Branches of level design

So the past few weeks i’ve been primarily focusing level designing the game. and it’s been a lot of testing and sketching level idea’s for the game. This process got me asking a few questions regarding level design and it’s different aspects of it. seeing as level design isn’t primarily placing really large boxes within a space without thought and design. Within level design you firstly have to communicate and enforce the fundamental rules of the game design.

So where am i getting at here?

Well i’ve been looking trough different games and their level design, There are loads of great games out there that all differs from each other fundamentally but all the games have challenges to throw at you, speaking about games like, Half-Life 2, Call of Duty, Journey, Candy Crush and Need for speed. So racing, adventure, story, multiply and puzzles.

All of these types of games requires some sort of level design but the level design is quite different from the focus of the level design, we have (not limited to) narrative, puzzle or competitive level design. all of these focuses on different parts of what the level and what the level wants to convey.

So i’m wondering how the workflow and the design focus and tricks lay about for these different designs. Every game and every team may very well differ in how they choose to approach these diffrent approaches of level design.

Types of design

• Narrative design

This level design have a primarily focus on advancing the story within the game and enforcing it trough its level design. A great example of a game that utilize and enforce its narrative is Journey.

• Puzzle design

You gotta be smart to solve a puzzle, but i bet the one who creates the puzzle is a bit smarter. To create a puzzle requires a bit of understanding of the player and a know how on what the purpose of the puzzle is. at the same time the designer needs to ensure that said player is able to solve it and move on within the game.

• Competitive Design

Multiplayer games that challenges the player against each other is in need of compelling and fair in order to deliver a experience where the player wont feel mistreated. Some games solve competitive design by using a mirror match up in order to not give any participant a unfair advantage.

For Clouds Below we aimed at a Narrative Level design with pieces of platform design. During the start of the game we wanted to introduces the player to its basic mechanics as (Moving, Jumping, Bursting)

(Picture of the starting Zone)

Here we introduces the base mechanics. Where we at the same time reveal the world to the player. As mention earlier.

I look forward to disusing the subject further and to find out what approach works for all of the different types.

Until then.. Ta ta

Two sides of design?

Hello my humble overlords.

The teams just finished our second week of production, our team are coming into the position and mindset of the development. There been endless discussions about mindset and vision for our game, there is  a lot that needs to be said in order to create a shared vision for a game, to find what’s best for the project and not the individual and personal preference.

So my Question and challenge for the design this week have been:

How do i design a level to teach you our mechanics and ways to interact with the game?
the first interactions with a game is really important in order too present the games aesthetics and mechanics. The game wants to establish and introduce how you play the game without breaking or annoying the player. As a designer i want to trust you to understand the mechanics right from the introduction of the mechanic, the player wont be bother with several hints and tips on how to play the game. As we’re going to introduce jump within a safe space to introduce it to the player, from there on we assume that the player knows how to utilize jump throughout the game. It wont need a 2nd introduction.

Early iteration of the start

So the question is then, How do we introduce a mechanic as easy as possible to make you understand the game?
The obvious answer to this is forever testing. trough hypothesis and discovery on how the composition works we’ll understand what works within introducing mechanics, but testing costs time and money. So what methods are known to work in order to create a lean learning curve for the player?

so the understand these methods i looked at other games and how they tutor the basic mechanics of the game, and something i as a designer are afraid of is to tell the player what to do, i want the game world to convey what needs to be done within the world, not windows that break the immersion and tells you how to do things.
The thing within this is that games today may utilize small parts of “this buttons does that” and then the game trusts the player with showing the rest of the mechanics.

For this i’ve been looking at games like Journey and Half-life 2 and how they “tell” the player what to do, and the thing is, like i’ve mention earlier, Is that these games tells the player that “This button does this verb”.
for example; when the player reaches the boxes in half-life 2 the game tells the player: “F to pickup an object” and then the game trusts the player on figuring out the right decision and understanding of that mechanics

Picture taken from half-life 2 “tutorial”

this proves that games won’t require extensive tutorials in order to communicate what it wants you to do and how you do it within game.
(Picture taken from Half-life 2 )

So how is this applicable on our game?
Using these methods that Journey and Half-life 2 suggest in order to introduce mechanics to the game, where i intend the game to tell the player what button does what and then show them in a safe environment one at the time. The first 10 seconds of the game is designed to introduce the narrative structure of the game as well as it’s two basic movement mechanics in a safe environment, where a player may fail and learn it’s structure.

