Trash Dev Game Design

  looks like there having fun but we need paperwork to be sure. In the last post about Assignment 3 I talked about the changes I would make to the game before going into playtesting. Of those changes we decided to implement the split Intensity Meters. If you don't know what I'm talking about go read my post "Assignment 3: Development Progress".  Now on to the topic at hand. We have begun the process of play testing. We know the game is buggy going in and obviously there are things we would like to fix before going to play testers, but we don't have the time for that so let's put out of scope out of mind.  First lesson is feedback comes fast in a playtest for a two-player game. The players speak to each other and because the game is player V player when someone gets the upper hand there can be a lot of yelling about it on both sides.   Looking at the feedback over the four playtests that we have conducted there are some clear patterns when it comes to gameplay

Hot tip; bet on YouTube Its time for me to go back to Tracy Fullerton. But I have to be honest, I have tried to write this blog post a few times. I read chapters over and over trying to find something I wanted to talk about but I hate this text book. Its painfully boring, unimaginative and lacks the fun and soul that makes game design mean something. I could write an essay on how much I dislike this Textbook, but I'm not going to do that. Instead lets do something more fun and more nice. I'm going to highlight some YouTube channels and videos that are infinitely better resources and free. so, lets begin.  GDC - https://www.youtube.com/@Gdconf/featured GDC (Game Design Conference) is a legendary channel, honestly its a gold mine. According to its own description "GDC talks cover a range of developmental topics including game design, programming, audio, visual arts, business management, production, online games, and much more." In short they get professionals in the gam

I swear its a logo officer, promise I didn't crop the Design Page Ok so, Lethal Cuts. Its a simple little fighting game but its got some interesting stuff going on. Lets start by going over the game as it was presented to the group and then ill talk about the changes I would (and hopefully will) implement as the lead designer.  lets look at the Design Page for Lethal Cuts. really this image should be all you need but ill explain anyway See that black controller? that's the most important information as far as I'm concerned. Move with the left stick, jump with A, attack with X, block with B. Ignore the Attack Direction stick, that's not implemented. The attack works basically how you expect and theirs a different animation if you attack in the air buts its pretty much the same attack. Block is a bit more complicated, your character turns to stone after a small pause becoming immune to hits for a short time. No health bars just if you take 3 hits you lose.  Now there'

the new project We've made it to the final boss so to speak. The last assignment for the game design unit, and its a group project. Remember that Sell Sheet and Design Page I made for actual Driving? Well everyone in the class did one and we all went around the room showing off our designs. People had done some really cool stuff and honestly, I was blown away by some of it. Everyone that saw the Sell Sheet for Actual Driving was very impressed and I managed to find four people to make a group easily. But here's the hard part, and why Actual Driving had its development so quickly brought to a close.  Once I had a group we had to sit down and figure out which of the four games was going to be made, that's the final assignment, as a team finish one game.  The Meeting went down like this, we all loved Actual Driving and each of us agreed that if we were going to go to a vote on which game we wanted made it would be mine, but one of the other games that was pitched was a very cl

  Thats a win in my book Feedbacks in for the Design Page and Sell Sheet, as Predicted there were issues with the Design Page that dropped me a few marks, I was missing some core information I hadn't considered, but overall the feedback was positive. 24.5/30 comes out to 81.6666667% that a distinction and Ill rock a distinction any day.

Look How They Massacred My Boy  I have to admit I feel a bit sheepish putting this post out. I know I said at the end of two of my previous posts I would get back to developing Actual Driving and finishing the Off Hand mechanic but sadly this is the end for Actual Driving's development, and I haven't put any more work into it. Ill get to why that is but first let's do Successes and Failures of the development cycle.   Successes Firstly I think it's a big success that I have developed a 3D game, there's not much gameplay to it but mechanically it feels pretty good to drive and you can explore an open world, not many other students can say they did that! The artwork. I'm so happy with the graphics update, I have showed the game around a bit and everyone comments on it and how unique it looks. I'm also pretty happy with the game design and concept. My first two games were a bit bland, mostly thinking up an interesting coat of paint to put over very generic game

  Smash hit game of the year In my last blog post I talked about how I would be designing a Sell Sheet and a Design Page for Actual Driving. Well, here it is, Above is my Sell sheet, It went through a few iterations but hasnt strayed so far from my first attempt. (first attempt at a Sell Sheet) Mostly my feedback on the first attempt was that nobody could tell it was a video game due to the art style, hence why I added box art and a catchy "Wishlist now on steam" to the final product. Over all I'm proud of what I achieved with this though. I think it captures the energy and if I saw this as a poster at EB games Id definitely want to check it out.  As for the Design Page Among other issues, text size makes it a bit hard to read I wasn't sure what to do with the design page to be honest, When speaking to my tutors and looking at examples everything seemed to centre around 2D or 3RD Person games where you can see your character standing in the world or level. My game is

  I know what you're thinking, and yes. It is worth 30%. The first Assignment for my Game Design unit is this blog as an overall product, were still chipping away at that (obviously) so while were at it lets go over my 2nd Assignment. In short, I am to produce a "one sheet" and a "one page" design document for a game that I may go on to produce as my final assignment. the names "one sheet" and "one page" are horribly undescriptive and so easy to mix up so moving forward I will be referring to them as a Sell Sheet and a Design Page. In more detail; A Sell Sheet is an attractive, single sided, A4 pitch document designed to help readers understand the vision of your game and achieve buy-in. It is something you could hand individuals interested in helping to develop your game (as developers, publishers, investors or in other roles). Think of something halfway between a poster and a business card. Example of a Sell Sheet for a pinball machine A De

The most realistic graphics of 1993 I decided that the first thing to do to improve Actual Driving would be to give it a graphics overhaul.  I started with a sky box which was simple enough, one of the actions that comes with the With3JS Extensions is "Create 3D scene" I was already using it to make the 3D effect work but had neglected its skybox feature. When setting up the Create 3D scene action I just had to include a background image with an image ratio of 2:1 (1024:512 for example). The important part here is the background image section, "NewSprite4" Despite how simple that is this took me way longer than expected because I just could not get it to recognise my image, I added it to the scene and named it HCLDSKY2 ( I don't remember why to be honest), you may notice that in the above image I'm using "NewSprite4" though. That's because the name of the image in this case doesn't come from the name you gave the thing yourself but from wha