Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Game Design II - Week 6 - October 11



Another week of game design passed by! And for once in this class I’m actually satisfied with where it’s going, this is one of the few classes I can actually enjoy sometimes because we talk about interesting things. I personally hate programming, because I just don’t understand most of its complexity… but areas like level design, and game design in really intrigues me. I remember last semester when I was making level for fun for no apparent reason. Even though the levels I made were for my game, I didn’t actually get a chance to implement them. Little bit of random useless information I guess?

                First lecture we got to talk about reward systems and things like that. It was interesting to hear the different views on what people said in class, but of course my voice was silent. I began to doze off as usual, and thought about New Super Mario Bros 2, for the Nintendo 3DS, and how there’s like barely any reward! Like really? What the heck can one do with an infinite amount of coins and lives? Nothing, but yet this is a super successful game that people get strangely addicted to. I love it, I bought it on the first day, especially since I work at a gaming retail store, I get tempted really easily to buy these simple games. Then I think of my PlayStation 3 account and how whenever I buy a new game, I try my very hardest to get as many of the trophy achievements as possible and complete the game 100%. I do it a lot of the time for almost every game that comes out… I think honestly that’s probably my best reward, the ability to show off and boast when I platinum every Sonic game and all the God of War games.

                Yesterday was a little different, didn’t get to go outside! I heard the whole class didn’t like when we did that… which is really dumb IMO because it forces us to be interactive and have fun and learn something. I was disappointed… BUT then it got even better, we got to do an interactive activity where we basically analyzed different games and I got to do my favourite childhood game. Banjo-Kazooie! This game was probably the best game ever on Nintendo 64. Some of the important things about that game were that it was one of the first 3D platformer adventure games to come out in addition to things like Super Mario 64. It implemented a very colourful environment and an assortment of themed levels, my personal favourite was the one that took place in the winter level. That particular level had all of the abilities used to their fullest and also contained many mini-games… I really want to play it again. 

Following that exercise in class, we had to design another game with random requirements. These ones actually really stumped me and I was completely clueless. To be honest, I cannot even really remember what we came up with… We used a checker board as our board with a checker as a game piece that was to be protected by the player. Our requirements were that we needed to have a Sci-fi game with a game mechanic that involved protecting a location. We were also required to make the game have stars that would be collectable and a game reward with money. That’s pretty much it for today… we’ll be working to finish up our Unity level for the first homework assignment. It seems a lot simpler to create something with this engine.

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