Week 4

Games this week
What have you been playing?

• DOOM (2016) by id Software / Bethesda

• Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades (2016) by Rust LTD.

Scrum
What did you do last week?

• XXXX

What are you doing this week?

• XXXX

Are you having any problems?

• Me and my group have been having issues in terms of communication. As discussed within the group before class, there have been issues in terms of  

Learning Journals!
Open your learning journals, share them with your team, and provide each other feedback!

• I unfortunately couldn't show anyone my learning journal for the simple yet very embarrassing fact that none of my other weeks have even a single word recorded in them as of writing this (March 8th, 2022). For this reason, I couldn't get any feedback from anyone

MDA Identification
What are the mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics that we see in this week's video?

• Death Stranding
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGjGXnCiFyw 

• Mechanics: 

  • Stabilization - the player has the ability to manually stabilize themselves when carrying cargo in order to not lose balance and drop the cargo, which could result in a game over if the cargo is destroyed.

• Dynamics: 

  • XXXX

• Aesthetics:

  • XXXX

Skill Atoms Briefly

• Example skill: Dodging

  • Player Action - Player presses X

  • Simulation - Rapidly moves the player avatar in a direction

  • Feedback - Player observes avatar animating on screen

Identify a Skill Atom
Skill atoms are useful tool for breaking down mechanics and how they interact with players for the purposes of analysis.

• Game: Settlers of Catan

• Skill: Building a settlement

  • Player Action - Trading resources to build a settlement.

  • Simulation - Placing the settlement on the board.

  • Feedback - The settlement is on the board.

  • Synthesis and Filtering - The settlements start generating more resources based on where they were placed.

Mark's seven P's for game development

• Prior

• Planning (and)

• Preparation

• Prevents

• Piss

• Poor

• Performance

How are games designed?
You've been at this for a few weeks now, what have you learned about how games are designed?

• XXXX

Let's talk about feedback?
The importance of providing useful actionable feedback and being able to take constructive criticism.

• Good feedback is something that the designer may not have already thought about.

• Bad feedback is something that the designer already knows about, something that is pretty obvious, and is therefore not very helpful.

• Relevant feedback is something that is relevant to what is currently being worked on and tested.

• Bad feedback is technical advice given for exactly how to change something in a game by people who are not even game designers.

Brief 1 Contents

• The document needs:

  • A design for your changes to your selected board game

  • Your predictions on how the changes would impact the game.

  • Results of play testing that describe and charts what the changes actually did to the game.

  • Reflection of these testing results (also individually on your Google Sites).

  • Show calculations related to your modifications.

    • The statistics and probability changes in your game arising from your mod.

    • Also present these as part of the results of your testing.

  • Postmortem the mod – what would you change now?