During the coming week i’ll focus on more the deeper level design in order the challenge the player with your new found skills.

Next subject I’ll discuss flow and it’s interpretation within level design from my perspective.

Until next time, Overlords.

Adam Out.

Board game analysis: Arkham Horror

Hello Peons.
I ask for forgiveness in this late Post. By attending to dreamhack i lost the time to post this so here goes.

Arkham Horror.

It’s a game based of H.P. Lovecrafts universe created with the object to work together against the ancient ones. In the game the players play as investigators that work against the different cults and to stop the ancient one from entering the world. There are several ways for the player to prevent these disasters from happening. During the game several rifts will open where monsters pour out and take over the city. To do this the player collects Clues, fights monsters, travel to other worlds.
Arkham Horror is the game where you fight the ancient ones from the books basically.

The Rules
representing the players in the game are the investigators. The investigators have premade a sheet that describes abilities, skills and the starting equipment. There are several different variables that comes into play with the investigator sheet. Many variables who influence the outcome of decisions made throughout the game, for example the speed/sneak variable influences how fast a character can move. By making a character faster he’s ability to sneak becomes harder and vice versa.
Representing the health in game are sainty and stamina tokens, they represent the mental and physical health of the player.

The enemy in game is represented by different monster cards throughout the session and finally by the ancient one sheets if it awakens during the game. The players choose before the start of the game what ancient one they would like to battle. Depending on what ancient one is chosen the players the ancient one has effect on gameplay from turn one. For example Cthulhu affects his worshippers with innsmouth look that gives his Cultist a horror rating of – 2 and a horror damage of 2 sanity. Cthulhu also invokes on the investigators during the gameplay by reducing their maximum Sanity and stamina by 1.
All Ancient ones affects the gameplay in different ways to give different difficulties.

There are several ways the Ancient one can be awaken, the two most common is that the doom track gets filled. For each round that passes a doom token is places upon the ancient one’s sheet. The amount of doom tokens needed for ancient one to awaken varies, between 8 to 16 doom token is needed. When the doom track is full and the ancient one awakens.

Other ways that the ancient one can awake is trough to many gates being open, if there are seven gates open with four players the ancient one will awake the moment the last gate is open and the game will enter the final battle.
Final Battle
Before the final battle begins the players will discard any active environment cards or rumor cards. Additionally the systems for money, bank loans and retainers stop being accounted for.
The final battle consists of several phases that each fighting round includes. It starts off with the investigators refresh which enables the investigators the refresh their skill cards, use abilities and adjust their skill sliders. The investigators may also trade their items as if they were on the same tile.
The next phase is the Investigators attack phase, during this phase the players use combat check against the ancient one with the combat rating as modifier. The ancient one, unlike normal monsters can’t be defeated by one attack. If the players accumulate enough successful attacks equal to the amount of players. If this happens the players may remove one doom token. The ancient one is defeated when there is no more doom tokens.
After the players made all of their combat checks it is the ancient ones turn, it unleashes attacks on each of the investigators once. The attacks varies for the different ancient ones some makes the investigators make a sanity check others may give the investigators to lose a sanity or one stamina. After the ancient one has attacked each investigator once the round restarts. By defeating the ancient one the investigators has saved the city and the day. There are also other ways that the game can be won trough, if the investigators managed to seal enough gates before the last doom token is place the ancient one can’t enter the world and the arkham is saved.

System
What makes this game go forward? and what it’s the most important system working at play?
During the game there is a card called mythos card, the mythos card acts for the monsters in the game. There are three major categories of the mythos cards and how they affect the game.
The environment mythos card that gives a description of an ongoing event in Arkham, the ongoing event may be positive or negative for the investigators depending on what modifiers the mythos card is holding. The environment card will stay in place until the next environment card comes into play.
The headline mythos card is a one effect card and the most common type of mythos card in the game. These mythos cards do different things depending on card but they may be beneficial, harmful or neutral. When the cards text is done the rest of the mythos phase is complete, the card is discarded to the bottom of the mythos deck.
The rumor mythos card has an ongoing effect (much like the environment cards) but also consist of a pass and a fail condition. For example the mythos card “Disturbing the dead” will have the ongoing effect that a die will be rolled at the end of every mythos phase. If the die lands on a 1 or 2 the terror level in the city is increased. For the card to reach the pass condition a player need to discard two gate trophies in the rivertown streets during the encounter phase. The fail condition for this card is when the terror reaches 10, if this happened every investigator will be cursed.

