Aaron
Goldman
Prof.
Manley, Prof. Wright
Final
Concept Analysis
12/7/13
When
I first came into this class for my capstone project I was hopeful. I
had just come from a very bad group experience where I was paired up
with other people who really didn’t work well together. We all had
problems meshing so I looked forward to working with people I knew;
people who had shown their skills to me before and made it obvious
they really wanted to make a great game. Over the summer we had spent
some time talking about game ideas. These were all speculation and
most of all highly out of scope but it helped draw us in the
direction of the kind of game we would want to create. It did not
matter what genre it was but what did matter was how the player felt
when they were playing this game. We wanted the player to feel in
control; they needed to feel that, while they may have been in a fake
world, that world inside itself was very real, and you are the one
who affects it.
The
majority of our ideas were all over the place; there was no common
theme, no single genre that was explored. All our ideas even after
the first few days of class all came together to enforce player
control. We wanted the player to have a very “real” experience in
the game. What I mean by that is when a player goes into the game
they want everything to interact with them. People use video games to
escape reality but they still want to be grounded in a new reality
within that game. As long as everything makes sense within the world
then the suspension of disbelief can continue. Players want to feel
like that hero or that awesome character in their game. People
project themselves onto their characters; you can especially see that
in games with morality trackers. This isn’t only for Role-Playing
Games though, a person will become sucked into any game world they
are in, and put themselves there. Everything needs to make sense
though in this world, if I see a crate I want to move this crate
because in real life I can move a crate. It works like this in every
game. A player will walk about or play around trying to find out what
they are capable of doing and what they cannot. In our games we
didn’t want there to be limits; if a player thinks it they can do
it, they can do it. Now this of course sounded like a crazy
undertaking for a Capstone project, but if the world we create is
small and the main focus is this “interactivity,” then maybe we
can do it.
From
there we continued to come up with concepts that supported this idea
of control. We came up with an idea where you could traverse an
island and lay traps for other players in order to get your enemies
to chase them. Players had control over what traps they built and
where they built them. Another idea we had was that players could
shoot Black Holes at each other and they had to use their Jetpacks to
get away. We took these ideas and several others and sat down and
wrote down everything we would want to do in this game. We tackled it
as if we looked at the game from an outside perspective and said:
“what can I possibly do in this game?” By doing this we formed a
massive list of things that could be made into a reality with uniform
mechanics that would satisfy multiple things we would want to do. For
example, Half Life wanted to give the player the ability to interact
with the world so they made the “Gravity Gun” which could
interact with parts of the environment; this was not only to move
things around the world but also allowed puzzles to be solved and in
theory you could attack an enemy. We created mechanics like this that
would be versatile in their uses, to give a much more realistic feel.
In the end we figured this would really help us because the less
features we needed for the core of the game, the more features we
could add later.
We
came at the project with a very proactive fight towards innovation,
and iteration. Once most of our concepts were cut off we went with
the most solid idea and iterated like crazy on that once idea. What
that idea started with was a Stun game in which players could stun
each other to allow enemy AI to kill the opposing players. We wanted
a different and indirect way to kill players in a (up until this
time) unoriginal genre of games. The other big benefit was that our
programmer specialized in AI programming so we figured that we could
get much more done if we favored our specializations. After exploring
the Stun game and finding that players seemed to gravitate more
towards exclusively killing the AI we decided to explore another
mechanic in a similar genre. The new mechanic had players shooting
Black Holes which would suck up blocks in the environment. This
supported our “indirect kill” idea and also really allowed the
player's to have full control over their world. It was at this point
I really started to see my own desires come through on the game
mechanic.
Ever
since I was a kid I always had the urge in Physics based games to
just cause chaos. I loved the idea of being able to manipulate
objects in an environment, Telekinesis to be blunt. In every game I
have ever owned that has magic I always get the telekinesis spell and
it never functions like you see in movies and TV shows such as:
Supernatural, Lost Girl, and the Harry Potter Series. When I play a
game I want to feel like I am actually in the world I’m playing in
and for the time being it all works the way it should, no shortcuts,
nothing to kind of make it work, true “real life” telekinesis. Of
course this has not really happened yet and that’s why we tried to
make it. My group members and I felt the same on where the game had
come from and how we all felt the same way about giving a real,
promised experience and not cutting corners.
