#IGB220 Reflection

[fulminata14]

Postmortem - Asteroids

This is a postmortem reflection on my second game made in the IGB220 workshops - the Asteroids game Soul Stealer.

For this game the elevator pitch came to me very naturally, and I found a mechanic and story that I liked with relative ease. The only problem I had in this regard was using the base assets we were given to make the platformer made the story/mechanic not make too much sense, but this could be easily rectified by me using other free assets or making my own so it isn't really a big deal.

Learning about utilising different screens was interesting, and although I didn't think of it while I was developing, the feedback I got about my tutorial disappearing too quickly helped me realise that menu screens and the like would be easy to do to help show tutorials, as well as a pause menu to stop the game at any time.

Reading Chapter 9 of the Game Design Workshop this week led me to think about how I want to approach playtesting for future workshop projects and assignment 3 later on. I think that the one-on-one playtesting style where you just take notes on what is occurring would be best for my playtesting, as until now I have just gotten all my playtesters to play at once and then give me their feedback.

In terms of gameplay feedback, playtesters said that it wasn't really clear what needed to be done in order to stay alive, and that they were dying too quickly before they figured out what was going on. This has helped me to realise the importance of playtesting, especially with people who don't know how the game works, as my understanding of the game's mechanics led to me staying alive for much longer than the playtesters. Seeing playtesters play also helped me to understand that it was important to make sure I fine tuned variables to make sure that the experience wasn't too overwhelming.

In order to improve this game, I would probably add a menu screen that would display tutorials, and lore on the game, as well as a difficulty select option that would change variables such as life decay and enemy health to enable players of different skill levels to get similar levels of enjoyment and satisfaction from the game. I think that I have been able to improve a lot more since the first prototype we made in the workshop, as my mechanics worked well and I understood how I could make them work in the game easily and quickly.

References:

Fullerton, T. (2018). Game design workshop : A playcentric approach to creating innovative games, fourth edition. CRC Press LLC.

[flvskgamedesign]

About me and this page

Hey, my name is Finn Savill Kestel (n10880551) and I am a Game Design student at QUT in Brisbane Australia. I have always loved video games and after years of deliberation I finally decided to study the art of creating them. Currently studying the Fundamentals of Game Development or IGB220. This page's purpose is to keep an informative diary/journal of my creative process throughout the semester. I will update this blog as often as possible with ideas, images, mistakes, lessons I learnt, and reflective thoughts.

[jxcksjournal]

Elevator Pitch for "Coin Quest - The Beginning of the Pinkies"

For my first IGB220 prototype i will be designing and creating a lightweight platformer called "Coin Quest - The Beginning of the Pinkies"

As a general rule of thumb i used concepts from the textbook "Game Design Workshop" by Tracy Fullerton to fuel my ideas for the game. The main being the concept she explored from one of Nintendoes lead designers; Shigeru Miyamoto. Who mentions that your childhood is a great place to start e.g., hobbies, experiences and feelings from when you were young.

Elevator Pitch:

Coin Quest is to be a loose representation of one of my favourite activites as a kid, collecting shiny things around the woods around my house. Including collectable gold coins that add to your score, that must be collected while overcoming harmless obstacles such as the slimey creatures named "Pinkies" as well as using simple jump physics to navigate the vertical terrain.

The whole game is designed to be simple and have no tough/intimidating obstacles due to its target audience, it's rating of General (G) is reflective of this.

Target Audience = Younger kids aged 6-10

Designed to be a sort of replacement for the real life version of finding shiny objects when they are unable to e.g., weather issues, location and such.

Future posts will explore the process of creating the game and look at the mechanics i have implemented.

Thank you for reading!

[jjmakesgames]

shower thoughts with jj: one sheet and one page finals

Hi, here’s the final versions of the one page and one sheet. Enjoy.

talk soon,

jj

[yuki-the-odd-eyes-player]

Playtesting in Spooky Month

Me and my team did some playtesting on the 26th of October.  Overall when playtesting, they all said roughly similar things while also picking up unique things such as clashing art styles, no Background music, and how the character I designed looks really pixelated (which is my fault as I may have saved it at an extremely high resolution).

[spirit-of-ambition]

Introduction/About

Hi I’m Flynn, and welcome to this blog/reflective journal regarding IGB220. I Study a bachelor of communications majoring in Advertising and Public Relations, with a video game design minor (hence this unit).

My interests lie in social and story games, specifically favouring indie games such as ooblets, temtem and hades. I think games are a great medium to present art and bring people together. My goal in the games industry is to become a community manager and publicist/marketing solutions for indie dev’s. The strategies implemented by Digital extreme’s Rebecca Ford for their game warframe really drove this ambition.

Forming a nuanced and experienced understanding about game development is crucial to my goals as the success of indie developers can be attributed to a transparent brand community. Creating a transparent community means effectively communicating the game’s development progress, player experience and game design goals.

