Lecture

Balance is one of the most elusive qualities of a game. Often times, it is something that you are only aware of while playing the game and experiencing the overall ‘game-feel’. An aspect might feel balanced in theory, but in practice feels the opposite. Because of this, I feel that playtesting and the iterative process is hugely key to the successful balancing of a game. By having a playcentric approach to development and playtesting changes in a cyclical manner, balancing can be achieved.

Of particular note in this week’s lecture were the different methodologies for balancing a game. It is clear that documentation is key in the process. This allows for a frame of reference from which to make your changes later down the line. For this reason, game design documents are essential, and to this end I am endeavouring to make a clear, coherent GDD for my team’s game for GAM220. When encountering problems it is also key to fully understand them before attempting to solve them. By gaining this critical understanding, we can identify a solution that best fits the problem, without breaking the rest of the game.

GDD work

I have spent some time this week looking at my game concept through the lens of balance. By employing some of the knowledge and techniques learnt this week, I hope to create a well balanced game design that does not contain any ‘dominant strategies’. Elements of my game that I have identified as at risk of being out of balance are: equipment, game economy and levels design. While I won’t be actually producing this game, it important that I make sure these aspects are well thought through and considered so as not to render the game unbalanced.

The statistical boosts that each piece of equipment gives the player will need to be considered holistically, so that each piece is viable for the player. For instance, do I choose a 10% speed boost or 10% faster stamina regeneration? These small dilemmas build up to make a game more engaging and dynamic.

Game economy similarly requires careful balancing as players should neither have more money than they know what to do with or too little money to purchase anything they want. I will need to iterate in order to reward player investment accordingly. Errands that are completed by the player should provide money that is equivalent to their time investment. Otherwise the player would only do the quickest errands for maximum profit.

Level design will likely be the aspect that needs the most iteration and playtesting to perfect. I do not want certain routes or traversal objects to be significantly more effective than others (influence of character upgrades notwithstanding.) Using a bouncepad to launch yourself into grinding on a telephone wire should be just as viable as darting in-between traffic, catching the slipstreams of passing cars.

Individual challenge

This week’s individual challenge tasked us with identifying and discussing a game which features an example of poor balancing. I choose to discuss Skyrim (2011).

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Due to the fact that balance is such an intangible quality, I found this challenge quite hard. It is hard to know whether a proposed solution will improve balance as so much of a game’s balance comes from the ‘feeling’ you get when playing. While I do think that these elements are quite unbalanced when considered in the context of the wider game, I am not fully confident that my proposed solutions would fix them.

Nick had an interesting response to my submission:

While I do agree that eventually any weapon in Skyrim becomes overpowered if levelled enough, I still think that the bow is significantly powerful, especially in the early game. Aside from a few specific circumstances, it is the only weapon which can dispatch enemies without the player needing to enter combat. Because of this it becomes easy for the player to end up specialising in archery, without sufficiently testing the other weapon classes.

I definitely agree that much of the appeal of RPGs comes from the gradual tilting of balance in the player’s favour, until the player is powerful enough to best previously intimidating opponents with great ease. I think that if an opponent levelling system were included in the game, the player experience would be significantly devoid of that satisfying progression.

Iron designer challenge

For this week’s iron designer challenge, we had to rebalance a casual game in order for it to be targeted at a more hardcore audience. Our team chose Club Penguin (2005).

The main element of the game that we focused on were the minigames, as we felt that they were the most demanding of the player. We decided that we could turn the game into a competitive party game that cycles through modified versions of the original minigames, with players being positioned on a leaderboard, and the player who has got the most points from each game winning.

For example, we turned a minigame centered around level-based jetpack flying into a frantic race between players trying to reach the end. Players are able to get pickups that give benefits such as speed boosts or projectiles to throw at other players.

It was a difficult challenge to convert the game into a more demanding and competitive experience, however I think that the concept we landed on has potential to work. It is interesting to see how simple gameplay modifiers can tilt a game’s balance to become more ‘hardcore’, at least in theory.