It
was also at this time that we looked toward the potential success of
a game like this. It seemed like the kind of game that “the people”
or the collective gaming community would want to play, and have been
waiting for. We felt that because it was something that people have
tried and failed; so there was obviously a market for that, but there
was also a market for this in its genre. Being what could basically
be called a Third Person shooter, it fits into a genre which really
hasn’t changed much in the past few years, especially with pick up
and play games. Not that it would be easy necessarily to make a game
that is innovative but we also knew that anything remotely different
in this genre would be praised highly in a very unoriginal genre.
Immersion
is the key, but there needs to be the innovation, and we had that; it
may be a mechanic that has been attempted, but not like this. We gave
true power into the hands of the player, real physics and a reality
in a universe where you could create black holes. People as I said
before, want an escape; this is why immersion is so important to
players. Many people play them as some sort of escape from reality:
“They are in a virtual world that makes sense to them—a place
where they can be whoever or whatever they choose, without worrying
about how they look or act, and without having to deal with real-life
problems” (Video Games). It is because of this that we know a
completed version of our game will be successful. We don’t need to
know if our game is successful first in order to find out if people
enjoy its main values. This is a widely spoken of and talked about
portion of video games, people play them for an escape and immersion;
it would make sense that because of this players would much rather
play a deeply immerse game then one that feels very restricting. My
teams feeling on that point was that it would be better to have less
in the game and not restrict the player; than add a bunch of features
that come with more restrictions.
Of
course there is always a limit to immersion that comes from the
technology we have available to us at the moment. Recently the Oculus
Rift has opened up a lot of possibilities to us, but because it is
such a new technology we figured it would be best to sell our game to
a much larger market. Players can only do so much with a controller
but at this point that is what people have come to expect so we
decided it would be okay to stick with a conventional Xbox controller
to control and play the game. Due to this being our controller we
were narrowed down to either Xbox 360 or the PC. The market we ended
up choosing was the PC market because it was very large and was
comprised of both casual and hardcore gamers to which our game could
be sold to. We found our game to be very “Pick up and play-esk.”
Since the environment was affected in the gameplay we could market to
hardcore gamers by explaining that each and every consecutive battle
between players (at the final version we are at now with the game)
would have varying environments due to the player. In the final
version of our concept we found that using both solid , immobile
walls and walls built of blocks worked very well to keep the matches
dynamic. By the end of each match the level would be unrecognizable
to the previous match and another match would always begin. This was
tested early on with our Alpha level of King of the Hill, the QA
Testers didn’t want to leave and end the game. What is most
important though is this game isn’t something that needs hours of
dedication to pick up and become good at. A person could play once a
day or once a week and still come back to a familiar game with
constantly varying matches.
When
we created this game we intended for an immerse third person shooter
that would have dynamic matches which you could play repeatedly, and
have a different experience each time. The way we created the game we
ensured each match would play out differently. The way physics work
in Unity is somewhat realistic in that everything is acted upon
differently depending on the force used and the mass of the object.
It is because of this that our matches are so dynamic; all I had to
do to enforce this idea of a dynamic battlefield was to create a
level which gave players control of the levels layout. Our original
idea for this was to allow players to place blocks in the level
before the match; in the end we found that even if I placed all the
blocks in specific spots it didn’t take long for them to be
scattered all over the level. My job when making this level was to
encourage creative ways to use the blocks but most of all to ensure
players were always exposed and in range of some blocks.
Once
I had crafted a level like this the mechanic easily led players to a
competitive match and they were off fighting on the Hill, in our King
of the Hill mode. The part that made us very confident in our game
was that the mechanic on its own was so much fun to play in a test
level that once the game was in a real world, it would be amazing. QA
of course confirmed this for us when we couldn’t pull the players
away from the game. As we watched the recording of the matches you
could tell that while everyone started in the same spot every time,
they were always trying something new to win their team the game. We
had at this point confirmed our experience in our game and began to
add the art in and polish everything up. Being that the game looked
terrible without assets and was still fun we knew adding the proper
assets and refining and building another level we would have a very
solid, polished game. In the end we did have this solid product;
unfortunately it wasn’t in time for the presentations.
