GAME ELEMNTS
Hey there,
This week’s reading tasks where quite interesting in my
opinion. They where all about analyzing a researching a game so you can
understand what the key components are in each game. Here is the first one.
This part of the article is very important because it helps
us define certain qualities of a game. It showed us a list of recurring themes
to help us understand the qualities of a game. The list is as follows, rules,
conflict, goals, decision making and uncertain outcomes. Games also are
activities, they are artificial/safe/outside the ordinary life, voluntary, they contain elements of
make-believe/representation/simulation, they are inefficient, they are art, and
they are closed systems.
What
are the atomic elements of a game?
It then goes on to describe the atomic elements of a game. Which
lets us break down games into atoms to discover what designers may look at when
creating a game
Players- What I learned about players is that there is a standard on how many people you need to have, games must have a certain number of players to function. A game must at least have 1 player but can also have multiple. Teams also should be balanced if anywhere possible. Also, separate individuals versus the system must be fair.
- Objective (Goals)- In order for a game to function the player needs some sort of objective, there are also common objectives in the game which means that if there are multiple players playing the same game they will have the same common objectives to carry out the same goal that the game is trying to get the players to achieve.
- Rules: There are 3 categories of rules, setup, things players do from the beginning of a game, Progression of play, what goes on during the game, resolution, what condition is caused to end the game what happened to make the player win/lose.
- Resource and Resource Management: It is a broad topic, but it means what a single player has control of.
- Game State- Things in a game are all organized by a computer that keeps an eye on what the player owns in the game and just the game in general.
- Information- What information is given to the player
- Sequencing- The sequence in which players interact with the world and one another
- Player Interaction- How each individual player influence each other and how they interact with one another and the world
- Theme- The theme does not affect the gameplay at all, the theme makes it easier for the player to get emotionally attached to a game, but it does not make one game better that another.
- Games and systems- This is how every element that is in a game comes together to make the game run
For critical analysis it is quite useful when looking at
games. It is an un-biased opinion of the game. Its looking at the formal
elements of a game and do they work? It is also useful when designing your own
games for instance asking yourself does the various parts of your game work or not.
The list of questions they gave can be quite useful for everyone.
What is game design? Game design can be linked with all
types of research, game design has every other aspects in it for research such
as “Be it a technical oriented paper of an inventive algorithm
or a study of a game forum discussion”. When asking game designers to describe their opinion on what
game design is they will describe it as either emotional engineering or largely
communication or everything that goes into a game design is more or less what
goes into the game. It is also seen a game design in general as experimental as
an overview, experimenting making your games to get out what you want.
Introduction to Game Design: Prototype Your Game
The term prototype comes from a design where its making something before you commence your full project but in games, it means to explore aspects of the game. It showed us different ways of coming up with prototypes, like paper mashups for creating your game. So basically, designing your game on a piece of paper, trying out different ideas. Also, you can try out your prototype in real life, there example was playing ping pong in real life on a wall. Then you would commence your digital prototype where you come up with a starting phase of the bare bones of your project. “no need to figure it all out in the beginning”.
Thanks for reading they where my thoughts on game development. Hope you enjoyed
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