Week_4_escape_game_part_1

Game Design

Week 4

Workshop

Activities:

1. Admin
2. Playing and reporting
3. Design challenge

Activity 1 Admin

Supervisor will check the design journals are all being maintained.

See if anyone continued development of the “territorial acquisition” design challenge

Assignment One

More detail next week but students might want to make a start on sourcing potential works that are candidates for a game and either bring them in or make notes in their journals

Games to play this week require PLUGINS, some may require DOS and / or INSTALL

Useful: DOSBox: http://www.dosbox.com

Activity 2 Playing and reporting: ADVENTURE and exploration held together by story

The main point of play this week should be taking note of the 4 DESIGN ELEMENTS in each game and the way that they work together – students must consider how the STORY element is evolving as a mechanic in its own right and as an embedded narrative

Text Adventure

Play Colossal Cave / Adventure http://www.ifiction.org/games/play.phpz?cat=&game=1&mode=html

Infocom games – Zork I, II, III : http://www.ifiction.org/games/index.php?cat=2

ZORK I: Dungeon

My initial play through of ZORK gives me a very mixed review as it was a lot of fun to see the game work with certain commands that seemed logical at the being able to interact with the world and having to form the picture from the story was engaging however it became very frustrating only having a very limiting knowledge of the language or "acquisition" (I had to look at  a wikipedia page to figure out how to move) I believe more practice with its system I might learn the language but that could be part of the game is to start with nothing and self teach yourself the game discovering new abilites and commands along the way.

As a modern and young gamer this became very frustrating and eventually unplayable as all games that I play currently clearly lay out the boundaries, rules, movement etc. Whereas ZORK feels to me like a lot of trial and error and because of my knowledge of programming  and user's interactions with computers and frustrations that users have that computers can't fill in that extra piece of information to understand. 

For example if a person incorrectly phrases or spells a word. "pick-up mat" will work whereas "acquire mat" does not.

Lack of communication between the game and the player makes this frustrating which is why it became a "cult" hit.

Early Graphic

Adventure: http://www.2600online.com/adventure.html

Adventure: http://www.simmphonic.com/programming/adventure.htm

“Adventure's fun comes from the way all of its simple objects interact to produce complex behavior. Carried objects continue to operate, whether it's the bat or player who holds them, so the bat might carry the magnet through a room where the player is using the bridge, moving it out of position and forcing him to find another way back. Or, carrying the sword, the bat might brush it across a dragon on his flight, killing it. This is possible because all of the objects in the game function automatically, which they have to be anyway since The Button is devoted to dropping stuff. A lot of the fun in Adventure comes from the unintended consequences of the player's actions.”

LucasFilms Adventure Games

Secret of Monkey Island (sampler) http://www.classicdosgames.com/online/sampler.html

More classic DOS games: http://www.classicdosgames.com/online.php

Activity 3 Design Studio (Workshop weeks 4 & 5: see slides)

Challenge: Design an escape game

Materials – large sheets of paper, pens, post-it notes, A3 graph paper

Step 1: Understand the escape concept – this is one of the simplest exploration concepts but it can also get complex very quickly. Essentially you are creating a setting that the player can wander around – they will probably need to find items and use them to UNLOCK the exit / dig a tunnel

So in terms of the four elements – you need to deal with SETTING / STORY (what kind of space is it) – OBJECTS and PROGRESSION (what does the player need to find and use to achieve the goal)

The essential functional rule is IF (the player has the key) THEN (they can escape)

The trick is to make the key finding dependent on a list of other objectives or object combinations

Step 2: Decide on the THEME (there are many ‘escape the room’ games – the theme dictates the aesthetics and perhaps the objects).

Step 3: Decide on the objects and keys … the GOAL and the setting should present a coherent game reality

Step 4: Decide on the RULES or the order / combination in which the objects will need to be used by the player to make their escape

Step 5:  Map the world and place obstacles and useful objects

Step 6: Design HOW the player will collect and use objects in the prototype version (dice, cards) – is this design ONLY appropriate to the digital realm – if not, HOW could you achieve the basic mechanic?

Into digital:

Simple exploration games are fairly rare as they quickly evolved into games with complex quests and or combat and action. However, the Escape the room games still maintain the exploration – collect and use gameplay.

You can make a simple escape the room in Power Point

http://pptheaven.mvps.org/tutorials/EscapeTheRoomGameTutorial.html

Or in Flash

http://hubpages.com/hub/Flash-Tutorial-Introduction-to-designing-Escape-the-room-games-in-flash

Info-literacy – basic skill sets

IF appropriate you may wish to support this challenge by using basic photo-shop and introduce students to some very simple editing skills so that they can use images in their power point games