Game Design II - Week 5 - October 7, 2012

Thanksgiving weekend is finally over and I’ve realized that I haven’t really been updating, so I’m going to talk about last week before I simply jump to this week. 

Last week was actually one of my favourite moments in this school. After being here for four years, the stereotype of game developers being bookworms and computer nerds was broken and taken in a different direction. We actually got to go outside for our second class and participate in an interactive game design assignment, which was super fun.

 Of course this was on the second class day; our first day was a simple lecture that informed us once again on various components of level design… I remember while being in the class not participating and getting that ever so scary ball of death that will probably smack the brown off my face one day… that I was thinking of how I personally want to make super hard levels and don’t often think of myself as the player for the level. I know I mentioned this before, but it is pretty important and can be a problem if I was planning to be an actual level designer. After the Portal 2 assignment where my team and I started making a super complex level, we each got to test it and I realized I was getting more frustrated than having fun, and I never wanted to do it again. This is not something I believe that game developers in general want to push out to consumers. 

For the second time this semester, I had a little reality check when trying to create our outdoor game. Upon entering the class, we were informed that we were going outside; to be honest I thought our class was simply moving to a more useless room like the gaming lab which is very small. We then went outside to the big field area, and we broke into teams of 4 -6, of course due my social status in this game development program, I know nobody, except for the GDW group I was put with. We then received volleyball, a small plastic ball, and some rope; in addition to this we had a set of guidelines.

 A sheet detailing the different roles of the battlefield soldier classes was also given to us, and we had to incorporate at least two of these classes into our game, easy enough. We call it, Ultimate Battle Ball. Here’s what that looked like:

The game layout looked like this:

Our game consisted of a Recon soldier and an Engineer soldier on each team. The main objective of the game was for the engineer to put the small plastic ball in the opposing team’s net. The Recon class represented the goalkeeper, and they would be in possession of the large volleyball. Their job for the game was to protect their net with the ability to throw their ball at the opposing team’s engineer. The engineer was the main goal scorer and would be traveling to the enemy net to try and throw the small ball in the net past the enemy recon.

The rules are as follows:

• Engineer and Recon player are allowed to use their hands and feet.
• Recons are not allowed to leave their net.
• If Engineers are hit by Recon’s they have to stay down for 5 seconds before they can run back.
• The Engineer can only retrieve the big ball for the recon soldier, and can also only possess one ball at a time.
• Recon soldiers can throw their ball to the engineers while defending if they choose to, but the engineer cannot move while in its possession. (this is similar to the rules of basketball while if you’re near the net you can pass and move on pivot points)
• Players can switch roles after ever round.  Each round begins with the small ball being placed in the center and both engineers race to it from their net.

Upon creating this, I was trying to make it more complicated with my group members, but one important lesson I learned was that complex game design can sometimes really suck. When it came to play testing time, I really struggled to play and I was really tired….it was pretty funny. Can’t wait to see what happens this coming week.