The First Attempt

In our first group meeting, on october 13 2014, we decided which role we would have in the team and pitching our early ideas. I was appointed as the producer of the team. We pitched ideas about the summer aspect. We got the mutual idea about a wizard who's taking a vacation on a summer beach. Our appointed Game Designer, Sebastian Larsson, had a whole list of ideas for a game on his notepad, combined with conceptual images. He presented the idea that this game would be a typing game, taking the game Typing of the Dead as an example, where you defeat zombies by typing pre-scripted words. The typing aspect would be our main core mechanic in the game, by we had to see on how to incporparate it in both our paper prototype and our PC game.

During the meeting we came up with the idea to make a typing game where you go around the beach and talk to the people there. In this case, you would tell insults to them. When you start a conversation and tells a insult, it'll start a Pokémon kind of battle mode between the player and the person you talk to, where both eschange insults to each other which damages one's self esteem. Here the player chooses one out of three insults, and one of these can deal greater amount of damage than the rest. In order to choose this extra damage insult, you must inspect the person you're battling with and look for potential weaknesses. For example, you're battling against a fat guy and give a insult about how fat he is. You can also have friendly conversations with other people on the beach and ask them if they know persons that has potential weaknesses, which the player can exploit. Examples of that would be that the friend is afraid of spiders, or have a broken love life.

We also discussed on how the camera for the rest of the game should operate. We choose to have a top-down isometric cameraview when you go around the beach, and then switches to a battle mode-view when you insult people. To give the game its Aesthetic aspects, we used Challenge (since the players will be challenged all the time by selecting and writing down insults fast) and Narrative (since humour will be big part in the players experience in the game). We discussed on how to make the game more engaging and difficult, so we implemented enemy levels, where low-levelled ones (like small children) could be easily defeated in combat, while high-levelled ones (like teenagers, adults and lifeguards) requires that the player levelleles up before combating them. That way we established player progression as the players needs to first take down the low-levelled characters before they go for the higher ones.

We also added a power up (that benefits and add extra abilities to the player character) which the player could use to read their chosen targets mind and find their weaknesses. That way you gain insults that will damage the target even more.

The first paper prototype.

On October 18, we designed our paper prototype based on our core gameplay. We wanted it to be engaging and doable, but it was a bit difficult because we haven't seen a game that has fast-paced typing and decision making before. We wanted to make the typing mechanic fun so that we don't have to come up with a completely new gameplay mechanic. But we didn't find a good way to simulate the typing mechanic, so we mostly figured out on how to make the decision making engaging and inplement the mechanics and other aspects on paper.

We agreed to have at least five characters in our paper prototype. We would write the dialogue and insults to these characters. When playing the prototype, the player will get three insults to choose from and decide what insult deals most damage. We found this to be very shallow, so we implemented a mind reading ability (as part of the magician's magical abilities) with a riddle about the target's weakness, which the player must figure out. At the end of our meeting, we figured out that this would turn out pretty bad. It would be pretty insulting for the players and it would not work in the paper prototype at all. So we scrapped the insulting idea all together

The second attempt

Didn't have the time to write this done because of time constraints.
Summary: Sebastian came up with a new big idea to replace the insult mechanic. Instead the entire game would be a Typing shooter, where the player is a magician who battles against horrific sea monsters emerging from the sea and wants to enslave the magician and all people on the beach. The player fight these beasts by typing tre pre-generated words and throwing these at them. We came up with new powerups, moving mechanics, the idea that the items would have two different properties (that some items can deal more damage than other items), and different kinds of monsters.

The second paper prototype.

Didn't have the time to write this done because of time constraints.

Summary: We implemented the new ideas for the game in a new prototype, which went really well. Sebastian already did some independent work on it, and we helped him to finish it by using paper, cartons and pens from the artclassroom. We fine tuned it during other meetings before we presented it to the teacher, thnaks to player imputs. :

 How did the individual assignments go?

I didn't have the time to write down texts about the second attempt and second paper prototype in this report. It's a big shame...

The individual Project report was the hardest assignment to do in the project, since you must record evertyhing that you've done troughout the entire project. As this was an individual assignment, you couldn't get so much help from your teammates, though you could get writing assistance from the teachers at school. This was very useful so that you could get early feedback and advice.

