ah teaches game design and development (Mechanicals lecture)

Mechanicals

Lecture outline

An introduction to game mechanics. Lecture slides will be made available on the day of the lecture.

In preparation for lecture...

Please close up any laptops, cellphones, Oculus Rifts, Thinkpads and other 'beep-boop' devices.

March break

To accommodate for March break, we will not formally have class on March 18/25th. I can meet during those classes to support you on your projects as you would prefer, but we will set pre-arranged times to do so.

I will also be adding back a class on February 18th to accommodate for the lost weeks.

Any questions or concerns with this?

Presentation time

Time for P1 pitches!

Game mechanics

What are the rules and/or systems that define the player to game relationship. When a player performs an action, what is the reaction from the game?

MDA

Remember from our MDA framework that the mechanics are the 'fundamental' building blocks of our games. We as designers use them first, but they are the things our players will experience 'last'.

Mechanics enable achievement

A good way to frame thinking about mechanics is in response to the goal of the game. If the goal of the game is to jump over obstacles, we likely need a mechanic to jump.

Conversely, this can also be a way to subvert existing assumptions about gameplay. If the game is about jumping over obstacles, instead of jumping over the obstacles perhaps the obstacles jump over the player instead.

Game loop vs mechanics

Today's critical play

We will be playing 'Baba is You' and pulling it apart in three 'phases':

1. What are mechanics?
2. What is the game loop?
3. What could be happening programmatically?

Mechanics

Critical play (Part 1)

Questions to respond to:

• What actions can you take?
• What kinds of verbs would you use to describe those actions?
• How do you know the actions you can take?

Game loop

Critical play (Part 2)

Questions to respond to:

• What actions do we repeatedly take to win the game?
• What is the sequence of those actions?
• What changes when a loop ends?

Programming

Critical play (Part 3)

Questions to respond to:

• What would you need to be able to do programmatically to build this level?
• What kind of logic do you see within the level?
• What is likely defined when the level starts?
• What is update while the level runs?

Questions?

Any questions about the critical play reflection?

Game loops vs game loops

We have talked about game loops as a design consideration, but we can also have game loops that are a programmatic consideration.

Code tutorial

Today's tutorial covers starting to define functions within our code. A function is a reusable block of code, making it faster and easier to repeat specific actions.

Refactoring

As part of today's tutorial we will be refactoring some of our code from earlier tutorials. This is meant to help us improve the readability, structure and maintability of our code.

To the computers!