Posts

Reflection

 What a semester it has been! Overall this class has been a massively enjoyable one and has really made me re-think how I enjoy and view games. Its one thing to be a fan of games and play them, but taking a class like this you really take a step back and look at them from a different perspective altogether.  I really enjoyed the moments in the projects that involved the back end part of building a game. I am a creative person, have grown up drawing and doing creative things. The moments in the design where we were brainstorming the concept was the most exciting parts for me.  I really enjoyed working with Construct 3, and would really like to continue that. The small snippet of the game I design, I showed to my daughter and she seemed really excited, I think it would be a really fun idea to maybe sit down with her and use some of the things I learned in this class and design a game with her!  The best part of the class was how my mentality changed toward games. Before, I only focused o
Post a Comment
Read more

Digital Design

 Who boy, this has been an experience!  I really thought the last assignment shook me, but thinking through the process of building a digital game has really had me re thinking the idea of games in general!  I have enjoyed the process overall, but find my creative ideas far overpowering my practical experience. I really want to shoot for the moon in design, but just don't have the time or the knowledge yet to make it happen. If I had to do this project over, I think it would realize its "ok" to think small and accomplish a smaller project than try for the bigger, lofty ideas.  Using Construct has been pretty easy to grasp. Being in a technology field as a profession, working with new software is pretty intuitive and I grasp the concepts pretty easily... the struggle really comes more from not knowing what all the software can do. In short, having limitations in the software, but not really knowing what those limitations are. Again, having lofty ideas... but not having the
Post a Comment
Read more

Analog Game process

The past few weeks we have been asked to re-envision our mentor game into a analog game. Could be a board game, card game, dice game, etc. anything as long as it wasn't digital. Though I love games and really enjoy playing them and teaching them to other people, I have never really had a desire to make a game... so this project was quite exciting to tackle! For the process to begin, I had to think of what type of game I really enjoy playing and what type of game I could easily build based on my mentor game. I chose a strategy/ territory acquisition style game, similar to the class Risk and a newer award wining game called Small World.  A few details about my Mentor game and ultimately the inspiration of my game.  Game title is Zoombinis and it is a puzzle based learning game that pushed learners to try solving puzzles by trial and error and pattern recognition.  My new game title is Zoombinis: The War Within and goes away from puzzle solving and into the realm of competitive strate
Post a Comment
Read more

Game Design Process

 Woo boy... I made it though my first game design process!! Overall, I really enjoyed the process and learned some valuable things about the process and ultimately how I can make improvements for future projects.  I am a very visual person, so as I was working on this project, I found myself much more productive when I was working in Twine and could see the "flow" of the story being visualized out. I used word to write out my "Scenes" but it wasn't until I started to incorporate those scenes into Twine did I get into the process.  As I was doing that, I could visualize the encounters between player and the game, as well as mentally visualize the game taking shape. Though this was a text based game, with limited images, it became a visual process for me.  I understand that this may not always be the best process, or the fastest, but I find myself working much better and more efficiently if I can draw the content out. Or in this case, play a mental movie!
Post a Comment
Read more

Narrative Design Process

This part of the project has been a really hard thing for me. Not because of the content or lack of creativity, but because it goes against my creative process as a whole. I tend to be a sit down and crank out the creative project all at once type of person... this narrative process has been "asking" me to workshop an idea for a length of time, which seems so foreign to me. Making it very hard to focus and work on an idea!! So far, working over time has not worked well for me, I am a visual person by nature so I have done a few little sketches to generate the "look" of the story in my head, but I really need to sit down and write it out.  My concept is a game to teach 4th - 5th graders the basics of computer essentials, specifically the functionality of some of the primary hardware components.  The game will be called "Prof. Ludlow and the personal computer". Learners will enter Prof. Ludlow's lab and help him to successfully build a personal computer.
Post a Comment
Read more

Gamestorming!

This past week we have been going through the process of brain storming (Game storming) ideas for a game. This has been a fun creative exercise to think through the process of creating a story that could eventually be turned into a learning game.  For me, the gamification of a learning idea has been tricky, not because I can't think of a story, but more so because in my day to day life I am not "teaching"... so trying to figure out something that I want to teach or have someone learn isn't intuitive to me.  In the end, I am pulling inspiration from my daughter and some of the experience I see her not obtaining in school. Last semester in another one of my classes I built a few projects around the idea that in her school they use technology, but there is no course work teaching the students ABOUT the technology.   With that base idea, I started to work through how I can provide this material in a fun and engaging way. I don't have all the details of the story worke
Post a Comment
Read more

Reflecting on your Player Type

Image
  After completing the Quantic Gamer Motivation Survey  I was given the gamer type of "Slayer". In general this profile fits me pretty well, as most of the games I have typically enjoyed have put me in the place as the hero trying to "save the day" and really immersed in the story as a pivotal component. However, this profile is a stark contrast to my mentor game for this course.  My mentor game is Zoombinis, a logical puzzle game that has the player navigating a group of Zoombinis from stage to stage completing random puzzles to get as many of the little creatures to the end.  So far, there appears to be no action... or "main" character that saves the day. Its just me as the "controller" moving these little creatures from point A to point B, which in my opinion, is a big deviation from a "Slayer".  Looking at the game from a motivational standpoint, this game could be considered in line with my profile, in that it is very calm and ind
Post a Comment
Read more