Week 2

Pre-class activities

Polishing the Boots - Designing 'Downwell' Around One Key MechanicIn this talk, Downwell creator Ojiro Fumoto will share his experience about the development of his acclaimed game Downwell. The lecture is centered around the way Ojiro discovered a fun 'gimmick', and designed the entire game around it trying to...

"Polishing the Boots - Designing 'Downwell' Around One Key Mechanic"
Presented by Ojiro Fumoto
From GDC 2016
Length: 27 minutes, 51 seconds

Task: Watch this video on the GDC Vault about the development of Downwell - a downward scrolling platformer. In it, the developer talks at length about how they polished a single mechanic to make an excellent and very popular game. This is great advice for your projects, and should give you some indication on how you should design your game to be manageable with the time you have!

Status: Not yet watched.

Week 2 slides

GAD180_Week2.pptx

Key points and notes

MDA in Unravel Two is:
- Mechanics: the physics system
- Dynamics: how the yarn interacts with the physics system
- Aesthetics wasn't touched upon :(
The waterfall system of working on a project is a very primitive system as it is a one-way process that is only designed for perfection and has no leniency for mistakes whatsoever. Avoid this unless necessary.
The Agile/Scrum system is better as it allows for mistakes to be corrected before finishing the project.
AAA companies don't only use the Agile/Scrum system because with much larger projects, it's more time-consuming and expensive and ultimately results in the game taking more time to even finish.
Don't always use the Agile/Scrum system if time becomes an issue.
GitHub is good for when you are making tweaks to your program and want to keep the good version in case something messes up, which eliminates the need for making multiple separate copies.
GitKraken is good for managing projects, especially when working as a team.
Do's and don'ts of Git Kraken:
- Do work in separate Scene files so work from others isn't overwritten.
- Do create branches (i.e. UI branches, Audio branches, etc.).
- Do push your work (save) often so there's always a recent backup.
- Do choose when it makes sense to merge your work together into a single scene.
- Don't work on somebody else's scene file unless merging.
- Don't work on the game while a merge is taking place.
- Don't perform merges without telling the team first.
- Don't force merges if it throws merge conflicts.
- Don't update Unity.

Games this week
What have you been playing?

Receiver 2 (2020)
by Wolfire Games

Receiver 2 is not your standard FPS game. The main premise of the game is to use both your provided firearm and your wits to avoid or disable enemies such as turrets and drones while looking for tapes that you must listen to to progress. The main aspect of what makes this game unique is its realistic interpretation and implementation of the firearms, in that all the functions are simulated, every part of the firearm has been modelled down to every spring and pin, and malfunctions are simulated as well (to a much higher frequency, which is in line with the game's lore).
I have been trying to hunt all 34 achievements in this game, and I have managed to unlock all but 1 achievement, which is to beat the game 5 times. This may not sound like a big deal but if you actually try the game, you'll notice that this game gets VERY difficult, and to beat it, you not only have to have things like the firearm functions memorized, but you also have to have the upmost focus at all times.

Image: Receiver 2 website picture, by Wolfire Games (2020) [1]

Image: TPT2 cover image, by @Den_S (2012) [2]

Theme Park Tycoon 2 (2012)
by @Den_S

Theme Park Tycoon 2 is a game created in ROBLOX, available to play for free. The main premise of the game is to essentially start up a theme park and generate money from it to invest into that theme park. You can buy all different rides with the money you make from the theme park and expand your theme park (with land expansion and, of course, more rides) to bring in more people, generating more money.
Me and my online friend have been playing this game for maybe a couple months now and we have been working together on a co-op theme park, where we have put in (or written down to put in) our best ideas to really make the theme park something special. Currently, we have covered 6 total sections of land (out of 36) with rides and attractions, and we have big plans for the future such as a pirate-themed area and a roller coaster on top of a hill that will surround the park.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II Open Beta (2022)
by Infinity Ward, Raven Software, Beenox, Activision, et al.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II is the newest entry into the Call of Duty franchise, being the direct sequel to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019), developed by multiple studios with the leading studio being Infinity Ward and Activision at the helm of publishing (as always). The Open Beta for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II was made publicly available to download for free on all platforms on September 24th, 2022 at 1:00 PM EDT (which was September 25th at 1:00 AM AWST), and featured the multiplayer mode of the game with a select amount of game modes and guns to choose from.
Me and two of my friends decided to download the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II Open Beta through the Battle.net launcher on the day that it was made public and played a few rounds of various game modes. Personally, I think that while some of the features shown in this Open Beta and also talked about in the prior MWII showcase hosted by GameSpot on YouTube were pretty cool, I thought this multiplayer experience, at least for the Open Beta, was nothing truly special. The pace was slowed down compared to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019), which is a good change from the absolute crackhead speeds, but it felt a bit like playing Call of Duty: Vanguard, which didn't have a very good multiplayer experience. We got bored of it after a while and stopped playing.

Image: MWII cover art, from Kalinine (2022) [3]

Scrum

What did you do last week?

Last week, my group brainstormed the idea for our game, and came up with the idea "Cubicide", which is a set of microgames featuring characters made up of simple shapes with faces on them, and the main character, Jimbo, has made it his mission to kill one of the other characters, Tristan, for being on his phone in the cinema, rudely interrupting Jimbo's movie experience. My group then set up a game design document for this idea (which needs to be further worked on).

What are you doing this week?

This week, we've quickly written up some slides for our pitch deck of our idea. It covers the basic areas of our game according to the requirements. After class, we will then get started on working on the game design document to expand on the idea and cover more bases about the game. This will be what we present for Project 1.

Are you having any problems?

I am having a bit of a problem with managing the work from GAD174 and this class, as both have work that requires a good amount of time to do well. What I can do to solve this is dedicate more time to my work, as well as better organize things and monitor the amount of work I put into each project (e.g. I have put way too much work and time into the week 1 class activity for GAD174).

In-class notes

Notes

Do learning journal reflections per project, not per week.

Feedback for pitch deck

Mark microgames that aren't essential to the story that can be scrapped if time becomes short.
Instead of the game continuously being a happy comedic game, make the theme of the game more psychological horror where everything begins to crumble after the murder has taken place, signifying the psychological toll of murder.
Pay attention to the message of the game. Use the crumbling psychological horror theme to assist this.
- Example 1: Murder is not worth the psychological torment.