The following post is a selection of exercises from the first three chapters of Fullerton’s Game Design Workshop (2014). I made an effort to choose at least one exercise from each chapter and focused on the ones that I found the most interesting.
1.3 Your Life as a Game
Here are some aspects of my life that could be made into games:
Travelling to work
The travelling to work game has a simple objective: make it to the office on time with the highest number of points. However, there are a number of challenges the player must navigate in order to complete the task.
Firstly, the player must decide at what time to leave the house with a rough estimate of the time required to get from home to work. The more time spent in the home prior to leaving, the more ‘alertness’ points the player will have to spend on the drive, since they will have had more coffee. However, the game takes place in Saskatchewan, and the weather is unpredictable! Sometimes there will be 10 cm of snow on the ground (and the windshield), so it is often wise to sacrifice some coffee time to make sure the vehicle can be sufficiently scraped for maximum visibility.
There will be many obstacles to avoid on the drive, some more important than others. Hitting one of the many potholes will only deplete the vehicle’s condition points, but hitting another vehicle or cyclist is an instant game over.
Once the car is safely parked, the number of alertness points, vehicle condition points, and number of minutes left before the start of the workday are totalled to calculate the player’s daily ranking.
Aquarium care
The fun of the aquarium care game comes from managing a system with several interconnected variables. The player must select suitable substrate and vegetation and carefully choose inhabitants that are compatible. The bioload, water pH, and hardness must all be carefully monitored to ensure the inhabitants are happy. Some animals, such as snails, can be added to reduce the amount of algae present, but their extra nitrogen production must be taken into consideration. Each new element added will have a trade-off. The overall goal is to create a healthy ecosystem that requires as little input as possible. The player wins the game when the aquarium becomes stable enough that it only requires weekly water top-ups and daily food for the animals.
Grocery shopping
The Grocery shopping game is an exercise in resource management. The player gets a predetermined amount of time and money and must get as many items on the list without running out of either. The score is based on the number of items that were successfully purchased in the allotted time and the number of dollars that remain in the budget at the end of the trip. An experienced player will make a mental map of the grocery store and retrieve items in the order that requires them to traverse the fewest number of aisles.
Cooking supper
Cooking supper is the sequel to the grocery shopping game. The player must prepare a healthy and delicious meal from the items acquired in the previous game. The goal is to include something from every food group and make it as yummy as possible without adding too much sugar, salt, or fat. Bonus points are awarded based on timing (if all components are still hot when the meal is served), use of cookware (fewer dishes = better), and appropriate volume of food (having just enough left for lunch the next day is awarded a special achievement).
Raising chickens
This game is all about balancing animal care, egg production, and neighbourhood satisfaction. Each chicken will produce a certain number of eggs per year, and the number of eggs will increase as chicken happiness increases. Chicken happiness is based on the amount of space available, the cleanliness of the run, and the variety of feed provided. Neighbour satisfaction is based on the number of gifted eggs and the amount of noise produced by the chickens. The game is never-ending unless chicken happiness decreases to the point that they get sick or neighbour satisfaction decreases to the point where they report the player’s chickens to animal control (because the game takes place in a city with anti-chicken bylaws). Each spring season there is a mini-game where the player has to look at all different kinds of adorable heritage breed chicks and avoid buying too many.
2.6 Challenge
The following games are ones that I find particularly challenging:
Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze
This game requires a lot of precisely timed button presses, which is not one of my strengths. As Donkey Kong flies through a side-scrolling level on a rocket-propelled barrel, the player must repeatedly tap a button to keep the barrel from falling. Increase the speed of the button taps and the barrel rises. If the barrel crashes into any of the many obstacles or touches the bottom of the screen, it explodes, and the level must be restarted at the last checkpoint. Because there is not much time to react between first seeing an obstacle and dodging it, I find that I need to play the same level over and over, which quickly becomes frustrating.
It is the combat that makes this game very challenging for me. There are a lot of different options for offensive and defensive moves, and each type of enemy requires a unique combination of them to be killed. It can take many attempts and a large amount of trial and error to figure out what works against each new enemy. Once the player gets over the hurdle of determining the correct type of combat, the next challenge is actually executing the moves without losing too much health. During battle, resources are scarce and it can take a long time to save up enough power to do a significant amount of damage to the enemy.
I find Hollow Knight challenging because the game map is large and initially very difficult to navigate. The player must work through the world piece by piece and can only access new parts of the map after solving various challenges, many of which cannot be solved without discovering a new power. The challenge would be lessened if the map were laid out in a linear fashion so that one could work through it as they achieved new powers, but as it is designed, the player must remember where the inaccessible places are and return to them later. It almost feels like a maze sometimes!
3.2 Three-Player Tic-Tac-Toe
For this exercise, I first tried making a 4×4 grid and proceeded to play against myself with three different symbols. I used X, O, and then arbitrarily added a triangle as my third symbol since it is something that can be drawn from either side of the grid and is recognizable upside-down as well. I decided that with the larger grid, a player should be required to get four in a row to win. However, it quickly became apparent that whichever symbol belonged to the player who went third would never be able to win. I found myself thinking from the perspective of the third player that I should just give up after a couple of turns.
I then changed the rules back to three in a row to win and tried again. This felt more like the classic game of tic-tac-toe where each turn forces the hand of the next player and generally results in no winner (unless someone makes a mistake). I learned at a young age that whoever gets to go first in tic-tac-toe has a greater chance of winning. After playing a few rounds of three player tic-tac-toe, I concluded that the first player advantage exists in this version as well.
3.3 Interaction Patterns
The following is a list of my favourite games for each of the seven different interaction patterns:
- Single player vs. Game
- Multiple individual players vs. Game
- Player vs. Player
- Unilateral competition
- Multilateral competition
- Cooperative play
- Team competition
3.6 Rules Restricting Actions
The following is a list of games along with the rules of each game that restrict player actions:
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- Twister
- Players must place a specific (left or right) hand or foot within a circle of a specific colour when the combination is called out by the person refereeing the game
- Players cannot remove their hands or feet from the circles they currently occupy until a new colour is called out
- Pictionary
- The player who is drawing for their team must communicate a word solely by drawing a picture without giving any verbal hints or writing numbers or letters on the page
- Scrabble
- Players may only lay down tiles that spell acceptable words
- Players may only collect up to 7 letter tiles in their hand
- Each word that is played must connect to word that is already on the board
- Operation
- Players must use the designated tool to remove a specific object from the patient
- Players may only remove the object that is indicated on the card that is drawn
- If the player lights up the patient’s nose, they may not continue their turn
- Pong
- The only action that players may perform is to move the “paddle” vertically across the screen to stop the ball from touching their side
- Twister
Reference
Fullerton, T. (2014). Game design workshop: A playcentric approach to creating innovative games. Taylor & Francis (CRS Press).