Exercise 

● Focus your game. How much can you remove and still maintain the core experience? 

Our game's core experience is herding birds, and we're choosing to focus more on that. More specifically we're removing most of the features, such as the "kabedon" feature, and focusing on the core gameplay currently. As for the birds, we're changing it to a more simpler concept and making them chickens, with an extra surprise. However, from the old feature of chasing the birds to a wall, our new idea will have that but transformed into a highlighted location called the "coop". This introduces prospects of potential level design depending on where we are taking out game. Also rather than the player being a romantic in pursuit, you are more of a farmer or worker doing their job.

Reading 

● GDW Chapter 11: Fun and Accessibility (p341—373) 

How can you tell if your game is fun? First, you must identify the formal, dramatic elements of your game. These elements fall under the category of Challenge (state of flow between difficulty/anxiety and skill/boredom), Play(there are many different types of players and different types of play for those players, what kind of opportunities does your game have for different forms of play? Does your game want to accommodate for all types of players or want to deepen gameplay for a single type?) and Story that are meant to hook the player emotionally to keep playing for the game’s outcome. 

Important aspects of Challenge:

• Reaching and exceeding goals: Ultimate goal, subgoals and personal goals. Subgoals can invigorate players along the way for the outcome. Are these goals defined or hidden? Questions of its simplicity and difficulty come between how you want your player experience to be (skill vs difficulty). Ask playtesters to talk aloud (especially with what their current goal is in the game) to get a feel of their engagement within the game 
• Competing against Opponents: Competitiveness provides a natural challenge to a game (this can be directly multiplayer or indirectly in rank leaderboards). To test for this element in your game, make sure your playtesters are in a space where they can easily communicate with other players and if they are naturally trash-talking or doing actions like chest-thumping, then that may mean significance to your game.
• Stretching Personal Limits: Accomplishing goals you made for yourself often times has more impact than other goals because we know our limits better than the game designer. It may even occur when a player cannot win but want to “win” in some way anyways. This sense of accomplishment is beyond the feeling of a system’s payoff system. Not everyone is able to enjoy this aspect as they may find it too open-ended. To answer the question of whether or not you want this in your game, you must know your game’s audience and judge if their play experience requires this open-endedness to enhance their play. Ask playtesters about their subgoals when playtesting.
• Exercising Difficult Skills: The process of learning and mastering a skill should not only be for the sake of being able to execute the skill but to be able to execute these skills in specific situations masterfully. A Reward or payoff system should exist for learning a skill.
• Making Interesting Choices: Choices should have consequences, these dilemmas of having the player weigh their options according to these consequences is a great way to challenge them, the factors that might be weighed into these decisions are something to think about. Ask playtesters why they are making these decisions and what they think the consequences to these actions are, how can you improve choices to have them avoid making arbitrary decisions.

Important aspects Play: 

• Living Out Fantasies: All games can benefit from tapping into player’s or their audiences’ fantasies, what aspirations are within reach and what fantasies does it fulfill? It doesn’t have to fall under the category of a fantastical realm but can be a narrative of a situation that is intriguing to experience (something that may even go against a player’s ethics).
• Social Interaction: Having an element of player interactions (high level of engagement amongst players) allows for compelling reason to stay in a game long after its release. How may your game incorporate interaction or what potential does it have for it to come in play?
• Exploration and Discovery: Curiosity of players, especially those who are interested in the fantasy or intrigued in the situation you are displaying in your game, is a huge drive in how they may operate in the game. The act of discovery (and the anticipation of discovery) is something magical. How do you lead the player without pointing them into the direction in a way to “control” the player? A game is a whole systemic  control scheme of directing the player
• Stimulation: How do we put the player in the world you designed (immersive design, VR, the sound design of surround sound)? This involves stimulating their senses (although some rendered intangible, is there a way to stimulate all senses?) and their imagination. With more innovative and immersive technology being evolved in our world, there are more “solutions” for handling a player’s immersive-ness. 
• Self-Expression and Performance: Giving a chance for players to show off their creativity makes for a fun, engaging experience between players and a new dimension to your game.
• Construction/Destruction: A great element to get players invested in a game, engagement within the space, with the space and with the game. Destruction can also be a fun element. How can the opposing element of destruction make for an interesting player experience? 