Here are some links to the games I developed in this unit thus far:

Platformer - ‘Slash and Dash’

https://games.gdevelop-app.com/game-1d7f9233-189e-46ad-b07b-cdf61484bb20/index.html 

Asteroid Game - ‘P.U.C.K this’ https://games.gdevelop-app.com/game-27731123-1e71-41eb-9dd5-5873531a0b95/index.html

[jackneverposts]

Introduction

Hello and Welcome! This is the first of many posts reflecting on the progression of my work in IGB220 - Fundamentals of Game Design - as I iterate, research, and analyse game concepts and prototypes.

My interest in game design stems from both an interest in narratives we can tell with games - through written stories and stories told through game mechanics - as well a the experience that player’s have through interacting with the games.

In this unit I hope to learn how to tell stories through gameplay design, and how this gameplay can effect players; how to teach them mechanics on a steady incline and how to keep gameplay fresh and interesting as a game reaches its end.

[lisahinton]

About me :)

|| Hi my name is Lisa and I study Interactive and Visual Design and Games Design at QUT.

|| I have a high interest in the development of games as well as app development as I love the endless amount of creativity, uniqueness and ability to produce an engaging experience for others! I enjoy playing games myself and have always admired the effort and attention to detail developers put into games to make them an amazing and fun experience! I would love to get involved in the production of games and see how they create them.

|| My aims and objectives while studying IGB220 include getting involved in what game development looks like and how it is done. My main aim is to be able to produce engaging gaming experiences that are fun for others to play through the program GDevelop. This unit will be beneficial as the more experience I have in developing games, the more knowledge I will hold in terms of what I find challenging and what are my strengths. Through blogging weekly, I can track and reflect on my progress and document my struggles and successes.

|| I am excited to begin this game development journey!

[harrisonigb220]

IGB220 Week 1 - About Me

Hello and welcome to my IGB220 blog series. Throughout the next 13 weeks I will be documenting my experiences, processes and learnings during the course and developing a game in GDevelop.

Who am I? My name is Harrison Schuch and I am an Information Systems student majoring in Computer Science at QUT with an interest in game development. While my current career goal is not necessarily to work in game development, it is something I am extremely passionate about and given the opportunity wouldn’t pass up. I have been working on projects in the Warcraft 3 World Editor since I was 12 years old, delivering on some game concepts and failing on many others, due to its robustness and being provided a large amount of assets to play around with. I have worked on Tower Defence, Online RPGs, Wave Surival, and basic RTS games (Harrison Schuch, n.a). 

Even though using the World Editor is considered modding, you can modify the base game so much you change the standard gameplay loop of Warcraft 3.

During the first week of my course I read the first couple of chapters of Fullerton’s Game Design Workshop book (2018) and it gave me some interesting insight, which I could reflect on my previous hobbiest work within Warcraft 3. One concept of particular interest was the idea of making the game for the player and targetting that demographic by making a fun gameplay loop. Just explaining this sounds particularly obvious however over the course of my experience of developing RPGs for Warcraft 3 you could easily lose focus of the gameplay for features and the world, and when finally playing it... it sucks. Fullerton (2018) provides a solution by involving playtesters constantly and allocating time to play your own game to keep the mindset focused on the players experience.

Sources:

Fullerton, T. (2018). Game design workshop : A playcentric approach to creating innovative games, fourth edition. ProQuest Ebook Central https://ebookcentral.proquest.com

Harrison Schuch (n.a). CroMoX’s Map Resources. Retrieved from https://www.hiveworkshop.com/members/cromox.201832/#resources

[jakesigb220-blog]

About Me/Introduction

Hello, I am Jake Somerville, a university student currently studying a Bachelor of Games and Interactive Environments at QUT. This blog will be all about my reflective journal for the IGB220 unit.

My interests in game development include; the design of levels and characters, world-building, story development, and art and texturing. 

In this unit I hope to gain more knowledge of the game design process through creating simple games in GDevelop, as well as working on improving my time management skills. 

I also wish I started blogging way earlier

[fulminata14]

Post-Mortem - Platformer

This is a postmortem reflection on my first game made in the IGB220 workshops - the platformer Soul Shift.

The thing that I struggled most initially was trying to make something unique. I was trying to make something totally new which was making it difficult to think of a platformer early in development. Once I learned that all I needed to do was try and put a fun twist or interesting change to the base game, it was much easier to come up with a pitch that I was satisfied. I also found that making an interesting world the game took place in or a story helped my enjoyment in developing the mechanics and levels for the game.

This type of development makes use of what is talked about in Chapter 2 of Game Design Workshop, finding different ways to engage the player. The ways that I find work best for me when I am trying to develop something that will engage the player is an engaging story or interesting mechanic that can draw the player in.

In terms of development, I learned a lot of useful ways that the GDevelop engine could be manipulated for it to perform in the way that I want it to. Although I was able to make the player character swap gravity when they landed on an enemy i wasn't able to make movement function while the player was flipped. I believe that the cause of this was my lack of understanding of how functions and events worked properly in GDevelop.