Further reading

I have been largely continuing my ongoing engagement with the Talis resource list this week.

Following the lecture, I read an insightful article about the importance and difficulties of balancing on Game Developer (formerly Gamasutra). I especially agree with the statement that “a game being ‘in balance “is like a person being ‘in shape’; there’s no strict, defined line at which a game goes from being in balance to out of balance, it’s a gradual continuum,” (Burgun, 2011). Balance is not a one-size-fits-all issue, and approaches should be tailored to each problem.

References

BURGUN, Keith. 2011. ‘Understanding Balance in Video Games’. Game Developer [online]. Available at: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/understanding-balance-in-video-games [accessed 27 November 2021].

Club Penguin. 2005. Rocketsnail Games, Disney Canada Inc.

Skyrim. 2011. Bethesda Game Studios, Bethesda Softworks.

Lecture

The lecture for this week was about the two main types of skill that games require: twitch and strategic.

As a game is commonly referred to as a series of interesting or meaningful decisions, it was beneficial to go over the types of decision in games, and how they are impacted by skill. The most compelling decisions are never easy – whether they incorporate elements of risk vs. reward, trade offs or dilemmas in which the seemingly lesser of evils must be picked. Blind decisions can also be a powerful tool, as players are unaware of their impact on the game until after their decision has been made.

It seems that the core difference between strategic and skill-based games comes from the speed at which they require you to make these decisions. In stark opposition to strategic games, twitch games rely on rapid, reactionary decision making from the player. These games are constantly throwing problems at the player for them to respond to as quickly as possible. In games like this challenge comes from the speed and accuracy of executing these decisions.

GDD work

When considering my game Slam City Skates, it seems that the primary skill required of the players is twitch skill. Due to the fast movement speed, and implementation of trick combos, the player will need to be making decisions on the fly. They must have quick reactions and make responsive inputs to maintain their combos and flow state for as long as possible.

Being an action-sport game, strategic skill does not fit very well into my concept. If I were to add more strategic decision-making in, I would likely implement it into the game’s story. There would be key moments in the story where the player must make decisions that alter the game state. These could be dilemmas or trade-offs, in which the player has to carefully consider their decisions and how that might impact upon the game. While these narrative-based decisions work well for a lot of titles, I do not feel that it would add anything substantial to my game’s core design, rather having the possibility to detract from the experience.

Individual Challenge

Following on from the topic of this week’s lecture, we were met with the challenge of combining twitch and strategic skills into one game. We had to add twitch skills into a game that is purely strategic. I choose to add twitch mechanics to the classic board game checkers:

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A game of checkers that takes place on a standard board, with standard movement rules.

With one twist.

You only get five seconds to complete each turn.
Within that turn you can move as many of your pieces as you want/can.
Each piece can only move once per turn.

Getting a piece to the other side of the board makes it become a ‘king’.
Every king you have on your team adds an extra second to your playtime each turn.
If you have three kings and the enemy has none, you get eight seconds per turn over their five.

No slow-paced strategies here, pure chaos and reaction times only. Quick analysis of the board and speedy visual processing is key to success.
Thanks to the time-pressure, an opponent may instantly take the opportunity to eliminate your piece, without seeing that doing so will open them up for attack.

Difficulty options:
Easy – 8 seconds per turn
Normal – 5 seconds per turn
Hard – 3 seconds per turn

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In truth, I struggled a lot with this week’s task and I am not overly pleased with the finished concept. I think that there is an inherent awkwardness to adding one gameplay-type to a game that is purely designed around being the polar opposite. In this case, coming up with creative ways to add twitch mechanics to checkers was a big challenge and I feel that simply adding a timer was rather unoriginal. However, I am happy with the modifier of each king adding a second onto your turn time, as it gives another reward for travelling all the way across the board.

