#igb220
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What is this blog about?
By Shannon Tetley
I'm creating this blog to document my journey learning game design and it will be submitted as part of my assessment for the class IGB-220 taught at the Queensland University of Technology. It's my aim to create an interesting record of my learning and to share what I learn with others in an informal yet professional manner.
Why am I studying game design?
Well, I'm actually studying for a bachelor in IT believe it or not. My major and passion is in computer science and I'm studying minors in mobile/cloud applications and user experience. I'm learning game design for the purpose of gamifying mobile apps but that's just the academic reasoning. I've loved video games from a young age and have dreamed of making them for a living since I was a teenager. I chose to study computer science for job security and only discovered my passion for it after beginning my studies. Studying game design for my user experience minor was a happy accident but due to my interest I have embraced it enthusiastically.
How did I become obsessed with video games?
I became interested in them by watching other people play them from a young age. I've always had an active imagination and a lust for adventure. I enjoyed playing make believe and video games are a natural extension of that for me. There's nothing more fun to me than to be immersed in a fictional world were you can explore and act out fantasies.
I don't remember the first game that I ever payed but I do remember being frustrated when I had to stop playing other peoples games when I had to go home from a friend or families house. Eight year old me was determined to get hold of my own games, so when my parents gave me the option of pocket money or a PlayStation for Christmas I gave up the pocket money 😂.
Army Men: Air Attack developed by The 3DO Company
My first game was Army Men: Air Attack published by 3DO. I loved this game because I got to play with army men that could actually shoot! I loved the light-hearted and comical story of this game but it was all about the action for me. From that point, I collected games over the years and even swapped consoles with friends, including an N64 which introduced me to the world of Nintendo. In Lecture 1; Fundamentals of Game Design (Conroy), we discussed how culture naturally forms around games and play. This resonated with me, given my own experiences, sharing and playing video games with friends. My friends and I have incidentally formed a unique culture of our own which stemmed from our mutual ownership and playing of games throughout our lives.
What kind of gamer am I?
While studying in my first week of game design I came across a concept I found interesting written by Richard A. Bartle (Bateman, Step 4). Professor Bartle talks about the four main types of player, from the point of view of a game designer.
My interpretation of the four gamer types are:
Achiever - That friend who brags about getting 100% in every game they get their hands on.
Explorer - They love to learn the lore of the world and discover all the cool things in the game world.
Socialiser - Plays the game to hang out with friends or to meet new people. Often found hanging out at the grand exchange in their favourite MMO.
Killer - They're those SOBs that hang out on your ship spawn killing you in Sea of Thieves! Yes I'm still salty about that 😠, they didn't even take my loot 😂.
Metroid Prime developed by Retro Studios
I can safely say that I'm an explorer. The first game I ever got truly obsessed with was Metroid Prime developed by Retro Studios. To me, Metroid was about exploring an abandoned and corrupted alien world. I got hooked on finding all the lore walls to piece together the story about why the world was corrupted and to find out what happened to the mysterious Chozo who left behind such beautiful and intriguing ruins.
What do I hope to get out of game design?
My dream is to write backend code for games and to have the skills to turn boring old phone apps into more enjoyable experiences. Even if that dream doesn’t pan-out, this class will be a valuable opportunity to learn design practices which I wouldn’t normally learn in my more technical computer science degree.
Gaming has always been an integral part of my life. I’ve always been subconsciously aware of the culture my friends and I formed and I internally knew what kind of gamer I was – I just never had the vocabulary to describe it. Just one lecture of Fundamentals of Game Design, has prompted me to critically reflect on why my experiences playing games have been positive ones and making these links has shown me how I can tie academia to my game design.
So far, the theoretical concepts I’ve been introduced to have been very insightful and have inspired me to apply these theories to my own game design. I hope this class will continue to open my eyes to the concepts which make good games so enjoyable.
References:
Conroy, David. “Fundamentals of Game Design
Lecture 1.” IGB-220 Fundamentals of Game Design, 25/7/2023, Queensland University of Technology, Online. Lecture.
Bateman, Chris. Beyond Game Design : Nine Steps Towards Creating Better Videogames, Course Technology, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/qut/detail.action?docID=3136230.
#about#first post#description#blog description#QUT#Queensland University of Technology#Beyond Game Design#IGB-220#IGB220
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Assignment Submission
Due to time constraints and other assignments all due at the same time, I was unable to finish all the game assets. I do however have the run cycle finished so the player will actually see movement. I'm very new to pixel art and my unfamiliarity slowed me down significantly.
