A presentation for TOSMI2009: Blender for Game Artists

1. Various Topics on
Game Design
Martin Ruskov
Blender for Game Artists
Aug-24, TOSMI2009

3. Game Development

4. Sample Game Design Document
● Game overview
– Game concept
– Target audience
● Gameplay and mechanics
● World, story and characters
● Levels
● Interface
● Everything else

5. The Player

6. Play
In addition to providing structured environments for challenge and achievement,
games can also provide opportunities for players to use imagination,
fantasy, inspiration, social skills, or other more playful types of
interaction to achieve objectives within the game space. The play might be
serious, like the pomp and circumstance surrounding a Grand Master match in chess, or
it might be charged and aggressive, like the marathon play environment of a Quake
tournament. It might also be an outlet for fantasy, like the rich online worlds of EverQuest
and Dark Age of Camelot. Designing for the type of play that will appeal to
your players is another key consideration for keeping players engaged
with the game.
– Tracy Fullerton, Christopher Swain and Steven Hoffman

7. Types of Players
● Achievers: Players give themselves game-related
goals, then vigorously set out to achieve them. Build
cities, accumulate treasure
● Explorers: Use communication facilities for role-
playing or to converse and interact with others
● Socializers:Try to find out as much as possible about
the game. Search areas and mechanics, fight every
monster, do every quest
● Killers: Provide game tools to cause distress on
others. Usually involves applying a powerful sword to
another players' head
– Richard Bartle

8. Types of Players
● Competitor: plays to best other players, regardless of the game.
● Explorer: curious about the world, loves to go adventuring. Explorers seek outside
boundaries-physical or mental.
● Collector: acquires items, trophies, or knowledge, the collector likes to create sets,
organize history, etc.
● Achiever: plays for varying levels of achievement. Ladders and levels incentivize the
achiever.
● Joker: doesn't take the game seriously-plays for the fun of playing. There's a
potential for jokers to annoy serious players. On the other hand, jokers can make the
game more social than competitive.
● Artist: driven by creativity, creation, design.
● Director: loves to be in charge, direct the play.
● Storyteller: loves to create or live in worlds of fantasy and imagination.
● Performer: loves to put on a show for others.
● Craftsman: wants to build, craft, engineer, or puzzle things out.
– Dr. Stuart Brown and David Kennard

9. Player Interaction Patterns
– Tracy Fullerton, Christopher Swain and Steven Hoffman

10. The Interface

11. The Message of Colors
– Brent Fox

12. Simple but Fun

13. Exploit your Tools
● What can you do with a physics engine?
● What are enjoyable and easy controller uses?
● How do you organize game menus?
● Do you need a HUD (head-up display)?

14. Flow
– Tracy Fullerton, Christopher Swain and Steven Hoffman

15. The Development
Process

16. Principles to keep in mind
● The game needs a good interface.
● The user should get instant visual feedback from game actions, with
sound feedback for major events.
● The user should have a score or some other way of keeping track of
how well he or she is doing overall.
● There should be clear goals for the game and a clear termination
point.
● There have to be advances and setbacks.
● Doing well should involve strategy as well as manual dexterity and
quick reactions.
● You may want to give the user the possibility of using different tools.
● Things should happen at a human pace, that is, not too slow or not
too fast. In particular, things shouldn't change instantaneously.
– Rudy Rucker

17. Iterative Process Diagram
– Tracy Fullerton, Christopher Swain and Steven Hoffman

18. Prototyping
Prototyping lies at the heart of good game design. The word
“prototyping” means to create a working version of the formal
system that, while playable, includes only a rough
approximation of the artwork, sound, and features. Think of it as a
crude model whose purpose is to allow you to wrap your brain around
the game mechanics and see how they function.
– Tracy Fullerton, Christopher Swain and Steven Hoffman

19. Tuning and Balancing
As mentioned earlier, the only way to fully understand a system is to
study it as a whole, and that means putting it in motion.
Because of this, once a game designer has defined the elements of their
system, they need to playtest and tune their system. They do this
first by playing the game themselves, possibly with other designers, and
then by playing with other players, who are not part of the design
process. There are several key things that a designer is looking for when balancing a
game system.
– Tracy Fullerton, Christopher Swain and Steven Hoffman

20. Stages of Game Development
– Tracy Fullerton, Christopher
Swain and Steven Hoffman

21. The Concept

22. Games are Fun
● What is a game?
● What is fun?
● What is the challenge?
● What do you learn?

23. Know your Topic
● Study the subject
● Think of parts of it that are attractive
● Don't bore your players

24. Tuning and Balancing
●
First, she needs to test to make sure that the system is internally complete.
This means that the rules address anyloopholes that could possibly arise
during play... If players are arguingover how the rules should deal
with a particular situation, it’s probably because the system is
not internally complete.
●
Once the system is judged to be internally complete, the designer will next test for
fairness... If one player has an unfair advantage over another,
and that advantage is built into the system, the others will feel
cheated and lose interest in the system.
● Once a system is internally complete and fair for all players, the designer must test to
make sure the game is fun and challenging to play... When testing for
fun and challenge, it’s important to test the game with its
intended audience of players. Generally, this is not the designer or the
designer’s friends.
– Tracy Fullerton, Christopher Swain and Steven Hoffman