Iron designer challenge

This week’s team challenge required us to make either a strategic or twitch base game design based upon a number of options. My team chose to make a strategy game set around the premise of a school reunion.

The player would move around a grid-based board, trying to avoid various people from their high-school days. At the start of each turn they would be signposted as to where each ‘enemy’ is about to move, giving them a chance to reposition and avoid. If the enemy’s turn ends with them occupying any adjacent tiles to the player, then the player’s ‘social battery’ will be drained. If the entire bar gets drained then it’s game over.

We also came up with varying classes for enemy types, based around archetypal school personalities. An enemy’s class effects how it moves, attacks, and how much damage is dealt to the player. This inclusion helped to keep the game concept varied and hopefully add some dynamic gameplay moments.

Further reading

This week’s further research has been largely taken up by my essay module, GAM210. My essay is tackling pedagogy within level design, so I have begun looking into articles related to this field. I have begun reading An Architectural Approach to Level Design by Chris Totten (Totten 2014), which has so far proved to be a very interesting read. In particular, Chapter 4: Teaching Levels Through Communication has been formative in my understanding of the topic, as it discusses various methods of behavioural teaching and how they can influence our understanding of how to design better levels. I agree with Chris’ statement that “learning from other fields is an important part of the ongoing development of game design” (Totten 2014: p. 162). Often, to become a more considerate game designer, it is important to look outside of our industry sphere and into other, more traditional areas, especially when in consideration of player psychology.

References

TOTTEN, Christopher W. 2014. An Architectural Approach to Level Design. Boca Raton: CRC Press. 

Lecture

This week the lecture focused on chance and randomness within a variety of game types. It was interesting to consider the fact that randomness not only adds to replayability, but can also help balance multiplayer games to make win conditions more achievable for all skill levels. Chance also adds an element of variety and excitement that is unfortunately not present in more linear, authored game experiences. It is true that my most exciting moments in Sea of Thieves (2018) have come as a result of the game’s various random emergent systems working in tandem to create memorable gameplay.

The concept of input and output randomness was also something that I hadn’t considered before. Input randomness (procedurally generated levels, randomly drawn cards etc.) seem to be a more preferable implementation of chance than output randomness (hit chances, loot boxes, etc.) I believe that this is because input randomness still allows players agency in how they respond to their random situations, whereas output randomness takes all choice away from the player, leaving them at the mercy of the game’s systems.

GDD work

Taking this information into account I have begun thinking about how chance could be implemented into my GDD game, Slam City Skates. I would like to use randomness to add a level of emergence to the game that would help to make the game more replayable, and for the world to feel alive. This could take the form of random events that occur while exploring the map, such as street skate battles, tagging opportunities, or chases. There could even be a challenge mode in which you have to skate your way through a procedurally generated playspace as quickly as possible.

Individual challenge

The challenge for this week required us to add elements of randomness and chance to tic-tac-toe. At first, it proved a challenge to come up with concepts that dramatically altered how the game is played. By considering the core aim of tic-tac-toe (to create a chain of symbols), I eventually came up with the premise of chaining electricity to power up generators.

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Lecture

The lecture on puzzle design was a great introduction to the fundamental characteristics of a well-made puzzle. Considering mechanics, goals, catches, revelations, assumptions and presentation is of key importance to puzzle design.

If puzzles find their way into my design document for Slam City Skates, I will need to remember that their inclusion should be intended to make the game more fun, and not feel like an after-thought. They should be an obstacle that supports the core of the game.

GDD work

This week marked the beginning of my work on the GDD for Slam City Skates, my hypothetical open world roller-skating game. I began by looking at the exemplar documents provided on the learning space for inspiration. It seemed that they all started out by detailing the high-level design details and concepts. Taking inspiration, I made a couple of slides discussing the concept, and outlining the core pillars of the game’s design. By putting these things at the forefront of the document, I able to make sure readers are on-board with the idea, before going on to elaborate further in. Next, I plan to discuss target demographics.

