Stay within your experience level

Do Challenge 4-1 in the text. It does not have to be an Activision/Blizzard game. It cannot be a game that already has a commercially-available board game adaptation. (CheckBoardGameGeek if in doubt.)

I would ask this time that you stay within your experience level. For example, if you have no game design experience prior to this course, do the basic challenge, even if you are capable of doing the others, and post in the Green Circle forum. You can certainly tackle the more advanced constraints on your own, but I’d like to try it this way to see if you get superior peer feedback. Thank you for cooperating.

Make a post on the Forums before next Monday. Then, as with last time, find at least two peers at the same difficulty level, and (if you are Blue Square or Black Diamond) three people at the next lower difficulty level, and offer constructive feedback.

Mini-Challenge

Here’s another quick thing you can try if you get through all of that. Propose a rule change to Battleship that will make it better than the original, and find a way to express it in less than 135 characters. Post to Twitter with the #GDCU tag. You have until Monday. One rule change per participant, please!

While not required reading, I can recommend these two articles for their relevance to today’s topic:

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  Veteran designer Raph Koster provides his own list of game bits that work well for prototypes.
  
• 
  An article on paper prototyping, written for an audience of video game developers.
  

The Process of Game Creation & the Game Design Document

Published April 10, 2008 Game Design , GM Free 9 Comments 
Tags: design document

If you’ve been following the Game Maker activities, or if you had a look at theSkillset Industry Standards, you’ll probably have realised by now that developing a ‘major’ game title can be a significant task – writers, game designers, sound designers, visual artists and more must work together to create the actual game.

So what sort of team – and what sort of development process – is involved in developing a game?

To get you in the mood, read section 1 of the Gamasutra article A Primer for the Design Process, Part 1: Do.

Now, let’s consider the case of an educational game, where as well as the game development team, we require input from educational specialists.

Here is one possible view of the Game development process, (again taken from the online article Game Development Process):

The concept development phase takes the germ of an idea for a game, works it up as a game outline, and tests it out on potential audiences. This phase ends with the production of a concept document, as discussed in Quick – Find Out About Some Platform Games….

The aim of the Design phase is to produce a design document that can be given to a game development team – the actual programmers, artists and sound designers – and turned into a working game. The game itself is likely to go through several stages of development as it tested.

What do you think the testing phase is designed to uncover?

The testing phase is a crucial part of this style of game development process. As well as uncovering potential programming bugs – such as in-game objects not working properly – it must also check for inconsistencies in narrative structure of the game, consistency (and completeness) of artwork, as well as testing the gameplay: is the game engaging, too easy, or too hard, for example.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves…

The Game Design Document

Arguably the most important phase of the game development process is the creation of the game design document.

Program Ace is a game development/project management company that offers a range of services from “Full Cycle Game Development”, through “Art Assets Creation”, “Animation and Cinematic” development, “Level Design” and “Programming”. If you look at their Game Development Process (they have removed part of the process diagram for commercial reasons), you will see an outline of how they structure a game design document.

Design Document

The design document defines the game concept as well as functional and technical specifics of the game. A design document consists of 3 parts:

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  Game Concept Document
  
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  Game Design Document
  
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  Technical Design Document
  

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  Game Foundations (Game Features, The Essence of the Gameplay, Characters, Gameplay Elements, AI)
  
• 
  User Interface (Navigational Chart, Functional Requirements, Objects of the User Interface)
  
• 
  Graphics and Video (Graphics and Animations, Animated Insertions)
  
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  Sounds and Music (General Description, Sound Effects, Music)
  
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  Plot
  
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  Level Description (The graph of the Positional Relationship of the Levels, Queue of the New Objects Implementation, General Level Design Description)