The mythos card also has two other important uses for the game. Firstly it spawns clue tokens around on different areas of arkham each time a mythos card is drawn.
the other use the mythos card posses is the monster movement. Each monster that is summoned into arkham have different signs and the arkham map have two different paths, white and black. These mythos cards tell monsters with a certain sign to move one step on either a white or a black path.

Good
the game focuses on having investigators with big differences, this opens up for the player to support each other through their different strengths. The game encourages its players to work together to achieve the victory against the ancient ones. This creates a sense of competency with the other players. Every player need to feel that they are contributing towards the common goal the team in the game. The game does that trough the different strengths and weaknesses. For example there are investigators that have great strengths in fighting monster but in sealing gates or traveling the other worlds have great difficulty. This can create scenarios where a gate needs to be sealed and the gate is guarded by a great monster. In order to seal the gate one investigator needs to kill the monster before the greate sealing investigator steps in and seals the gate for good.

Bad
The bad part of the game is related to the best part of the game, and that’s because it’s a NPC based game. The fact that everything the ancient one does is automated makes every encounter highly predictable. Though the mythos card section is randomized in what mythos card that will be drawn but for an experienced player the mythos card is a known part and not a hard part to deal with. This is something that is hard to avoid when creating a game where it’s the boardgame vs its players. A way to avoid this could be to have 1 player play as the ancient one and the rest to play as the investigators. This could create a more unpredictable experience but the difficulty could sky rocket. For this to work there would be a lot of limitations of what the ancient one could do and not, but it could prove out to be a more interesting way of playing the game.

Audience
As the game is centered and designed around the Cthulhu mythos and H.P. Lovecraft. It’s pretty understandable that a fan of the universe would enjoy playing with a game that offers the players to battle and banishing the ancient ones. Otherwise, the other player who knows vaguely about H.P. Lovecraft would more think about the mechanics that the games provides. The type of player who enjoys this would arguably either be a killer or a socializer who thrives on working together against a common goal.

Conclusion
I see Arkham horror as a great game where the first couple of times can be really tricky to get into but as the players understand more about the game and the mechanic the game will provide a great joy. I understand that the game is possible to play alone, controlling several investigators and working against the horrors that lay within Arkham.
I personally think that the game was very hard to understand and to get into. It may have been a problem that one of our team members was a big fan of the game and told us more what to do than why we did it. There were several occasions where I was told to roll a die but did not understand why and what numbers affected the outcome of the roll.
I enjoyed the game from what it was but I openly think that a design revolving around one player controlling the Ancient one and the rest playing as the investigators could provide a more interesting gameplay.

 

Board game analysis: Citadel

Hello Peons.
This past two weeks we’ve been playing board games. Going back to analyzing systems and to understand the systems.
Me and my group have been playing Citadels, a game where you try to raise the most magnificent citadel with beautiful districts.

Citadels
Board game

In Citadels, the players take rounds to build and erect a city, in order to do this player’s takes aid from different characters to lend their different abilities. The goal in citadels is to erect the most magnificent city, to outshine the other cities in the land. In order to do this the player needs to outsmart and outplay his opponents with the different abilities that the characters offers, a wide range of different abilities, some abilities are used to murder a other character, other abilities are used to steal all the other players gold.

Rules

The District cards
to be able to build the city the player needs district. These are made up by the district cards. Each district card has a color and a certain numbers of coin on them. These coins describe how much each district

The Character cards
each game of Citadel contains eight character cards. These cards will influence the round with giving each player a number, this number gives tells in what order the players are going to play. The characters also have abilities that aid the player in certain ways, for example; the assassin card takes out another character for the following round, other characters helps the player gain more gold during the round.

The Gold
Gold is used to build the districts in the players city, and to pay characters like the warlord (You receive one gold for each military district in your city. You may pay to destroy one district of your choice.) to destroy another districts. Gold is gained through the action phase or the different abilities.

