I wont take ages to explain as hopefully the essay will do that for me, anyway here goes nothing
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Design issues faced in making a Key Stage 1 game
During the creation of games there are many risks and problems that a designer will need to overcome, these design issues must be considered so that the final resulting game is one which is enjoyable, appropriate for the audience, at the correct difficulty and many other design issues. A designer must consider every issue that may arise, and even more so within a Key stage 1 educational game, much like the one that I am creating alongside a team of people at university. This essay is dedicated to discussing design issues that our team has faced during the creation of Circuitry Absurdity.
Our first design issue that nearly every games designer will face is how to make a game actually fun. First the designer must understand what the term 'Game' truly means. Greg Costikyan, in his article 'I have no words I must Design' (2002), breaks down the term 'game' and explores various tools for how a games designer may create a game themselves. Costikyan writes about Interaction, Goals, Struggle, Structure and Endogenous meanings. For a successful game all must be considered before going into more detail about what is required within the game to make it 'fun'.
- Interaction between player and the game is imperative, choices with meaning and obvious outcomes to how a player responds can make the game draw the player into the game world.
- Goals that are set to the player must be purposeful, they must make the player adapt to achieve. Just giving goals is not enough however.
- Competition (or as above, struggle) adding an extra element, as the goals increase the difficulty range advances
- Structure is another important area to consider as a small change in structure leads to a large change in player behaviour. This behaviour can be controlled by the designer by introducing certain goals
- Endogenous meaning, possibly one of the most important to the gaming medium as giving the player something in game that has no actual significance in the real world can give the player a reason to complete a game.
Costikyan summarised all these terms with one sentence with which we can use to decide what the term 'game' truly means, and thus how we could start to design our project.
[A game is] 'an interactive structure of endogenous meaning that requires players to struggle towards a goal'. (pg 24)
Looking solely at this single tool set would not profit our project as using only these terms can lead without a doubt to a playable game, however above I have used the term 'Fun'. To keep KS1 children playing our game before giving up bored and uneducated, we need to consider making our game fun to play.
Costikyan also explores Marc LeBlanc's Taxonomy (pg26), 8 terms that he used to describe how a games designer could create a pleasurable experience for the player.
The terms:
Sensation - Visuals, Audio, Tactile or even Muscular sensation
Fantasy - The fictional constructed world of a game
Narrative - A story within a game
Challenge - As above, struggle or competition
Fellowship - Simply put, the community surrounding the game
Discovery - Litterally exploring a game world or just revealing hidden information
Expression - Self expression, how the player portrays him or herself within the game
Masochism - Submission, allowing yourself as a player to be drawn into the games world
So now I have baffled with terminology how is all this related to creating our group projects final product?
Circuitry absurdity is a puzzle game in which the player must complete a circuit using all the components available running wires from the battery to the components within a certain amount of time to be awarded with a gold, silver or bronze medal.
Considering all the terminology above posed a new design issue, that we needed to include the majority of the terms in order to create a compelling game.
Straight away we could add fantasy to the game using a level select feature to create a 'world' or as it were, a house with toys to fix. With the target audience being set at a low age the toys we included would help to immerse the player into the game, making them believe they were fixing their own toys and thus a form of masochism had been included. With a level select discovery became a system to unlock rooms within the house, to find what new toys can be fixed around the various rooms.
The narrative of the game is very loose, Mr Sparks is helping the child to fix all the toys in the house, working from one room to another. This caused a few issues we needed to overcome, do we need a stronger narrative? Is the educational value more important and so should we focus more on the game play itself?
To appeal to the correct target audience we need to make the game compelling to the ages 5 - 7 and thus a more involved story was to be included. Along with the target audience we needed to consider the endogenous meanings. Children love to collect things, be it medals in games or shells in real life. We cannot give the child a shell, but we can give them medals for completing the game, even if the medals mean nothing in real life, through play testing I discovered that the gold medal meant a lot to the player, where his friend did not achieve. The player was therefore presented with a goal, to claim all medals within the game or to even beat his piers by acheiving greater heights and better scores.
This introduces our competition, or struggle in the game and even fellowship. Utilizing a score system to show off the previous players achievements meant each player had something to beat, a time that his fellow community member had set.
Interaction between players is always important however the player having meaningful choices within the game is also imperative. We have created the choice in which level the player wishes to tackle next however there is not a definitive meaning behind each choice, as the player must complete all levels to continue anyway.
I could continue with how we overcame multiple design issues however I have covered all the major areas above. Other aspects of the above terminology I will cover but in less detail.
