Exercises 

● 3.3: Interaction Patterns (p62) 

1. Single Player vs Game: Doom
2. Multiple Individual Players vs Game: Necropolis
3. Player vs Player: Tekken
4. Unilateral Competition: Crawl
5. Multilateral Competition: Stick Fight: The Game
6. Cooperative Play: Borderlands 2
7. Team Competition: League of Legends

● 3.4: Objectives (p71) 

1. League of Legends: Construction/Capture/Race/Chase
2. Moon Hunters: Construction/Exploration/Capture
3. Trove: Construction/Exploration/Capture
4. Torchlight 2: Exploration/Capture
5. Clicker Heroes: Construction/Chase
6. Osu: Accuracy/Speed/Race
7. Path of Exile: Construction/ Exploration
8. Puzzle & Dragons: Solution/Capture/Race
9. Battleblock Theater: Solution/Capture/Race
10. Stardew Valley: Construction/Race

● 3.5: Procedures for Blackjack (p73) 

At the beginning of the round, players or just yourself will place bets, then the dealer will deal clockwise one card facing up to each player and themselves; they will do this twice, but their second card will be facing down.

Depending on the total of your two cards, you will proceed to either: stand, hit, double down, split or surrender

After all the players have made their moves, the dealer will then flip over their second card, the dealer will either bust or make hand and possibly a push

Players will either lose their bets or are paid more 

● 10.8: Symmetrical versus Asymmetrical (p321) 

Our team’s original prototype was designed to be asymmetrical, but what we first worked with was a single gunner player and a sort of magical dinosaur that casted mobs of other dinosaurs; we tagged this guy as the boss, but we didn’t plan on making more character until we realized making individual players with different gun types would be a lot easier and more fun to do that one character stacked with 3 guns.

Reading 

● GDW Chapter 3: Working with Formal Elements (pages 55—90)

“Bound by the rules of play, we perform actions that we would never otherwise,... But we also perform actions we would like to think ourselves capable of and have never had the chance to face (page 55).” This is the beauty of the magic circle.

Player experience goals will influence the structure of your game. This means decisions for your game about co-op; how they might compete or cooperate or even both and the number of players. There are systems that require only an exact number of players to function while at the same time there are games that might require something like 5 or more players or even 1,000 players or more to play. The roles of players can all be uniform or a number of specific roles that need to be filled in order for the game to start. In games like RPGs, different roles will give players different abilities and a different player experience.You might want to consider the playstyles of roles and the play between them. In cases where roles are unique from each other, the balance of the roles will be critical to gameplay.

Player Interaction Patterns:

1. Single Player versus Game
2. Multiple Players versus Game
3. Player versus Player
4. Unilateral Competition
5. Multilateral Competition
6. Cooperative Play
7. Team Competition

Video games are interactive software that inherently requires player input to function and deliver a player experience. So its entire structural model is formed in order to represent a behavior or behaviors to allow this. Players are bound to see this model differently from taking subjective observations of “source models”, which are influences of reality. To preserve the player experience, a video game also has to persuade. That may mean displaying a convincing world and environment that the player can connect with.

Apart from the player experience, a game should have objectives for the player to strive for, game objectives or personal goals. The game’s structure may allow for more than one objectives and even objectives within objectives (...within objectives).

Procedures are methods of play and the actions of player to achieve game objectives. “One way to think about procedures is: who does what, where, when, and how (page 72).” The model of procedures a game tends to have is: starting action, progression of action, special actions and resolving actions. In digital games, a procedure can describe the potential actions from the menu screen to the game and its controls. In games like role-playing games, many things may be calculated in order for the conclusion of an action to come to light; this is a multifaceted system of procedures. We can observe this complex system in a role-playing analog game like DnD where numbers are rolled and calculated by player stats and a dice. When defining procedures, it is important to think of the physical limitations of how the game will be played.

“... rules define game objects and define allowable actions by the players (page 74).” It’s easy to state the rules of an analog game, but for digital games, these rules may not be explicitly said. One way to represent an unallowed action is by not having the interface for it even be played out. Rules are formed to define the structure of a game and to close loopholes. Too many rules, however, may cause immense brain damage to the players not only from its length but from pure gamer rage.

Rules also define objects and concepts within a game. These can be taken from the real world or completely fabricated. Of course familiar concepts may be already shared amongst games like intelligence, strength and agility stats. These are variables the game’s program uses to calculate behind the scenes. There are games where variables are upfrontly calculated by the player for them to decide their move, but most of the time these variables and its potential conclusions are intuitively known by experienced players accumulated in their game knowledge/”game sense”. So player’s relationships with these objects and concepts are that they will gradually learn the nature of them and how they will rely on the game’s procedures and rules.

Rules will also define the restrictions of space and limitations of a game, most of the time to keep game balance from straying far to one player’s favor.