The King
In the start of the game the king Is chosen by age. The oldest player always starts with the crown. From then the player with the King Character card receives the crow until the following round.

The game consists out of two types of cards, gold tokens and the king token. A round starts with the king to remove a random card from the character deck and to place it face down on the table, next the king draws a second set of cards and place them face up on the table (this depends on the number of players)

Next the players will choose a character card from the remaining cards in the character deck. The player chooses a card and then passes the deck to the next player on his left. This is done until the last player shall choose a card, this player have the opportunity to take a look at the card that was faced down earlier.

The round starts with the king shouting out the different ranks of the player characters, from the number 1 to 8. The order of the players is decided by what character they’ve chosen for said round.
When a character is shout’ed how the players turn start. Within the turn for the player one can decide out of the actions, either take two gold from the bank or draw two district cards from the decks. One of the card is put in the players hand and the other is discarded. After these actions have been chosen the player may build something with a district card.
Districts is built by paying the required amount of gold on the card. Gold is gained through character abilities or through the action in the start of a players turn.

Then if its stated by the abilities on the character the player may take the action stated.

After all players have played their round the sitting king collects all character cards and the round starts all over again.

cost and how much they’re worth in the end of the game. The color has a number of uses where more of one color adds more point in the end of the game, character abilities may as well use the districts for the players benefit.

System
the game is in the core as simple but heavy on the tactics, for a smart player needs to figure out what every other player chooses as the character of their current round, as well as picking a character that can counter their character. This is the mind game from Citadels; it’s a big part of the game to read your opponent trough probability, “poker face” and chance. Depending on your placement in the match you’ll always have to try and figure out what other character the other players have chosen, In order to do this you count from the two character cards faced up and the ones you see in the deck on your turn to figure out what the other players have chosen. If one may do this correct he’ll be able to control the flow of the game.
The districts in the game is important because they hand the player the points in the end of the game, when a player reaches 8 districts the game will end, that round that the last district is built will be the last. If there are players able to destroy one district before the round has ended the game will continue. District cards gathered and built during each player rounds, there are five different types of colors on the cards. Each color can provide income for the different character types or give special benefits that is describe on the card. These are the main focus of the game, to win the game the player needs as many valuable districts as possible. Having one of each color gives the player a bonus when the points is counted, having 8 districts gives the player a bonus, even more if the player was first with receiving the eight district.

Good part
The game requires and encourages the players to play mind games with each other. To gain an advantage the players need outsmart. For example if you a lot of gold from earlier round and another player sits on a lot of district cards on his hand, then the other player would want to pick the thief
( Announce a character from whom to steal. When the player with this card is revealed, take his gold ) in order to steal your gold. What the thief character need to do is to figure out what character you’re going to pick. Of course, nobody knows what character you’re going to pick but they can figure it out. Depending on what order the characters are picked and what characters were left on the hand when they had the character deck. For this it is needed to figure out what the other player needs to do and act against it.
For the player with the lot of gold the best way to defend himself would be to pick the assassin and assassinate the thief before the thief is able to steal the gold that the player possesses.

The Worst part
it’s quite easy to fall behind in this game. Playing the game and falling behind makes the game real hard. The player will spend most of his time trying to regain the gap that can be created by this. Same thing for the player who gains the advantage will have no trouble keeping the advantage. Maybe in order to make the game easier for the other players need to have more cards that can sabotage for each other, In order to make it harder and easier for players to regain the same level throughout the game.
Some characters have a decent drawback where the characters abilities work against the flow of the game. The Witch character card takes over the powers of another character that the player announces during his turn. The bewitched player can only take the action where the player chooses to take gold or draw district cards, after that the witch takes over and uses the players turn for her.
This character card takes too much power from another character, similar to the assassin the character abilities removes one of their turn. The assassin makes sure no one gets it, where the witch takes the other players power

The Audience
Suggested by the board game itself, is ages 10 and up. Most likely because that the rules of the game are fairly simple to the core and few different cards that is needed to keep track of. The fact that the game contains very little to nothing at all in violence and a simple core would give it the reasonable age limit for the game.
With this in mind, one would need to define what types of players that would be interested in playing this game. If one goes with the bartle test of players, one can see how the different parts of the game attracts the different personalities and individuals. The killers might enjoy thinking ahead of the other players and sabotage to gain victory, while the socializers might enjoy the whole experience of playing with the other players not focusing so much on the game itself. Achievers might play the game for the sole reason to build a city in different ways or simply to achieve victory over the others, the explorer might play it solely to explore the possibilities of a new game.

