Gaming ProposalProposing and NOT Designing a

Game: A Formal Report

• 1/3 innovative • 1/3 improved• 1/3 standard

Requirements• Title • High concept-a brief description of the game• Pitch-a one page document describing the game's selling points and potential profitability• Concept

– Explanation of the game's genre– Game's Premise– Project's scope and learning objectives– Description of the target audience– Play mechanics and game play description– Thematic concepts– Description of the game's environment– Development of characters

• Additional Deliverables (appendix)– Initial game-design document– Narrative treatment and possibly some sketches for game play– Flowcharts for one level of play– Concept art– Design of the game board if applicable

TitleBrainstorm possible titles for your game and share with class• Din’s Curse• Ego Draconis• Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep• Star Ocean: The Last Hope Internal• L.A. Noire• Zumba Fitness• Just Dance• Call of Duty: Black Ops

High concept-a brief description of the game

• A game concept statement, or premise, is a short, direct description of the situation of a game. It describes the player's goal, the opposition to that goal, and the means through which that goal will be accomplished.

• "In Trick or Treat the player characters have been trapped in the labyrinth of an ancient haunted house. They must escape by destroying adversarial monsters, avoiding traps, and solving the maze. Trick or Treat is a third person perspective action game."

•Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/1059522

Pitch-a one page document describing the game's selling points and potential profitability

• Player motivation• Genre• License• Target customer • Competition• Unique selling points• Target hardware• Design goals

• Player motivation

This is a short statement that indicates what the player is trying to accomplish in the game—his role and goal. This helps indicate what sort of person the player is. He can be driven by a desire to compete, to solve puzzles, to explore, or whatever.

• Genre

Indicate the genre of the game, or if it is a mix of genres, indicate that.

• License

If you intend for the game to exploit a licensed property, say so here. Also include any facts and figures about the property’s popularity, recognition value, and appeal to particular markets—but no more than a sentence or two.

• Target customer

What kind of person will buy this game? If age or sex is relevant, indicate that; more important, tell what other kinds of games they like to play.

• Competition

Are there already games on the market like this one? If so, list their names and indicate how this one is different or better than they are.

• Unique selling points

What’s new in this game? How will it stand out from what has gone before?

• Target hardware

Tell what machine the game is intended for. Also indicate whether the game requires or can make optional use of any special hardware or accessories.

• Design goals

In this section, list your aims for the game as an experience. Don’t just say “fun”—that’s too broad. Be more specific. Are you trying to provide pulse-pounding excitement? Tension and suspense? Strategic challenge? Humor? A heartwarming story? The ability to construct or create something of the player’s own? For each item, indicate in a sentence or two how the game will achieve thegoal.

Concept

• Explanation of the game's genre• Gaming platform• Category• Game's Premise• Project's scope and learning

objectives• Description of the target audience• Play mechanics and game play

description• Thematic concepts• Description of the game's

environment• Development of characters

Explanation of the game's genre

• An action game requires players to use quick reflexes, accuracy, and timing to overcome obstacles. It is perhaps the most basic of gaming genres, and certainly one of the broadest. Action games tend to have gameplay with emphasis on combat. There are many subgenres of action games, such as fighting games and first-person shooters.

• Fighting games emphasize one-on-one combat between two characters • Maze games have a playing field that is entirely a maze, which players must

navigate. Quick thinking and fast reaction times are encouraged by the use of a timer, monsters obstructing the player's way, or multiple players racing to the finish.

• Platform games (platformers) are a subgenre of action game. These games involve traveling between platforms by jumping (very occasionally other means are substituted for jumping, like

Genres continued

• Survival horror games focus on fear and attempt to scare the player via traditional horror fiction elements such as atmospherics, death, the undead, blood and gore.

• Graphic adventure games emerged as graphics became more common. Adventure games began to supplement and later on replace textual descriptions with visuals.

• A visual novel is an adventure game featuring mostly static graphics, usually with anime-style art.

• The interactive movie .