However, the report was collided with other assignments which would be handed in before the report. This was not good, because we must prioritise the ones that must be handed in first, and then move on to the next assignment.

I think it went quite well, at least for me. There's always room for improvements in the report, but then I would work with this, like, forever. I wouldn't call it perfect, because I've never written a report or text of any kind that can be branded as “perfect”, but atleast it's somewhat readable and instructive.

Analysis (Discussion)

What we did wrong

The thing I did wrong was to not writing diary entries during all our meetings, lectures and other project-related activities, since those would've helped me greatly with writing this report, and also post this on your school blog. I haven't blogged at all during the project, which is a bad thing since it's mandatory to blog at least one day per week.

I'm quite a reticent and empathetic guy who rather wants to listen to others rather than spreaking with them in person. I wanted to change that by taking the role as the producer, the guy who has the last word and serves as the group's leading figure. But I think my leadership was handled pretty poorly, since the rest of the group was more talkative than me. I wish I could've been more present and open during the meetings and the project overall. I would say that our Game Designer was the giant mastermind in our group and would serve as an excellent producer and lead artist. But I digress.

What we did right

I think the very best decision we did for this project was to remove the insult aspect of the game. Because if we would still use it, I think most people will get very upset when they play the game. And it wouldn't work in the paper prototype at all.

For the pitch presentation at November 5, I was choosen to present the game. But because I'm a pretty silent guy and can't speak in front of an audience in english, I decided to back out and chose the Game designer as the new presenter, as it was he who came up with most ideas for this game. During the pitch presentation, he gave us an awesome show, and one of the best presentations that day. I wonder how bad it would be if I would have standed there.

What i've learned

Being a producer for this assignment, I've learned much about responsibility. Your role as the one that has the last word in all discussions and meetings.

I've learned how to prioritice different ideas, instead of having all ideas that you can come up with implemented into the game. I've always thought that all ideas would be useful for something. But here, thanks to the restrictions and feedback from the teacher and the teamates, you need to you use the best ideas and scrap the rest.
I've learned that a paper prototype is a extremely good tool to test your ideas for the game and see wether they could be implemented, or get scrapped.

Thoughts about the project

I thought this project went very well. We did a very smooth job by having meetings both in person and on Skype nearly every day since the start of the project. It was also good that we had restrictions on certain parts so that you don't have make a overly complicated game, which would require more explanations in the presentations and writing on the Design document and One-Page Design.

The team I was part of must be one of the best of all teamworks that i've attended to. Unlike in previos teamworks where there were some who didn't do any kind of work or effort at all, here is a team that is 100% focused on the work and make serious efforts on it. And if you get stuck on the way, you can always ask your teammates for help and advice. And that's true teamwork. I would really like to work with Sebastian again. He was the big pillar of the team, a mastermind with artistic hands. The other teammates were also pretty good to work with. Olle the QA and Lead Code was a big help with fine tuning our texts and analysing the different aspects of the game. Adam the lead art and Daniel the Lead Sound gave some interesting ideas about certain parts.

It's a little bad when at same time you do the project you have an another course to attend to; Written and Spoken Communication where you write different texts and having a speech. Although it's nice that the course is game orianted, it's still a pain in the ass to write these long texts for several days, and then for further more days after you get feedback from the teacher.

The lectures was both very useful and interesting to listen to. These showed us how we should write the texts and how to present yourself and your game for a wide audience. It was also really good to get pitch-help from the teachers, because without it I think that both my and the other groups would've had really lousy presentations. The paper prototype was really fun to do.

Overall, this was a really fun and educating assignment, and I would love to do something similar in the future.

Feedback from others

Before we presentet our paper prototype to the teacher, we allowed students from the other groups to test it. They thought it was fun and engaging, and gave us new and interesting ideas on how to fine tune the game itself.

On October 23, we presented our paper prototype it to our teacher, Marcus. He liked our game very much and gave us useful suggestions to use for the PC version.

