Nyaggin'

"The Art of Game Design" Book Note #1

I am now studying Game Science and Design in Northeastern University, and our class assignment suggested us to read the book The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses and post comments on the content. I thought it would be a good idea to keepa record of my thoughts & what I've learned, so I decided to post them here on my blog site.

Inspirtaion

Although the assignment required us to start from chapter 9, but I started on chapter 7 because I found the chapter title very interesting.

Inspiration comes from real-life experiences.

This is the first keypoint I get from chapter 7. It reminds me of two ideas I've came up with during my college days.

Idea #1

The first one originates from the experience of me going to school everyday. So in my undergraduate university, the dormitory is in a separated area from the main campus.

Because they are separated by a through highway, we students have to walk a long route through an overpass everytime we want to go to the opposite area. Beside of being a little annoying, it is all good, except for one problem: The overpass is too narrow and there are many scooters sharing the route. So from time to time, usually when there's a traffic peak, a bunch of scooters would coincidentally block the entire overpass so that no one could move at all.

I thought, "hey, can I make a parkour game of a student trying to walk across the overpass?" At the start of the game, the camera will take a glance of the entire slope—it doesn't seem long, but soon as the game starts, the player would find out they're never reaching the upper end, and there will be infinite upcoming pedestrians & scooters blocking their way. If they ever hit anything, they will be pushed all the way back to the bottom. Sort of like a modern day Sisyphus!

Idea #2

The other idea also has something to with the overpass. During the COVID pandemic, most Chinese students were quarantined in the campus. But because of the natural division between our dormitory to the campus, the university had to come up with some ways to restrict our mobility while being outside of the campus crossing the overpass. What they did is to set up a time limitation—they would keep a record of the time you exit/enter the dorm & campus gate. If you were hanging around outside for more than, say, 15 minutes, you will be given disciplinary measures and an school official will call you over for a talk.

This was really causing many troubles for us. Say if we'd like to have a quick breakfast someewhere just around the campus gate, it was just impossible because a 15 minute interval was too short. This made me wonder if I could use this limitation as a game challenge—the player would be required to do some extra tasks for their friends & classmates during their trip to the campus, but soon as the time's up, their view would gray out, strong heartbeats and breaths could be heard, all indicating an upcoming death if they don't go back to the campus quickly. Instinctively, the player would drop the tasks and try to head back ASAP. But if they failed to head back in time or just simply ignored the indications, eventually all the bad signals will go away and the player could again see the beautiful blue sky, the red flowers & blue water, because they had broken free from the absurd regulation and are embracing the naturally granted freedom.

"My Silent Partner"

Come on, that Kekule story is so old and completely a cliché! Even if it was himself who told the story I still won't agree that any sane scientific researcher should ever buy it. Let's just try to take another example next time, shall we?

Intention & Experience

To make a good game, a game designer must know their players.

Ah yes, a very relatable point.

When I was studying for the college entrance exam as a middle school student, I was always struggling on writing essays. But soon after I entered college, I suddenly found out that it's not that hard anymore for me to write! So I tried to reflect and analyze what's the exact reason, and the conclusion I came up with was—writing is never hard if I knew for what I am writing. For the college entrance exam essays, the topics are always very vague questions, like the ones you would get in a language test. And to get a good grade, students often have to guess the topic proposers' intention—to try to match their expected side of view. I myself never liked thing on those topics and so I didn't know in what tone should I put my idea. But things changed in college: everything I need to write there is always something closely related to my professional skills. I always knew

  1. In detail about the topic I am writing;
  2. To whom I am writing;
  3. What effect on the audience I am expecting to make;
All of a sudden I'm doing pretty well on all writing assignments (still except for those nonsense theses)!

BTW, for this blog I'm not writing specifically to impress the professors to get a good grade. I just want to share my real thoughts to any reader of my blog! :-)))

Back to game design, it's all the same thing. The goodiness of a game is always rated by the players. So to make a good game, the designer must know what their players like or dislike. And this requires reflection: The designer should try to simulate in their mind the experiences a player would have while playing, so that they could see which parts of their game are doing well, which parts need improvements and which parts should be removed.

There's also a passage I wrote for another assignment stating my thoughts on reflection as a game designer. Read that as well if you're interested!

On the player side, I hardly think there's gonna be some omnipotent rule that fits every player's appetite. Each player have their own favorite gameplays, and it would be hard for a game to try to fit for everyone. It's better to only focus on one specific type of players at a single time. For family/party players, we got Nintendo; for hardcore RPG players, we got Dark Souls; for creative players, we got Minecraft... Etc, etc.

Though, would it be a good idea to try to make a game that converts players?, like what a missionary do? Like, it contains the necessary elements to lure a certain type of player into playing it at the first stage, but soon as they get further in the progress, the players would have to engage more in the truely intended gameplay. I don't know, but it sounds evil!