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.