Having a concept to work with is one thing, being a 5 man team however we needed to decide early what the art style would be, I quickly locked down onto a previously existent style which we dubbed 'The Jimmy Nuetron Effect'. Using the 3D style from this children's TV show, our 3D artists knew exactly how we envisioned the game looking, creating a perfect 'sensation' base for the artistic pleasure.
'We call the representation of one medium in another Remediation'
The artistic style of the television show Jimmy Neutron was used as a springboard onto the artistic style that we took for our game, the representation of a previously existent look, feel and style recreated similarly within our game. A style that will appeal to both genders and therefore a vast target audience
Originally our game was going to appeal to both genders by allowing the player to ave an on screen representation of themselves however this was worked out due to safety issues and such like and so we had a new design issue. How can we make the game appeal to both genders?
To overcome this we set up each room to contain toys that would appeal to both genders or a specific gender.
Gender in gaming is very male dominated, Gamesindustry.com held host to the 'United Kingdom National Gamers Survey 2009'. A survey which discovered in terms of gender children between 8 - 12 had a more male populated games intake than females, where males would play for over 3 hours more than females a week.
Taking this into account we could aim our game more at a male audience however due to this being an educational game which teachers could use to inform students how to create circuits, classes will be filled with boys and girls and therefore our game must comply with both genders.
Looking back at Costikyans assessment of the tools of game design, challenge is one very important area that we had to consider when designing our game. A design issue that without looking into would make or break or game completely. Thus tasked with a play test with the target audience, we needed to see exactly how difficult the game would actually be for the players we were aimed at producing the game for. Its one thing having challenge in a game, its another not being able to complete it due to its intense difficulty! The children managed to complete levels within a certain amount of time however seemingly they couldn't achieve golds as the medal times were set too quick for them. The mechanics of the game therefore became a design issue, we needed to lower the complexity of the level designs or heighten the medals to become more achievable for the target audience we had been briefed.
Adding a tutorial to the start of the game was also extremely helpful as success rates heightened due to a less word based tutorial and a more interactive 'play along' style tutorial. Giving the player the chance to see what his or her actions did in an un-timed version of the game gave them the chance to build up a 'perceivable consequence' for each action. As Doug Church discussed in his work 'Formal Abstract Design Tools' (1999) this is 'a clear reaction of the game world to the action of the player'.
Giving the player this preconceived knowledge of 'what will happen if they do this' allows them to make more informed decisions later on in game thus allowing them the ability to explore themselves different methods to acheive their goals.
Through play testing we have avoided the design issue of young players not understanding the concept of the game, or not being able to play it all together.
With every game that is created or designed there are a multitude of design issues that need to be ironed out quickly and effectively. Our game was no exception. The way we over came each issue was extremely useful to everyone in the group who for many this was our first experience creating a game suitable for a specific market.
To overcome many of these issues we just looked back at our childhood and considered what we would find 'Fun', using Leblanc's taxonomy we could then relate them to real game situations and then effectively utilize them in our project.
Another method was to actually let the children play our game for themselves. Let them tell us what was broken, or what needed fixing. It was a particularly helpful session finding out our tutorial was too confusing and therefore a design issues arose of how to fix this problem. Looking at what works outside of video games was also helpful to us, to decipher what children wanted in an educational game we looked at successful art styles and other games that appeal to this particular target audience, in other words Market research.
Looking back at all the design issues discussed above and remembering the Tools for creating 'Fun' in a video game can help in my future of games design especially considering how we can overcome any problem that brings itself into existence. Breaking down the issue and tackling it as its own entity and then adding it back into the game as a whole, this is what builds a game up to being as massive as they can become, although our project was small compared to the multimillion selling games of today, this project was a good exercise to practise. The knowledge that all these design issues exist is always good to remember especially when under a deadlined project!
References
Costikyan.G, (2002), I Have No Words I Must Design, Tampere University Press, Tampere
Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin (2000) Remediation: Understanding New Media MIT Press
Todays Gamers, (2009), http://www.tnsglobal.com/_assets/files/Factsheets_UK.pdf
Doug Church, (1999), Formal Abstract Design Tools - Gamasutra, http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3357/formal_abstract_design_tools.php
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And there we have it, 2009 words and over 5 hours of work later (gladly not in one sitting!) I have completed another essay. I say completed but I am probably just going to have to change a lot of this to reach maximum (or at least a decent grade!)
I hope this was an interesting read, if you managed to read it all...
Ross, Out.
I hope this was an interesting read, if you managed to read it all...
Ross, Out.
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