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Assignment 3 Postmortem
I really enjoyed working with my group over the course of this project. I worked with Aerin Larrazabal, Kellah Mcmenamin, Jack Wightman and we were all able to establish the roles that we would take over the course of the project.
I think that our group's ability to communicate over what we were working on made the assignment not that difficult, however getting to that point was a little difficult as none of us were very good at taking up a leadership role and organising exactly what needed to be done. I ended up taking a sort of leadership role in figuring out who would do what based on our different skill sets. We tried to follow the phases of production listed out in Chapter 13 of the Game Design Workshop book, with the addition of the existing prototype to build off. Our planning for the different elements of the game in pre-production phase was shown on the One Sheet and discussed in Discord calls the way we wanted the game to work. In the Production phase we worked separately but simultaneously to produce different aspects of the game to be combined, e.g I worked on menus and finding sound effects, while Aerin designed different art assets that we could use.
In the future to improve on the process we used, I would strive to document all the changes that were made better, as our group was a bit inconsistent as to what we recorded when we made changes. I would also try and do more playtesting in different phases of development, as most of our playtesting was done around the same point in development.
References:
Fullerton, T. (2018). Game design workshop : A playcentric approach to creating innovative games, fourth edition. CRC Press LLC.
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Submission and GG
The 3rd assignment and soon to be this blog are submitted and have taken the time to write a brief reflection on this unit as a whole. Though programming and game development are not my forte I was glad to see the usage of Gdevelop to help acclimate students to basic game development such as myself. This is my final semester and 2 years ago I thought my final semester would be all doom and gloom but this unit has been a very fun one to take part in while completing my capstone. I am worried that my knowledge of programming, games and design may interfere with my grades and I would hate to see my gradation delayed due to any of the units from this semester. My tutor was a great help in guiding me through any issues that i faced with the content and assignments from this unit and I do feel bad that the Tuesdays class i attended I was always forced to leave early due to a weekly meetings I had a roughly the same time after. I do wish my group members from assignment 3 the best of luck in completing the rest of their gamedev university journey and for job prospects beyond and hope to one day see their names on the credits of a game i just completed (yes of course I watch the credits and read them, I am not evil). It feels weird to be at the end of university, It feels sad that after 18 years of studying in school, high school, Ib and now uni that its just over. I also feel that I should have engaged more socially in university and that my time was wasted (sorry to the marker for trauma dumping in a blog post for an assignment).
But anyways GG and have a good one.
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Week 14 Thoughts
The semester is done! At the end of not just this semester but my degree as a whole! I was so glad I got to take part in this class, playing games has always been a passion of mine and to learn some of steps in game development as part of my degree has been so interesting and lead me to want to develop games in my spare time.
Working on the playtesting report has been great, as I've been fortunate to have three great group members in Umang, Samantha and Hannah who have all contributed to the final result. They each brought different skills and ideas to the table which made development fun.
Having my sister and her boyfriend playtest my game was very cool as my sister has completed a bachelor of games herself while her partner likes to play games in his spare time as well. It was very satisfying to finally finish our prototype and get testing with a cool progression of levels starting in a grass level then sand level then two spooky levels to finish. Halloween was the overall theme of our game as the player controls a pumpkin person who has escaped an evil witch and must reach the end while collecting as many points as possible.
It was fun developing a platformer as platformers would be my favourite genre of games so to see the inner workings of what makes them tick per say has been fascinating. With any project like this there are things to reflect and look back on with obvious things like "I wish I started sooner!" or "I wish I wasn't working on this at 11pm at night" with any university student. However, in terms of reflecting on the game itself I think making more levels would've been fun and perhaps fleshing out the existing levels as they are at the moment just about one screen each. Perhaps having secret rooms unlocked with the invisible platforms leading to them would've been cool. More enemies or rather enemies specifically themed to each level would've been good too but the functionality and difference between our enemies was good. Except I would've liked if the small blob actually did something rather than sit still and would've been better for our players but we had an idea of it being hard to spot that you must be careful for but perhaps was not the right execution of that idea.
I've grown to appreciate playtesting as an important step of the development lifecycle as I always perceived playtesting as this final piece of the puzzle akin to beta testing simply to find bugs. However, if done correctly and involving the right people it can extend to being part of this iterative design process where new ideas come up watching the game be played or from player feedback.
Again I'm very glad I did this class as an elective and want to thank the teaching team for a great first experience with game development as while I had done IGB180 last semester as an elective that was more analysis than development. I certainly want to work on making my own games as a hobby and maybe one day I'll return to university and complete a Bachelor of Games.