Genres continued• Role-playing games draw their gameplay from traditional

role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons. Most cast the player in the role of one or more "adventurers" who specialize in specific skill sets (such as melee combat or casting magic spells) while progressing through a predetermined storyline.

• In city-building games the player acts as overall planner or leader to meet the needs and wants of game characters by initiating structures for food, shelter, health, spiritual care, economic growth, etc. Success is achieved when the city budget makes a growing profit and citizens experience an upgraded lifestyle in housing, health, and goods.

• Business simulation games generally attempt to simulate an economy or business, with the player controlling the economy of the game.

Genres continued• A government simulation game (or "political game") involves the simulation

of the policies, government or politics of a country, but typically excludes warfare.

• Life simulation games (or artificial life games) involve living or controlling one or more artificial lives. A life simulation game can revolve around individuals and relationships, or it could be a simulation of an ecosystem.

• Pet-raising simulations (or digital pets) focus more on the relationship

between the player and one or few life forms

• Vehicle simulation games are a genre of video games which attempt to provide the player with a realistic interpretation of operating various kinds of vehicles.[23]

Genres continued• Racing games typically place the player in the driver's seat of a high-

performance vehicle and require the player to race against other drivers or sometimes just time.

• Space flight simulator games are a sub-genre that involve piloting a spacecraft. Space simulators are different from other sub-genres, and are not generally considered to be simulators, as their simulated objects do not always exist and often disregard the laws of physics.

• Strategy video games focus on gameplay requiring careful and skillful thinking and planning in order to achieve victory.

• Music games most commonly challenge the player to follow sequences of movement or develop specific rhythms.

Genres continued• Party games are video games developed specifically for multiplayer

games between many players.

• Puzzle games require the player to solve logic puzzles or navigate complex locations such as mazes.

• Sports games emulate the playing of traditional physical sports.

• Trivia games are growing in popularity, especially on mobile phones where people may only have a few minutes to play the game.

Source: Wikipedia

Game's premise

• The Premise: An Italian plumber travels through a brightly-colored fantasy world collecting coins and mushrooms. He crushes turtles and goombas (essentially brown, waddling monstrosities) to death in order to rescue a princess from being raped by a dinosaur who pilots an airship.

• Read more: 12 Great Video Games With Ridiculous Premises | Cracked.com http://www.cracked.com/article_15227_12-great-video-games-with-ridiculous-premises.html#ixzz1ayEsXC4y

Project's scope and learning objectives

• Statement of what a player will understand or learn during the game and at the end of the game.

• Provide a bullet list of objectives.• Objectives can be derived from the tasks

Description of the target audience

Game mechanics

• Game mechanics fall into several more or less well-defined categories, which (along with basic gameplay and theme) are sometimes used as a basis to classify games.

Turns

• A game turn is an important fundamental concept to almost all non-computer games, and many video games as well (although in video games, various real-time genres have become much more popular). In general, a turn is a segment of the game set aside for certain actions to happen before moving on to the next turn, where the sequence of events can largely repeat.

Action points

• These control what players may do on their turns in the game by allocating each player a budget of “action points” each turn. These points may be spent performing various actions according to the game rules, such as moving pieces, drawing cards, collecting money, etc.

•

Auction or bidding

• Some games use an auction or bidding system in which the players make competitive bids to determine which player gets the right to perform particular actions. Such an auction can be based on different forms of "payment”.

Cards

• These involve the use of cards similar to playing cards to act as a randomiser and/or to act as tokens to keep track of states in the game.

Capture/Eliminate

• In some games, the number of tokens a player has on the playing surface is related to his current strength in the game. In such games, it can be an important goal to capture opponent's tokens, meaning to remove them from the playing surface.

Catch-up

• Some games include a mechanic designed to make progress towards victory more difficult the closer a player gets to it. The idea behind this is to allow trailing players a chance to catch up and potentially still win the game, rather than suffer an inevitable loss once they fall behind. This may be desirable in games such as racing games that have a fixed finish line.

Dice

• These involve the use of dice, usually as randomisers. Most dice used in games are the standard cubical dice numbered from 1 to 6, though games with polyhedral dice or dice marked with symbols other than numbers exist.