Individual challenge

The lessons learnt in our puzzle design lecture led into the individual challenge assigned this week. We were tasked with creating a puzzle based around defusing a bomb, using the techniques and principles introduced to us by Nick.

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A grid-based puzzle similar to Minesweeper where you must find and defuse the bombs on a battlefield.

The player must dig in places to uncover the locations of the bombs. They will be told exactly how many bombs must be found in each level.

One catch: if you dig up directly over a bomb, it explodes! At this point the level will reset.

Each level has a unique layout, with buildings shaping the play space. However, the placement of the bombs will be randomised, to avoid exploitation of the mechanics.

The player always starts by digging the center tile.

Once you dig up a tile, the player will able to hear the ticking of a bomb (if there are any on an adjacent tile), letting them know a bomb is in the vicinity. Depending on the intensity of the beep, they will be able to deduce the number of bombs in the adjacent area. This can only be heard when the player is stood on the dug-up tile.

Through careful and decisive digging, the player will be able to pinpoint the location of the bombs in the level, placing markers wherever they think they are. If the player changes their mind, they can pick up and replace their markers at any time.

Once they are done, the player can click to end the level.

If they were correct in their placement an animation of the character extracting and defusing the bombs will play out, the player will be congratulated, and the level will advance.

If they were incorrect, the whole area will blow up, and the level will restart.

Below is an example of an early level with a step-by-step of how someone might complete it:

Key:

White tile – Play space

Black tile – Dug area

Brown tile – Building (non-playable area)

Pink dot – Point at which you can hear a bomb

Red dash – Placed marker

Spin on minesweeper

Feedback for improvement

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I was happy with the idea, as I think it has mechanical simplicity that allows for tactical complexity. It is something I would like to develop further as a personal project, possibly prototyping it when I can. I got some helpful feedback too, with one peer suggesting that I could even add a limited amount of tiles to dig up per level as a further constraint to the player. This is definitely something to consider, if it can be implemented without being too frustrating it would add an extra layer of complexity.

One submission that I found very interesting came from fellow designer Ryan Minty, who interpreted the challenge less literally. He came up with a ‘social diffusion’ game, in which the bomb is actually an escalating argument that has to be settled. I really like this idea and it shows that you can come up with creative solutions to seemingly straightforward tasks.

Iron challenge

This week’s group challenge tasked us with designing a puzzle system based around electricity. Our team decided to make a grid-based connection game similar to The Witness (2016), however ours had a significant twist – it takes place in first-person and real-time.

Titled ‘Groovin Gaffer’, the game would see players trying to connect electrical nodes on a dancefloor to set up for a 70’s disco. There would be environmental hazards thrown in which modify how players engage with the puzzles in novel ways. For instance, some tiles may have water spilt on them and if the player electrifies more than two adjacent nodes then the tile becomes electrified and unable to be stepped on by the player. Other tiles may drop down to form a chasm that the player would be at risk of falling into.

We were really happy with this concept and felt that it had a good amount of modularity, being able to be expanded on and developed further. We came up with some fun puzzle designs that left some people who playtested feeling genuinely stumped.

Further reading

As with each week, I have been engaging with the Talis resource list. This week I started reading The Art of Game Design (Schell, 2008). It is by far the best book on game design I have read. By breaking down design considerations into digestible ‘lenses’ for us to look at our games through, Schell is able to effectively convey the fundamentals and intricacies of design. There is an accompanying website (Schell) that lists all of the lenses featured in the book, which I will consult whenever evaluating my own designs, to ensure that I make the best possible decisions.

I also watched the GMTK video on puzzle design, as it was referenced many times in our lecture. I resonated with Mark’s point on minimalism in puzzle design, where he says that “a good puzzle is pretty minimalist, with almost no extraneous elements” (GMTK, 2018). I think that this is highly important as difficulty should arise from the player figuring out how they arrive at the solution not what that solution is. A minimal presentation provides a minimal barrier between the player and the actual solving of the puzzle.