The feedback I got for my game was mostly positive, and the criticisms I got were related to the short length of my prototype and the mechanics that I needed to improve.

In order to improve my devlopment process for future prototypes I need to take more of a deep dive into how the mechanics of GDevelop function together and plan out the way that my elevator pitch will interact with GDevelop.

References:

Fullerton, T. (2018). Game design workshop : A playcentric approach to creating innovative games, fourth edition. CRC Press LLC.

[ereefhardi]

Ereef Hardi

so here is a short post about ME

I am a first year student(2020) who is currently studying Games and Interactive Environments ( Games Design ) in QUT. 

This blog will act as a reflective of my IGB220 unit and also a place where I could follow-up with the interesting events in games development industry. 

I have always had a thing when it comes to video games. Learning games design really made games more interesting as I get to learn the effects of gameplay on humans instead of just playing them for fun. 

 I hope that one day, I will generate fascinating ideas and make games that brings not only joy but also education to the world.

[gesutav]

A bit about me.

Hello, my name is Tavis Craik, and I am a first year Game Design student at QUT.

This blog will act as a reflective journal for my IGB220 unit and things I find interesting in the industry. Within this unit I hope to acquire substantial knowledge about the game development process and the ins and outs of the video game industry as a whole.

Video games have been apart of my life since I can remember with my first console being the original Xbox, playing games like Star Wars Battlefront I and II.

I want to make games that bring the sense of joy that I have always experienced and provide awesome titles to the generations to come.

[dmurrqut]

Assessment 3/Transform Rescue Postmortem

We've finished up our report for assessment 3, and development on the prototype is done alongside it.

One aspect of the readings that helped inspire inspire our design process for Transform Rescue was the textbook section on Agile development methodology in chapter 13 (Fullerton, 2018).

We didn't make use of a proper Agile development process or properly set out a sprint or release plan, but we did define specific goals and tried to prioritize the development of specific features within short, specific timeframes. Given our limited time and resources, this allowed us to produce something useful (for the purposes of IGB220) quickly, and it also allowed us to rapidly pivot on some design specifics as our understanding of the prototype developed.

On reflection, it would've been nice to double down on this process from the beginning, but it may have ended up being an overwrought process for the type of task we have. However, it's something that I'd like to explore in more detail in future game design projects.

One thing I'd change about how we developed the prototype would be having a more thorough mechanical prototyping stage at the start. Our first stretch of work on the prototype resulted in a bit of a slapdash scene that wasn't built in a way that made it easily reusable (through global objects and events, for example) and it wasn't set up to test the forms and abilities available to the player. In other words, some of our early prototyping work wasn't done in a way that made future development easy, and it wasn't as helpful as it could have been for exploring mechanics.

One thing I'd change about the design of the prototype itself is the lack of an ability for the basic human form. This was a point of disagreement in the team, but when we first started working on the prototype, I felt that the "Human" form should have a unique ability like every other form.

Playtesting seemed to confirm that having a form without any abilities was indeed confusing, and it felt like a bit of a waste to me. Discussion of this kind of change made it into our report, but the short version is that I would've liked to add a simple projectile attack to the Human form, to make it useful for longer and less confusing to the player.

Above: He jumps, but little else.

Sources:

Fullerton, T. (2018). Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games. ProQuest Ebook. Retrieved from: https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/qut/reader.action?docID=5477698

[jjmakesgames]

shower thoughts: one sheet and one page progress

I underestimated how much space an A3 sheet of paper has.

The one sheet is really fun to make. I’m using it as an opportunity to create a poster for Molly Malware on Vectornator as a way to almost sell the game when I pitch it again for Assignment 3. I’ve also been using the one sheet as a space to explore Molly’s artstyle, and so far it’s going pretty alright. The one sheet is very pretty in comparison to the one page though.

The one page is massive considering the amount of information I need to put in and white space I need to leave for notes. I’ve added a lot design notes surrounding enemy types and initial level designs, but it still feels empty. I think it’s looking good though.

talk soon,

jj

[yuki-the-odd-eyes-player]

More thoughts rolling in

While working on the new project with my new team, I’ve came to realize a few things that I could’ve done better in my previous mini-projects: 1. During this project, there was a set plan, goal and style guide that was intended.  When I created my variants of games (the platformer, shooter and driving game), there wasn’t any set direction, it was simply just a hollow shell of an idea with little to no substance.  Due to having no set plan or idea, many ideas would roll in which isn’t entirely a bad idea, but then you’ll be getting conflicting information/ideas that may or may not work, reaching to the point where the motivation would possible just vanish, and the plan/game would completely drop.  This is probably why there is almost ALWAYS a game plan regardless on what’s happening. 2. I should also do things I also actually like instead of doing what my team generally wants, or what other people want more specifically.  If it isn’t something I’m entirely invested into, I feel like I fall out and never completed anything.  That, and ensure I have my own opinion spoken out, otherwise the project will become more of their project and less of “our” project, and avoiding to take too much control as it is a group project.