As
with any long assignment there is always reflection, especially to
what I have done and what I have learned. The biggest piece of
knowledge I picked up from being a designer on a team with such
skilled people is that you need to kick their butts. I took advantage
of the fact they were skilled and never pushed my artist to turn out
work faster and because of this we didn’t make the presentation.
Once we had the art it all pulled together and all that had to be
done was a level with more assets and a better soundtrack. As I said
before the mechanic and previous levels lent themselves well to the
experience we wanted so it should have been plug and play with the
art assets. There is a point where being kind to your group members,
because they are your friends, becomes a problem. I of course found
this point a little too late and we suffered because of it. Another
issue that I found was that because we didn’t push hard enough it
was more difficult for me to find work I could do proactively during
the process. I always felt like I had to wait to start my level
design work and in the end, never had my programmer get to it soon
enough to 100% ensure it was bug free. Our process was poor and that
is what hurt us, we had a fantastic concept and, in the end game, and
all the members of my team, myself included are talented in our
fields and you can tell from what we made. We just didn’t encourage
each other enough.
Another
problem was meeting up and how important this class was to my other
group members. My programmer is basically sitting in a job at this
point and because the game really had nothing he could show off with,
he didn’t care too much. He always did the work and what we asked
but he never went above and beyond for the game, and there was no way
he would move his schedule for it. My programmer is the busiest
person on this earth and when the game should have been most
important, Insanity or other classes were more important. My artist
had another class which always took precedent and because of this his
art for the game was second rate to what I’ve seen him do, this was
up until the break when he had time to spend on this game. You can
tell this is true if you compare the assets from the newest level
versus our stage three challenge level. All of this together with not
meeting enough led to a lot of over text message or half group
meeting “band-aid fixes.” Up until about three weeks before
Thanksgiving we weren’t fixing the real issues with our game which
put us back along with testing unnecessary mechanics like the
alternate dimension or some of the other iterations we tested. All of
this held us back until we really sat down as a group for a while and
listed what we wanted from the game and what we needed to get there.
Once we did this it all really came together as a solid game. It was
too late though at this point because we were too far behind and my
group members didn’t have the motivation to push themselves in
order to finish it all in time for the presentation.
Of
course nothing is any one person’s fault and had we another week or
two we definitely would have been where we are now. All we can do is
reflect on what we did right or wrong and understand what we could
have changed. As a developer I have truly realized that there are no
weaknesses for a designer if they really work. We are taught to be
Jacks of all trades and have a bit of everything and then from there
we can pursue a specialization or two, for me that is narrative and
sound. Unfortunately this game had no real narrative besides the
basic concept and the environment so I worked hard on my level
design. Even though I knew I wasn’t amazing at level design I still
went at it as if I was making a sound or a narrative, no reference,
just dive in. When it comes to music or writing I can put what is in
my mind on the screen but levels I have always had trouble. It wasn’t
until halfway through the semester I really got some help from my
artist and started collecting references. I had to stop cutting
corners, and when I did this I made some really good and well
received levels for our game. In the end I really see how important
it is to push yourself on the things you are weak at, just like a
resume, you are only as valuable as your weakest asset.
Works Cited
"Gamasutra -
Fewer Mechanics, Better Game." Gamasutra
- Fewer Mechanics, Better Game.
N.p., n.d. Web. 09 Dec. 2013.
"The Penny
Arcade Report." The
PA Report.
N.p., n.d. Web. 09
Dec. 2013.
"The Two Ways
You Become Immersed in Video Games." Kotaku.
N.p., n.d. Web. 09
Dec. 2013.
"Video Games – An Escape From Reality?" Video Games –
An Escape From Reality?
N.p., n.d. Web. 09 Dec. 2013.
