ah teaches game design and development (Going with the flow lecture)

Going with the flow

Lecture outline

Planning out your game and prototyping. Lecture slides will be made available on the day of the lecture.

Game development process

At this point we have worked through a portion of the game design process:

  1. Conceptualize
  2. Prototype
  3. Playtest (P3)
  4. Evaluate (P3)

Conceptualize

Developing an idea and the experience. We have talked about a variety of different frames for thinking about game design:

Ideas

  1. Think of an idea.
  2. Try it out.
  3. Keep changing it and testing it until it seems good enough.
(Schell, 2019)

Having a core

Before getting to prototyping you want to have a clear 'core' to what you are proposing. Think back to our first project and how we tried to define the 'core' of what we are building.

Prototype

A prototype doesn't require code.

A sketch illustrating the components of a game
A paper prototype of a monster from the game Spore
A screenshot from the digital spore game where a monster is being designed
A screenshot from our in-class tutorial making a jumping game

Prototype the core

A prototype isn't about showcasing all of your game. Explore the core or a small subset of the gameplay. Keeping the prototype small makes it easier to see where there are specific problems in what you are proposing/testing.

Playtesting and evaluation

We will expand on playtesting and evaluation in the coming weeks, but there are different ways we can consider playtesting:

Debugging

Let's do a little bit of debugging with your games at this point. Please open up your games and let's try:

Understanding the game:

  • When you press the button does the system respond?
  • Is it clear what your button press does?

Interaction testing:

  • Tapping the button very quickly and continuously.
  • Double-tap the button.
  • Holding the button.
P2: A Tiny Game

Today's critical play

We will be playing 'Spaceteam' in two phases:

  1. Accessibility of the game.
  2. Comparison of the physical vs digital game.

Accessibility

Critical play (Part 1)

What kinds of concerns in accessibility are there with the following:

Physical vs digital

Critical play (Part 2)

Questions to respond to:

Questions?

Any questions about the critical play reflection?

Critical play reflections

Code tutorial

Today's tutorial covers dealing with creating game states and collisions.

Collisions

Today we are going to do an axis-aligned bounding box (AABB) collision detection.

To the computers!

Code exercise
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