References

GAME MAKER’S TOOLKIT. 2018. What Makes a Good Puzzle? [YouTube essay]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsjC6fa_YBg [accessed 5 October 2021].

SCHELL, Jesse. 2008. The Art of Game Design: A book of lenses. Boca Raton : CRC Press

SCHELL, Jesse. ca. 2008. ‘Game Design: A Deck of Lenses’. [online]. Available at: http://deck.artofgamedesign.com/#/?lang=en [accessed 7 October 2021].

The Witness. 2016. Thekla, Inc.

Lecture

During this week’s asynchronous lecture, we explored topics around communicating game design. As a designer, communication is arguably the most important skill to have, even more so than creativity. Whether we are writing up a design document or conversing with members of the team, we need to be able to convey the overall vision effectively.

Many key points of effective design documents were discussed. In particular, I resonated with the principle of brevity. A GDD should, at least initially, cover all elements of the game’s design in a brief, bullet-point format. This is because you do not want to overload the reader with too much information early on – they should be able to get a good idea of the desired product at a glance. Of course, detailed writing is important, but that should be reserved for later on in the document when covering individual disciplines and breaking down mechanics. The last thing you want is for your team to be bored while reading about the game they are making!

This directly extends into my team development module for GAM220, for which we are currently undergoing prototyping. There has already been some confusion over what is required of each prototype. To remedy this, the other designers and I wrote up two ‘one-page design documents’, for the team to refer to at any point during this development phase.

GDD work

For much of this week I have been brainstorming ideas for my game design document to be submitted in assignment one. I had a few promising ideas which I couldn’t choose between, so I decided to make mind maps for each.

 

Eventually I came to the conclusion that the roller-skating game was my favourite. I feel that it has a lot of potential for engaging mechanics. It was also the idea that I felt most excited about. In short, it was a game I would buy and play.

In order to get a better sense of what form the game might take, I did some research into similar games.

Case Study #1 – Jet Set Radio:

The most obvious parallel I could think of to my game idea was Jet Set Radio (2000). The game has a lot of similarities to mine, being based around roller-blading and having an anarchic tone. After watching some gameplay, I made some notes:

• The environment is set up to be as fun and easy to move through as possible. Ramps and grind rails are everywhere.
• Great soundtrack that contributes to getting you into a state of flow during skating.
• I like the incorporation of graffitiing. It lets you make your mark on the city, while also adding to the anti-establishment ideals. Could possibly let players create their own tags?

Case Study #2 – Sunset Overdrive

Next I looked at Sunset Overdrive (2014). While being a post-apocalyptic sandbox game with lots of combat, there is a big emphasis on fun, fluid movement by grinding through the map on rails.

• Grinding on rails is largely encouraged. Not only does it help you get from A to B much faster, it also is essential during combat when large amounts of enemies are on screen. I need to similarly encourage players to move, even if there is no ‘conventional’ combat.
• The game has a good sense of humour. I would like this to be prevalent in my game too, incorporating the humour of 90s Saturday-morning cartoons.
• The HUD is reflective of the game’s punk and comic-book stylisation. My UI should feed into the narrative and style by being reflective of the 90’s cartoon aesthetic.

Individual challenge

For this week’s challenge we were tasked with describing two vastly different games and then reflecting on how we analysed each game. It seemed that I tended to focus in on how mechanics elicit particular emotions, which is unsurprising as emotional response is what drives most of my design decisions within my own projects.

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Sable (2021)

Sable is a lo-fi exploration game about a young woman setting out to find her purpose on an otherworldly planet. Taking cues from games like Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017)  and Journey (2012), the developers at Shedworks have taken care to give a large amount of freedom to the player; once you leave the starting area, you are free to tackle the game in whatever order you choose. There is an upgradeable climbing mechanic, allowing you to scale almost any surface, if you have the stamina for it.