How it Correlates
with the character cards and the district cards the game works fine, having the characters in game adds another level of tactics that would be lost without them. Without the character cards the turns would go get boring. The rounds would only be about whatever the player needed gold or more districts for his city. The character cards add an element of tactics that gives the game the depth it needs to stay interesting.

Have a great weekend. 😀

The sounds none thinks about. Weekly blog post

Hello peps.
Another week another blogg post.
This week I’ve been focusing entirely on sound. Sound Effects which I’ve been struggling with a lot. So this week I had enough with programs that did’t want to work with me and started using FL Studio. The program is created for house music mainly but it has been working fine for me in creating sound effects. At the same time I got to borrow a extern music card, headphones and mic from a buddy of mine. This supported me greatly in recording sound effects for the game like a bubble sound that plays when the avatar dashes.

In the sound making as itself it was a jungle, for a person like me who’ve only dealt with pre-recorded sound effects and voice recording. About half way through the sound effects I feel like I have no idea in what I am doing, clearly I should learn an instrument to be able to understand tones and notes. But this far I’ve been able to create what I’ve had in mind, and I hope my sound effects will be able to help convey what we want to tell the player with the game.
One particular sound effect that I am particular proud with is the bubble noice. It took me about a 4-5 hours to create the sound that I was happy with and how I created the sound was by recording myself blowing bubbles into milk. I tried several different beverages to gain the perfect sound for the bubbles. I think I started out with normal water then went over to water including soap. I also tried using soda but it wasn’t working out as properly as I intended.

I Think the milk was thick enough for the bubbles to give me the correct sound. The fat in the milk is what helped me out in the end. I wonder if making real bubbles with soap and recording them when they pop. One thing that would really have helped me with the sound engineering was to find a forum where the recording and creating of sound effects was discussed. The most forums I have found have been community forums to large free sound fx databases.
Next week is all post mortem that’s going to be focused. I don’t want to repeat what happened last time when I was too late to turn in the post mortem because of internet failure. Wish me luck!

Over and out Adam

Weekly post. Sound Design

 

Hello world.

This week I’ve focusing on creating sound and fine tuning the last on the design document. The sound for this week have been growling sound that indicates that the character is low on hunger, showing that the avatar is close to death. The idea is to start playing the sound at 50% hunger at really low volume, then increase the volume as the players hunger is decreasing. As well as that I am working on a way to make the growling noise go faster as the hunger is increasing.

Other sounds I’ve been working on is the power up sound and growing sound. The growing sound is trying to be something instyle with the growing sound from pokemon. I don’t want to use the sound but I want it to be in style of it. I have been using an website for creating the power up sound as well as the growing sound without any bigger progress. Can be that I should try to get a programme in style of 8bit sounds. Going to look further into it during the evening.

The point of the growing sound is that it’s going to be a three part sound where the note gets lighter and louder, to indicate that the avatar have been empowered. The hard part is that I don’t want the sound to sound too much bit, I want the sound to feel believable and keep the same standard as the rest of the game. If the game isn’t made in Bit inspired graphic the sound will feel misplaced. The challenge is to find what sound creates the illusion of the sound I want to create. Maybe I am lack the knowledge to create the sound for this particular cause. The only thing I really can do is to continue to try and find the sound I am after. In the end it’ll work out.

Meanwhile I’ve been trying to work out the MDA for the game.  During the afternoon today I worked with the MDA in the design document. Trying to find what empowers what troughout the game and what is really important. Looking back at the important part is giving me a feeling that our attention has been a bit misplaced. Maybe that is an experience I can carry with me too the next project.
Speaking off, now that the project is going towards an end, the feeling of these two past weeks have been tiered, that people are looking towards the final project this year and don’t really care what happens now.

Well, with one last push I am sure that we’ll make it.