25. The Game
World

26. Cartoony Art
– Scott McCloud

27. Realistic vs Believable
● Realism ● Believability
– Actual – Consistent
– Real-world – Fantasy
– Mimicry – Creation

28. Immersion
● Tactical immersion is experienced when performing
tactile operations that involve skill. Players feel "in the
zone" while perfecting actions that result in success.
● Strategic immersion is more cerebral, and is
associated with mental challenge. Chess players
experience strategic immersion when choosing a
correct solution among a broad array of possibilities.
● Narrative immersion occurs when players become
invested in a story, and is similar to what is
experienced while reading a book or watching a
movie.
– Ernest Adams

29. Fourth Wall
"The truth was a burning green crack through my brain. Weapon
statistics hanging in the air, glimpsed out of the corner of my
eye. Endless repetition of the act of shooting, time slowing down
to show off my moves. The paranoid feeling of someone
controlling my every step. I was in a computer game. Funny as
hell, it was the most horrible thing I could think of."
– Max Payne

30. The Story

31. Storytelling
● Mind and stories
● The storytelling tradition
● Interactive storytelling
● Games and storytelling

32. Storytelling
The basic structure of a good plot was discovered
a long time ago. It’s called the three-act structure.
Aristotle first identified it in his Poetics, which
gives it the kind of halo that sometimes makes
ideas seem unapproachable. But his point is very
simple: A story must have a beginning, a middle,
and an end.
– Bob Bates

33. Aristotelian Dramatic Arc
– Tracy Fullerton, Christopher Swain and Steven Hoffman

34. Interactive Story
– Tracy Fullerton, Christopher Swain and Steven Hoffman

35. Simulation
– Tracy Fullerton, Christopher Swain and Steven Hoffman

36. Scope
– Tracy Fullerton, Christopher Swain and Steven Hoffman

37. Game Design
The game designer envisions how a game will work during play.
She creates the objectives, rules, and procedures, thinks
up the dramatic premise and gives it life, and is responsible
for planning everything necessary to create a compelling player
experience. In the same way that an architect drafts a blueprint for
a building or a screenwriter produces the script for a movie, the
game designer plans the structural elements of a system that,
when set in motion by the players, creates the interactive
experience.
– Tracy Fullerton, Christopher Swain and Steven Hoffman

38. The Pioneers

39. Chris Crawford
I was driven by one thing and that was “blind”
play. I was very concerned that, no matter how you looked at
it, with board games you could always see what the other
guy was up to. And that always really bothered me, because it was
horribly unrealistic. It just didn’t seem right, and I thought the games would be much
more interesting blind. And, in fact, when we did them, they were immensely
powerful games, far more interesting than the conventional games. And as soon
as I saw that, I knew that this was the way to go. And board-play technology has never
been able to match that simple aspect of it. It was so much fun sneaking up behind your opponent,
and, as they say, sending 20 kilograms up his tail pipe. It was really impressive stuff, very heady
times.

40. Sid Meier
“Ifind it dangerous to think in terms of genre first and
then topic. Like, say, “I want to do a real-time strategy game. OK. What’s a cool
topic?” I think, for me at least, it’s more interesting to say, “I want to do a game about railroads. OK,
now what’s the most interesting way to bring that to life? Is it in real-time, or is it turn-based, or is it
To first figure out what your topic is and
first-person . . . ”
then find interesting ways and an appropriate
genre to bring it to life as opposed to coming the other way
around and say, “OK, I want to do a first-person shooter, what hasn’t been done yet?” If
you approach it from a genre point of view, you’re basically saying, “I’m trying to fit into a mold.” And I
think most of the really great games have not started from that point of view. They first started with
the idea that, “Here’s a really cool topic. And by the way it would probably work really well as a real-
time strategy game with a little bit of this in it.””

41. Will Wright
I just got infatuated with games. As a kid I spent a lot of time building
models, and I bought some of the very early games, such as the very first version of
Flight Simulator with the wire-frame graphics. You had to write your own machine
But just the idea that you
language patch to get it to run, that was funny.
could build your own little micro-world inside the
computer intrigued me. So I saw it as a kind of
modeling tool. At some point I just got so into these things that I
decided I would try to make one myself, and that was right around the time the
Commodore 64 was first coming out... So, I bought a Commodore as soon as it came out and just
dove into it, and learned it as quickly as I could. And that’s what I did my first game
on.

42. The Literature

43. References
– John Feil & Marc Scattergood
– Richard Rouse III: Game Design Theory & Practice
– Brent Fox: Game Interface Design
– Tracy Fullerton, Christopher Swain and Steven Hoffman: Game Design
Workshop: Designing, Prototyping, and Playtesting Games
– Dr. Stuart Brown and David Kennard: The Promise of Play
– Richard Bartle, Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who suit
MUDs
– Rudy Rucker: Software Engineering and Computer Games
– Scott McCloud: Understanding Comics
– Steven Conway: A Circular Wall?
– Ernest Adams: Postmodernism and the Three Types of Immersion
– Background: http://www.flickr.com/photos/unthinkingly/3012273104

44. Further Reading
– Chris Crawford: The Art of Computer Game Design
– Raph Koster: A Theory of Fun for Game Designers
– Katie Salen & Eric Zimmerman: Rules of Play