• Adding several monsters coming from different lanes so that the player would need to move left and right to defeat these.
• There could be smaller monsters that can be defeated with just one item, and greater monsters that requires players to expose their weak spots in order to defeat them. That, both the moving system, would greatly improve our simplistic weakness sytem.
• He suggested a new power up which enlarges the item which the player is about to shoot, hitting multible monsters at once.
• He suggested that we should showed more about the aesthetic aspect of the game, on how the players would feel when they play the game. He explained that the design decisions for the video game Resident Evil were made to further promote the games aesthetic aspects.

Feedback from the pitch was mostly positive. The third-year students was very excited about the game and asked many questions about the different aspects. And the teacher was pleased with the presenttion.

Our teacher got this to say about our game and presentation:

"One thing that was really good was how you went through how the game works. That's really great. There are so many terms and genres thrown into the presentation, right from the start. The game is described as a top-down RTS, Tetris, typing, etc. There are so many different genres to describe what the game is, so I get confused. I've played your paper prototype; it worked really well and I thought at that point what your game is. But now I'm really confused, now I have no idea anymore. As a stakeholder, I gave you the task that I have ordered a space shooter game. We come back and get a top-down RTS Typing Game. That's not a direct link to me.

It was very cool that you went through exactly how the game works. You talked slower (than the other presenters) and had a focus. You didn't try to describe it as something completely different."

Other third-year students got this to say:

"You said it was an educational game and that you have to write. But how do you balance the writing aspect and the words that you should learn from it? "

"What has the game to do with Tetris? It looks more like Space Invader or 'Typing of the Dead' to me. Because it's like what Marcus says; it is the different video game terms and genres that makes it very giddy. It was much clearer when you described the gameplay. "

"The main idea is that you write words on a keyboard. But how do you control the characters? How do you get this game to work on mobile devices? There are quite a lot of mechanics. You have both the need to write the word in time pressure, you have to choose the right words and you have to think on what shoddy properties the word has that can give a potential critical damage against monsters. As an indie game geared towards the casual market, it's a fairly complex gameplay."

"This question may not be that important, but there were two girls in the last two slides. May you be able to change avatars? "

I think that certainly the theird year students was interested of our game, though it was only them and the teacher who asked the questions for our game and to the rest of the groups. But I don't see a problem with that, and I think that the other freshman students was interested in our game as well, because I saw a lot of people handed up after the first questions were answered.

Summary

Overall, the project went really well for Team 13. We've managed to create a game with intresting and deep gameplay, cute artstyle and global rankingboard which I'm sure will attract a lot of players. I'm lucky that I was a part of this successful team, I think this is one of the best groups that I've worked with. Thanks to all the discussions that we had on Skype, the meetings at school were we eschanged ideas and built the paper prototype, helping Sebastian to train his Pitch-presentation, the positive feedback from the teachers and students alike, we've managed to create a successful piece of work.

My great advice for future game developers is to have a team that is 100% focused on the assignment, to contact each other in person or via internet about ideas and such and test this by making a paper prototype. Make sure that everyone has something to work with, and if a teamate has a difficult obstacle in his way then the team will come to his rescue. Everyone must particiapte, no one gets left out. Though keep the discussions on the internet when everyone is awake, do not have nighttime discussions like my group had, it's a pain to scroll through every single slide of comments since the last time you logged in.

Also make sure that you choose a role that is best suited to your abilities. If you're a good artist, then go for the Lead Artist-role. If you got lots of interesting ideas and can describe them really well, then go for the Game Designer-role. If you can program stuff, than go for the Lead Code-role. If you can record music and/or sound, then go for the Lead Sound-role. If you can analyse texts and ideas and change these for the better, then go for the Quality Assurance-role. If you're a guy with experience and with the ability to lead and represent a team, then go for the Producer-role.

You choold defininetely not work in a team with just some incompatant morons who don't care at all about their duty and role, and therefore won't do any progress and will be a worthless asset in the team. You chould consider to work in a team which you feel most confident och comfortable with, a team that sits on the same boat and always count on them in order to sail from Sweden to China with a small sailing boat. It will be a long journey, but you will be greatly awarded when you finished your journey. And when you do work, you do it with the team and not by yourself. That's what game design is; teamwork and collaboration. And if you got the right team for the job, you'll might create wonderful pieces of work. Or atleast have a fun time with those who share the same passion as you do: playing and creating games.