Important aspects of Story:

• Can be a powerful mechanism for engaging people’s emotions with the game 
• Game characters overcoming obstacles: empathy, you as the character overcoming obstacles: agency
• Is it an imaginative, unique premise?
• Unique characters
• Story-driven game?
• How is the story working with characters?

Analyzing Appeal

• Analyze the core concept of your game 
• Competition among players/ against players
• Adventure/Exploration
• Subgoals and personal goals and the overarching goal of growing your character
• Self-expression (RPG, roleplay)
• Construction of character/destruction of enemies, construction/destruction of monopolies 
• Inventory: Collection
• Goal: owning all property
• Social interactions: with other players online/amongst players, trading 
• Stimulation of music and color

Improving Player Choices

• How do you make choices interesting?
• Consequences and significance
• “...each choice must alter the course of the game (page 347).”
• Risk vs Reward: Each choice should have a potential upside (towards victory) and downside (hurt chances of winning)
• Sid Meier describes “interesting choices” as a stream of decisions that directly or indirectly impact a player’s chances of winning, things like drama and suspense can come naturally from having players weigh the consequences within their choices
• Analyze what kind of decisions your players are making, are they meaningful or tangential?
• If there isn’t any way to make inconsequential choices matter, then these choices need to be eliminated if they are not adding anything to the experience besides damage to the player experience.
• Types of Decisions: To create a truly engaging game, your game should have valleys and peaks, make decisions rise and fall and as the climax is being reached, rake up the tension by gradually increasing the importance of choices until the climax where the balance will be held
• The key to delivering critical situations to the player is to have both pathways have consequences against each other, complex decision
• [don’t]Hollow decision: no consequences
• [don’t]Obvious decision: no real decision
• [don’t]Uninformed decision: an arbitrary choice
• Informed decision: Player has ample information
• Dramatic decision: taps into a player’s emotional state
• Weighted decision: a balanced decision with consequences on both sides
• Immediate decision: has an immediate impact 
• Long-term decision: whose impact will be felt down the road

Dilemmas: in many cases, both choices that are presented to the player are not the “right” answer but both choices will have some upside and loss to them. They are oftentimes paradoxical and recursive, the encountered struggle to win the game

