Multimedia Development 2018

This week's article talks about game testing - very important part in making a game. After you have designed your game, its time to test it. At first, you test it yourself, but you, as the designer, know exactly what to do and how to do, so instead, you send your game off to people. There are different types of testing: Bug Testing (or Quality Assurance) - The purpose of QA is to find errors in the game’s behavior relative to its design. Focus Testing - In a focus test, you bring together players that are part of the target audience’s demographic in order to determine how well a game serves their needs. This is normally done for marketing purposes. Usability Testing - In a usability test, players are given specific tasks to accomplish in an attempt to see whether they understand how to control the game. Balance Testing - The purpose of this kind of test is to identify imbalances in the game so that the designer can fix them. Fun Testing - A game can be usable, bal...

Created with trianglify.io Stoooories! Gosh, am I really excited for a reading? I guess so... I kinda am. The first article I read today is Level 9: Games and Stories . It starts off with the standard question, all of them articles always start the same way - What's makes for good stories? Well, apparently, game developers look at three certain works, and those are: Poetics, by Aristotle The Hero with a Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting, by Robert McKee Poetics by Aristotle... Used in games? That's quite interesting. Let's look into it a bit more.  Aristotle used a very different language compared to the one we know now, so poetics isn't actually about poetry, but more about writing tragedies, but it's not the way we know it, as a story with a sad ending, no, for Aristotle it was basically serious and lifelike writing - there was no superpowers or mythical animals. Tragedy is li...

Another article about fun, this time you can view it here   Fun is apparently another word for learning... and as we currently know things hat are fun, this article focuses on why those aspects are fun. Source The part of the article lists and describes types of fun. Sensation. Games can engage the senses directly. Consider the audio and video “eye candy” of video games; the tactile feel of the wooden roads and houses in Settlers of Catan; or the physical movement involved in playing sports, Dance Dance Revolution, or any game on the NintendoWii. Sensation includes physical movement (good for building muscle) and looking at and hearing things that are interesting (good for detecting opportunities or dangers). Fantasy. Games can provide a make-believe world (some might cynically call it “escapism”) that is more interesting than the real world. Fantasy allows the kind of “what-if” scenario part of our brain to get stronger, allowing us to come up with novel ideas. ...

One of the reading's for this week was about making decisions-making and flow-theory. One of the first pages goes through what sort of decisions are bad and good, which I found really interesting. The bad types of decisions are: Meaningless decisions are perhaps the worst kind: there is a choice to be made, but it has no effect on gameplay. If you can play either of two cards but both cards are identical, that’s not really much of a choice. Obvious decisions at least have an effect on the game, but there is clearly one right answer, so it’s not really much of a choice. Most of the time, the number of dice to roll in the board game RISK falls into this category; if you are attacking with 3 or more armies, you have a “decision” of whether to roll 1, 2, or 3 dice… but your odds are better rolling all 3, so it’s not much of a decision except in very special cases.  Blind decisions have an effect on the game, and the answer is not obvious, but there is now an additional prob...

I have read the article Design Considerations by Greg Aleknevicus, and it seems to be mostly talking about actual board games and something that has a box, and within the box, rules and the components needed to play the game. The article talks about designing a box, and what should be included on it, like the name of the game, to pay attention to what sort of photographs are put on the back of the box, as they can often be misleading, and finally, to print one side of the box as horizontal and the other as vertical. Then, he also goes over making components for the game and how they should be smaller than the place they will occupy, be different colors and shapes. Also, how you should include few extra components in case they get lost.  Then he moves onto cards, and mentions that they should have a white border,  use large indices and index cards on all four corners.  The theme should work with the rules, instead of against them.   And so, onto th...

MDA stands for "Mechanics", "Dynamics" and "Aesthetics", and are extremely important when designing a game, they are essentially the aspects that make the game "fun". Each of the words of the MDA framework are described as: Mechanics - Rules of the game. Dynamics - The play of the game after the rules had been implemented. Aesthetics - Player experience rather than visual elements of the game. They are all connected, as you can't have one without the other. When talking about the gameplay, most people think that the game is either fun or not fun, but what exactly is "fun"? According to the article, there are 8 types of "Fun":  Sensation - Game as sense pleasure  Fantasy - Game as make believe  Narrative Game as drama  Challenge - Game as obstacle course  Fellowship - Game as social framework  Discovery - Game as uncharted territory  Expression - Game as self-discovery  Submission - Game as pastime So, bas...

"What is a modern computer game made of? It fuses a technical base with a vision for the player's experience." Today, I have read the Formal Abstract Design Tools article by Dough Church. It talks about "modern games"(article from 1999, so its definition of "modern" is a little bit outdated.), but anyway, while the games had evolved a lot since then, the basic tools or ideas haven't really changed. This article believes that all disciplines - like audio, art, design, levels, code, etc - are involved and used to create a game. It is true for all of 2018 games too.  The article tries to develop a common, shared language that could be used to describe whether a game is good or bad, and what is it that makes people think this way. Source: Pinterest The game example used for the article is Mario 64. A game where players know, based on their decisions and actions, what will happen next. They have limited controls and abilities, so they can plan...

" 52,405 characters. 8,699 words. 377 sentences. 122 paragraphs. 35 minutes reading time. "   Sometimes, you read an article, you follow the sentances with your eyes, letting the words sink into your brain... and then you realize that someone is just so terrible at writing that reading is impossible. Greg Costikyan is one of those people. In the article "Don't be a Vidiot", which is also his speech from 1998 game conference, he talks about games so old that most students won't even recognise them. So, due to complicated language and very old information, I have decided to go straight to the next article -  The Essence of Euro-style Games . Euro-styled games are tabletop games, which used to be extremely attractive back in 1990s. At first, Euro-games were the ones that were created by European publishers - which makes sense - but those games have their own, very specific requirements to be even considered Euro-games. Those rules are as follows: Rarel...