Incentives are great ways to keep the player on track and there can be rules that oppose certain player actions that will allow them to stray from this track of the player experience train.

In some way, resources in a game will help players achieve an objective or allow them to progress. They must have scarcity and utility to produce exciting gameplay from its value and limited amount. There needs to be a balance between the two otherwise it will either become useless from its saturation within the game or become something novel and useless if it has low value. Depending on the type of player experience you want, these components might be used in a way that causes the player to feel frustration. On the other hand, in a fairer system, more is always better.

Resources within a game may be: lives, units, health, currency, actions, power-ups, inventory, special terrain and time.

“...conflict is designed into the game by creating rules, procedures, and situations (such as multiplayer competition) that do not allow players to accomplish their goals directly (page 83).” Procedures will be inefficient for players to reach game objectives, creating a sense of challenge. Within a game of multilateral competition, players will find themselves committing to this inefficiency of a game structure to focus on getting the upper hand on other players. Think of conflict as sort of the twist of the gameplay. Sources of conflict may be: obstacles, opponents and dilemmas. 

Boundaries can be physical or intangible. They are what form a space (the magic circle) for the player or players to play in and a shift of this boundary within a game can change it entirely.

The outcome of a game should be uncertain in order to hold the attention of players. For many game systems, producing a winner or multiple winners will be the main outcome, but still there is a mysterious factor of who that person or those people might be. “...the structure of the final outcome will always be related to both the player interaction patterns discussed earlier and the objective (page 89).”

● GDW Chapter 10: Functionality, Completeness and Balance: Symmetry & Asymmetry (p319—324) 

To start thinking of how you might balance a game, you should start by thinking of a fair system in which both sides (or multiple sides) may have a fair chance of achieving an outcome where they win. 

Within symmetrical games, players will start out the same with the ability to access the same information and the same resources. Beware of the “first move advantage” strategy that players may adopt that might tip the balance of the game. You can resolve by having the game resolve after many turns or forming a particular procedure that may help players after share the same advantage or even negate its effects by using a dice to randomize a value between players, rendering the player’s “advantage” up to rnjesus.

With asymmetrical games, the game designer gives different resources, abilities (procedures, methods of play), rules or objectives, however they must still design the game in a way that is still balanced amongst all players. Asymmetrical objectives for players can be: a ticking clock, protection vs capturing or a combination of the two; defending something until the timer is up and capturing that something within that time frame or individual objectives within a game.

● GDW Chapter 12: Team Structures (p383—410) 

“The developer’s main task is to deliver the product, while the publisher’s is to finance and distribute it (page 383).” On the publisher’s side, behind the Producer and the assistant producer are Executives, a marketing team and quality assurance. On the developer’s side, the Producer and assistant producer lead a team of game designers, programmers, visual artists, quality assurance and specialized media. 

The game designer brainstorms concepts, creates prototypes, playtests and from those feedbacks revise prototypes, communicates vision to the team and most importantly advocates for the player. The Producer is the leader of the developer’s team and is the main link between the developer and the publisher. They are responsible for the schedule and budgeting of the team, tracking and allocating resources, managing the developer team so that they deliver on time and motivate the team while solving production-related problems. Programmers will draft technical specifications, implement of the game on software prototypes; tools; game modules and engines, structuring data, managing communications, documenting code and coordinating with engineers to fix issues. The goals of visual artists are to design and produce visuals of the game. Their overall responsibilities include characters, the world and its objects, interface, animations and cut scenes. QA Engineers are also referred to as bug testers. For testing code they first create a test plan for the project based on it technical and design specifications and then execute it, record unexpected or undesirable behavior, report these issues after categorizing and prioritizing them and then retest and resolve issues after they have been fixed. Specialized media is an umbrella term for the broad and diverse spectrum of professions that may be required for the project. The Level designer’s is to implement level designs, create level concepts and test these levels with the designer to improve gameplay. On the publisher’s side, the marketing team is in charge of selling the game and they may even have direct involvement during the production process. The executors’ job is to run the publishing company. There may be some conflicts between the developer team and the executive due to the latter’s ignorance of the game, so it’s your job to put yourself in their shoes and show them patience and resolve it.

Research 

● Crawl (Steam/Xbox/PS4/Switch) by Powerhoof

Crawl is an unilateral competition where roles are everchanging as the larger group (or a single player) possesses objects or monsters in a dungeon room to knock out the soul (or sole)  of the player possessing a human warrior. Every player's goal is to fight to become the one possessing the human in order to win at the end. The last room is a 3 headed monster with each head being controlled by the players leftover. They fight against the player possessing the human body, but even after the former group defeats the human, the one who has dealt the killing blow will be the new player possessing the human body, while the player who has gotten knocked out of it will possess the 3 headed monster. I like the idea of having players control the environment and quickly adapt to different situations, leaving the "levels" always changing .