• A rational theory, Minmax theory by von Neumann: both players will do their best to “win” the game even if one side is not technically in a position to “win” (cake-cutting scenario)
• This is something game designers should avoid because if players look for the most optimal choice in the same situation each time, obviously the optimal choice will be the same, however, that will not be a game, but a riddle for mathematicians. The question here is how do we create situations that are more complex in such a way where players will need to weigh the outcomes of potential choices and in terms of risk and reward.
• With the introduction of features being negotiation and communication between players with the business being the trading or purchasing of technology, the complex payoff structure creates for a dilemma where players can make strategic moves or cooperative or deceitful plays 
• As much as possible, try to introduce dilemmas into your core gameplay, tie dilemmas into the objective of your gameplay in order to make the choices more interesting
• “...puzzles are defined by the fact that they have a right answer (page 353).”
• It is a key element in creating conflict in the single-player games (innate tension in solving puzzles)
• Contextualizing the value of player progression (player choices) towards the solution
• System of rewards and punishment within puzzle games creates a dramatic element
• Action elements can be balanced with puzzle-solving elements (or enhance them)
• The combination of single-player and multi-player puzzle elements creates for interesting player experience, Puzzle Pirates
• Rewards and Punishment, “The most direct consequences for player choices… (page 354).”
• The designer will emphasize rewards over punishment
• Punishment, or rather, the threat of punishment creating dramatic tension that is what pressures the player
• Balance system between rewards and punishments, best rewards being that of value and utility
• Rewards that are useful in achieving victory (greater weight/value), rewards that have monetary value and romantic association (appear to be valuable), rewards that are tied to the storyline (added impact)
• Make each reward count
• Timing and quantity of rewards is critical
• Operant conditioning: Rewarded behavior is most likely to be repeated while punished behavior is not
• Repetitive mechanics go well with anticipation of consequences from players, the more players are able to see and anticipate the consequences, the more meaningful their choices are
• Enhanced by player’s game knowledge, visible information and game sense, this describes real-time strategy games (limited visibility, a lack of visibility can heighten a player’s tension and cause them to approach situations with swift actions)
• Surprise: A surprise outcome to a player’s choice can reinvest the player into the game
• This surprise may feel random, but finding the balance between randomness and the importance of player choices is the trick to utilizing surprise
• Progress: we feel joy from seeing your progress towards the end goal, to allow players to feel that they are moving forward is the best way to engage the player into the game
• Devise milestones along the way to showcase progression (small goals to the grand goal)
• Advertise these milestones so players know what they are and what they need to accomplish with rewards
• Be creative in finding ways to represent the progression
• Consider pacing, and the potential time spent by the player
• Resolution: where the players who have stuck around till the end deserve a big reward for all their effort, the satisfaction of completion
• Fun-killers:
• Micromanagement: unwanted chores, extra steps that take away from the player’s fun
• Figure out how much control to give to the player
• Is the task necessary? When a task becomes tedious and repetitive, there is an issue.
• Bring in fresh playtesters to test features, red flags when the same things are being complained about
• A solution to this is to simplify the game system
• Micromanagement usually comes from splitting up tasks into too many divided pieces 
• As the designer, you can set base values that make sense and leave important decisions for the player to strategize like where to go
• Micromanagement itself is not an issue, but it can become an issue when players are faced with too many decisions at once and interferes with the player experience, (there can be a choice in automating tasks: resource management, troop deployment, logistics)’
• The more flexible your system is, the more you can provide for your game while keeping it relatively simple
• Stagnation: the time in a space where nothing is happening or progressing, choices have little increasing impact on the story’s progress
• A common source is repetition 
• Vary action to the solution while showing and displaying some sort of progression
• Balance of power, condition to tip this balance of power
• Stop players from falling into a loop of zero net gain rewards and penalties 
• No progression, just none
• Insurmountable Obstacles: Literally an obstacle a player cannot get past (or at least takes one thousand times)
•  Prevent players from getting stuck, an assist system that recognizes the player is stuck and provides them with enough help without taking away the challenge from the obstacle
• Clues: the position of characters, visible information, system’s hints (via dramatic animation scenes and helpful tips in-game pop-up UI)
• Arbitrary Events: badly designed randomness can be the downfall of a game 
• Bad surprises (randomness) and unfairness
• “A good rule of thumb is to caution your players at least three times before hitting them with anything catastrophic (page 367).”
• Random events with lesser impact don’t require as many warnings
• The bigger the impact/consequence, the more warning you should provide
• Randomness and allowing the player to feel that they are in control
• Predictable Paths: linear progression becomes too predictable since there is literally one path, you can have different choices, but if they lead to the same outcome, then what is the point of those choices in the first place?
• To add a greater sense of possibility to you game, try adding behavior and rules of interaction to objects in the structure of your world in a simple set
• In this case, there is no progression in story, but interaction with objects in the world that the player decides to do for fun, creating their own player experience in a structured designed world
• Multiple paths to different endings
• Causing the player to weigh choices, replayable gameplay
• Accessibility: make sure the game you design is intended for the audience you have designed it for 
• Usability testing
• Target audience 
• Objective feedback (not friends or family)
• People who have never played your game

● Chapter 8: Digital Prototyping, Effective Interface Design (p258) 

“...your goal should be to make the interface as easy to understand as possible (page 258).”

• The interface is fresh and innovative
• But at the same time something familiar
• Form Follows Function: “the design of the object must come from its purpose”
• Ask yourself about the purpose of what you are building
• Bring influence from your concept and ask yourself what is special about it, what thematic elements can you take from the premise/concept to use in your interface, not only that but what elements can you take from the mechanics in your game to transform them into an effective interface
• Allow the interface to originate and evolve from the necessities of the function
• Metaphors: visual interfaces are inherently metaphorical, they are graphical symbols to help us navigate the virtual space created by you
• Symbols contextualize the experience of the game and its mechanics/features
• What is your game’s basic metaphor 

Research 

● Cloud by Jenova Chen, Designer Perspective: Jenova Chen (p191)

Jenova Chen talks about his design process that involves taking simple ideas that have not been done before and refining them. His game, Cloud, is one of them. The player experience goal he wanted to reach for this game was to evoke peaceful yet exciting feelings of beautiful clouds in the sky. As the game became more developed with its gameplay, his team soon took the chance to solidify its gameplay with a premise of childhood daydreaming. His meaning for games takes a different route from a lot of games today that revolve around action, but he sees video games more of an interative and immersive product. Prototypes are used to display what the final gameplay might be, but designers should not be afraid to scratch one out and start a new one. Always ask yourself what you want to make to evoke specific feelings from your player experience goal.