Movement.

• Many board games involve the movement of playing tokens. How these tokens are allowed to move, and when, is governed by movement mechanics.

Resource management

• Many games involve the management of resources. Resource management involves the players establishing relative values for various types of available resources, in the context of the current state of the game and the desired outcome (i.e. winning the game). The game will have rules that determine how players can increase, spend, or exchange their various resources. The skillful management of resources under such rules allows players to influence the outcome of the game.

Risk and reward

• Some games include situations where players can "press their luck" in optional actions where the danger of a risk must be weighed against the chance of reward. For example, in Beowulf: The Legend, players may elect to take a "Risk", with success yielding cards and failure weakens player's ultimate chance of victory.[1]

Role-playing

• Role-playing games often rely on mechanics that determine the effectiveness of in-game actions by how well the player acts out the role of a fictional character.

Tile-laying

• Many games use tiles - flat, rigid pieces of a regular shape - that can be laid down on a flat surface to form a tessellation. Usually such tiles have patterns or symbols on their surfaces that combine when tessellated to form game-mechanically significant combinations.

Victory condition mechanics

• These mechanics control how a player wins the game.

Goals

• This is the most general sort of victory condition, which can be broad enough to encompass any method of winning, but here refers to game-specific goals that are usually not duplicated in other games. An example is the checkmate of a king in chess.

Loss avoidance

• Some games feature a losing condition, such as being checkmated (chess), running out of cards first (War), running out of hitpoints (Quake), or being tagged (tag). In such a game, the winner is the only remaining player to have successfully avoided loss.

Piece elimination

• Some games with capture mechanics are won by the player who removes all, or a given number of, the opponents' playing pieces.

Puzzle guessing

• Some games end when a player guesses (or solves by logic) the answer to a puzzle or riddle posed by the game. The player who guesses successfully wins. Examples include hangman and zendo.

• Races Many simple games (and some complex ones) are effectively races. The first player to advance one or more tokens to or beyond a certain point on the board wins. Examples: backgammon, ludo.

Structure building

• The goal of a structure building game is to acquire and assemble a set of game resources into either a defined winning structure, or into a structure that is somehow better than those of other players. In some games, the acquisition is of primary importance (e.g. concentration), while in others the resources are readily available and the interactions between them form more or less useful structures

Territory control

• A winner may be decided by which player controls the most "territory" on the playing surface, or a specific piece of territory. This is common in wargames, but is also used in more abstract games such as go.

Victory points

• A player's progress is often measured by an abstract quantity of victory points, which accumulate as the game develops. The winner can be decided either by:– The first player to reach a set number of points.– The player with the most points at a

predetermined finishing time or state of the game.

Thematic concepts

• Good vs. Evil• Democracy vs. Dictatorship• Hatfields vs. McCoys

Description of the game's environment

Development of characters

Additional Deliverables

– Initial game-design document– Narrative treatment and sketches for game play– Flowcharts for one level of play– Concept art– Design of the game board if applicable

Game Design Document

• When a game is commissioned by a publisher, the GDD document must be created by the developer team and it is often attached to the agreement between publisher and developer; the developer has to adhere to the GDD during game development process.

• See examples on Gaming Assignment Sheet.

Narrative treatment and sketches

GAME DESIGN AS NARRATIVE ARCHITECTURE

By Henry Jenkins The relationship between games and story remains a divisive question among game fans, designers, and scholars alike. At a recent academic Games Studies conference, for example, a blood feud threatened to erupt between the self-proclaimed Ludologists, who wanted to see the focus shift onto the mechanics of game play, and the Narratologists, who were interested in studying games alongside other storytelling media.(1)

http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/games&narrative.html

Flowcharts for one level of play

Concept art

The design of the game board

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/psimonic/2064875919/#/photos/psimonic/2064875919/lightbox/

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/doodledan/1365673947/#/photos/doodledan/1365673947/lightbox/

• http://www.conceptart.org/?section=school