Final Concept Analysis

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.