Over and Out
Adam

P.S. The SGA Report is comming up with picture and “post mortem”
Stay classy 😀

Onwards! SGA conference

I am now in the train from my home town nykoping to Flemingsberg, where Swedish game conference is to be held.
During the conference a series of talks will be held. My aim is to recive and reflect over the talks. I am mainly going to focus on the design and production.

There is not much I can tell when i’ve not arrived at the the site. But first of is Linnea Harrison from DICE. On the site it says that she’s going to talk about world building and their methods from concept to polish.

There will be more to report when I get there.
Over and out.

Level design and Experience

Hello Minions

This week I’ve been focusing on the design for the game, that includes design document, level design and experience curve.
I want to start talking a bit about the experience curve and numbers. There have been a lot of numbers, and then I mean a lot. Experience curve is something that the player will never notice if it’s done properly, done wrong and the game will do a lot of damage.

So, with no experience (game design wise) about curves and progression with game design, I set out to construct a table to inform how much experience is needed to progress the avatar to the next size.
in the games both the avatar and the fishes have 9 different levels to achive, 0 – 8 for the enemies and 1-9 for the avatar. This is so the avatar has something to eat when starting the game.
At writing moment I’ve choose to take a sequence with an increasing level that makes sense, the so called Fibonacci sequence.

With the Fibonacci sequence it feels like a natural rising order. I studied the leveling curve of the wow but it changes a lot trough out the leveling, one to ten is a simple second grade function, but remaining levels uses more complicated functions, I ended up with Fibonacci’s curve for the experience and  for the gained experience per enemies, I choose numbers that fit in-between for the scope. (Subject to change)

I have a fear that the curve will be too big for the game itself, making it too long between the levels. Meaning that the player will find a grind in-between level, but making the gap to narrow in-between will make the player bored, no challenge. The line will have to get tested during the coming week. Now my focus is to get it implemented and to get the core loop into the game.

I want to take a small bit and mention the level design. As it is right now I’m making three different stages that seamlessly fit together, the first level is formed like an open world with a few cave systems where you can find a entrance to the second level, and some without a precise purpose, just deformations.
For the second level I’ve gone with a large cave system that branches out. I did a lot of reading for the level design. I am still unsure on how the third and last level is going to work. Either it’ll be really open as the first level or it’ll be a larger cave system. I’d appreciate any feedback good or bad.
I WANT TO IMPROVE.

Over and out

Adam

Game Dev Feb. Texture makin

Hello guys

This week I’ve been focusing on making a tile that can be used as a ground layer on any level of the game. The idea with the tile is to make it connect with itself in any direction.

The making of the Stone tile works like you create a few lesser pebbles with reasonable detailed, for this tile I aimed to create something in our aimed art style. One thing that could be done to the existing picture is to simplify the in the values to obtain the want feeling. The important thing when using this technique is to make the small pebbles really easy, the pebble shall not draw to much attention in itself.

Anyhow, with the small pebbles made I started duplicating them and turning each so they won’t feel repeated.

With the canvas filled with pebble I used to offset function to check how the texture worked out, editing it so it could connect with itself in any direction.

This technique is great way to make textures that wants a feeling of being a more cartoon and simple art style. Then it’s a matter of how detailed the first part is. If it stands out to much it’ll draw attention and then it’ll easy give out how it was made. Made right this technique is really valuable to make great textures.

I am certain that it can be used for other things as well as making pebbles, I’ve learned the technique from a hand painted grass texture tutorial. I’ll post the link down below.

This tile was originally set out to be the underwater mountain rock but looking at it makes it more suitable for corals or lesser rocks. I’ve been trying to find a reliable way to make a solid rock that can be repeated and fits into the world that we’re making.

I am happy how the Rock tile ended upp when it was done, what needs to be done now is to make a couple of tiles that shall be used as corners for the first tile. Making them means that the edges of each tile needs to be transparent so it can fit into the game world without any sharp edges.

For the next week I’ll be focusing on sound and design, I have been talking with people on the school and will be given accses to a sound room, giving me time to make all the sound for the game. The design part will be most focused on the design document and level design.

Over and out
Adam

Oh yeah. The link:

I hope it’ll help you out.

Doodling inbetween.

Just wanted to created something this weekend.
What feeling is this picture envoke for you? i wanted to create a feeling that keeps you going.
Back to the game developing

Over and Out.
Adam