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About me :)
I'm Eyvind, an exchange student from Norway, currently studying for a bachelors degree in IT. I'm staying in Brisbane for one semester and am looking forward to this game development unit.
I've been playing a lot of games growing up, but never really looked into what it's like to create my own games. I mostly play online/coop games fps games, but occasionally some casual games like Minecraft, Stardew Valley and Cities Skylines.
Throughout this unit I will be making updates about my progress on this blog.
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Week 13/14: Assignment 3 Postmortem
It truly fills me with regret to say that I am very disappointed with our final product. The game functions, I'll give it that much, but its very barebones, I didn't expect so little to be changed since we first started working on it. Most of the code seems to work which is good and they at least used my sprite art, but it deeply saddens me to see essentially the majority of my animations discarded. I made unique animations for every movement and attack of both the player character and NPCs and to see that they have used none of them, I honestly can't believe it. I put in all that work and they just ignored it, even if they didn't that's what it feels like they've done to me. Weeks of work and they have practically cut out all of mine, this is atrocious. I will be posting some of the full animations below but having finished this project I think I can say for certain I would and could have done better working on my own and my last hope is that I pass this unit because I never want to work on something like this again.
The last reading we will be doing of Fullerton's 'Game Design Workshop' will be chapters 13-16. These chapters cover the stages and methods of development, communicating your designs, understanding the new game industry and selling yourself and your ideas to the game industry. The first two chapters I felt resonated with me as if we had just had better communication, made a better plan, held people more accountable then maybe something like this wouldn't have happened. Having finished this project the last two chapters feel more like recommendations for what to do after finishing development. Basically how to learn from your experience, improve and understand how this industry works and then being able to sell yourself in it. Knowing what I do now, I'll definitely be keeping what I have learned from this book in mind for the future.
I'm sorry to leave this one such a sour note, this blog was started at the beginning of the term and it tracks and follows my experience, my work and my journey throughout this course. It details a part of my life that is now shared with you and for it to end like this, it's certainly not at all what I wanted. So let me say this. Thank you for following my journey, thank you for reading this and hopefully you can take what I've written here as a learning experience because I sure know I have. Hope you enjoy the sprite art.
Fullerton, T. (2018). Game design workshop : A playcentric approach to creating innovative games, fourth edition. ProQuest Ebook Central
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Submission and GG
Having finally finished what has felt like a very long semester and getting the chance to look back at the unit as a whole I have some departing thoughts. At the first introduction of this assignment (assignment 1 blog posts), I was not thrilled as I do not like the process of blogging nor had much experience with it as a result. However, looking back on all three assignments now it wasn’t as dreadful of an assignment as I thought it would be. I found the task of blogging my thoughts and progress on the different milestones throughout the unit gave me a good chance to reflect and helped me further my understanding of what I had previously learnt allowing me to better apply the teachings for future works.
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The team's Asteroid Shooter
So overall, plenty of playtests mostly include how the control scheme is nice and a few balancing options, so after relaying this info to our programmer, he successfully adjusted the balancing, and increased the screen ratio as well, making the game have a better viewing experience.
Looking at this game again, it has come a long way from having a simple UI and fire mechanic, to having a bit more movement and battle options (such as boosting and placing bombs). Not only that, but the game also had some beautification, making it more visually pleasing, and can give the player visual clues on what's happening during gameplay. Although I was tasked on keeping the information down during playtesting, it was also important to relay player opinions and/or identify bugs such as during gameplay, when the player takes damage, they will almost permanently remain invincible as long as they're under another enemy, as if the invincibility timer constantly resets, causing the player to rack up an incredibly high score.
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Assignment 3 First Playtesting Session
For our first playtesting session, we had one playtester who had heard of our game and 2 naïve playtesters. The entire time playtesting was very enlightening as the playtesters found many flaws in our game but also had a lot of encouraging comments about it too.
Some of the flaws that were found were:
Playtesters being confused by the 2 different attack animations and how they worked (they were randomized).
The first attack animation, a poke, had playtesters feeling that its range was too short and didn’t want to use it.
The second attack, a larger sweeping attack, frustrated the playtesters when they couldn’t work out how the attack worked.
They couldn’t tell from the animation where the attack hitbox was.
It was not clear that the player needed a sword to attack the enemies.
Every playtester said that the speed of the moving platforms is too slow.
Some playtesters could not find the exit to the next level and suggested that arrows or signs would be helpful to find their way through the level.
Some playtesters got hard-locked in the first puzzle section because they did things in the wrong order.
The jump didn’t feel right for some of the playtesters.
Some jumps that the player shouldn’t have been able to make were possible, negating some of the mechanics.
Playtesters wanted a checkpoint because it felt too punishing if you fell in the water and died.
Some of the encouraging comments were:
They like the art style of the game.
They enjoyed the intro music of the menu screen.
The sounds and overall feel of the game was enjoyable.
The mechanics were interesting.
One thing that we noticed was that none of the playtesters interacted with the interactive menu screen however they all liked it once they knew it was there and said that it would have helped them understand the mechanics of the game better if they had known it was interactive. All in all the amount of information and feedback gathered was awesome and will help us to improve our game for the next playtest.
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Introductory post
Hello. My name is Michael Leung and I am a University student currently studying games design. I have created this account as a way to record my game design adventure throughout my time in university.
I enjoy playing strategy games and sandbox games such as minecraft and fire emblem. I really like how I can take my time and think whilst I play these games.
I'm very excited to see where this will lead me to in the future
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Week 13
Due to being new to pixel art, I've been struggling to create all the pieces for our game in-time. Here is the buttons & the platforms for our game. I would show the backing but it's literally just a blue square. The button looks blurry as it's very small and tumblr blows it up too much.
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Today marks the completion of the gam RAM! my team has worked really hard on this and I hope everyone enjoys it
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Assignment 3 Playtesting Post
Our first playtest was testing our tutorial level with someone from our workshop. I ran the session and spoke with the playtester, and Aerin and Jack recorded times at which events occurred and the comments that the playtester made. Playtesting resulted in a lot of useful feedback regarding the structure of the level and the order in which tutorials were given. I think that despite doing so much playtesting in the earlier workshop projects, I underestimated how useful it would be in a group setting, especially in how other group members were able to pick up on things that needed changing that I would never have considered. The results of the first playtest led to the addition of a main menu screen, level select screen, and a game over screen. We also streamlined the tutorial level so game mechanics that weren’t easily understood were a lot clearer. Playtesting will definitely play an important role in shaping the rest of the game’s development.
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Assignment 3 Postmortem
Much had been added onto the game as of the last blog post and many changes have been made for the final submission version. These changes include but not limited to
extra level added on
new enemy designs
new perks
new stats
playtesting results gathered
many bugs fixed
UI change
gun firing SFX
reload SFX
damage SFX
The main things we wanted to add last right before the playtesting we just completed was the use of sounds to stimulate player response and feedback. My main responsibilities were not that of game development on this final project but heavily investing into:
playtesting
survey
questionnaire
playtest notes
external part C playtesting
Part B report and structure
Demo video
This meant that for the report section the work was evenly split and for development I took the role of creating/finding royalty free sound effects and splicing them to be used in the game and bug fixing any issues that arose from this. A very annoying initial bug was 50 gunshot sounds playing as long as the projectile existed or gunshot sounds playing during reload. This was promptly fixed regardless and gave me further insight into how weird Gdevelop is when it comes to the SFX side of things.
Things I would want to improve was adding more design elements from Dante's inferno and tying it into the games actual mechanics as both the western and hell themes seemed very surface level each, something like Cerberus enemy type in layer 2 or having pits in layer 5 full of enemies. The western side could have tied more in line with the player as they are the central pillar of this theme such as having dynamite grenades or a lasso to pull enemies close to better effectively use the shotgun.
If I was to change one main thing in the prototype it would be the original mechanics I had as an idea for the original platformer game. So the ability to teleport between heaven and hell would have been an actual mechanic used and incorporated to help solve puzzles. The themes and enemies would be further expanded to have each layer being unique instead of same enemies over every layer, however this would take a lot of time a redesign. I would have loved to also more realistically have all 9 layers of hell as right now we only have 5 levels. This would also be to go back over the more boring levels and add more uniqueness to them such as lost souls in the background of the tutorial, the first level being larger and more open ended, the 2nd level utilizing wind and hail against the player, 3rd level should have its design be reworked completely as it does not fit with the theme, the lava in level 4 expanded upon or having platforms rise and fall from the lava. The 5th level is the most recent one added onto and shows the promising direction that could have been included in the remaining 4 levels if we were to ever to them, it incorporates usage of water that slows the player down.
Overall this was still a very fun project and game to work on and my team really put some effort into the project despite being very busy during end of semester.
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