Welcome back everyone to my game design blog and to my latest specialism brief article.

Last time I started shelling out a few ideas for my third brief. And to try to demo them on unity.

The mechanics that I was trying out were to create two shapes, one would be the light trail that changes with time and another one would be the outline that the player has to shape the first one into.

I tried making this with by choosing a random moment in the equation ( remember that the light trails change course and form dynamic shapes only because the time variable changes constantly ) and locking the trails in that a particular moment, creating the outline. Then I created another shape where you could change the variables with different inputs ( as a place holder it was literally a number keyboard input ).

Getting the right combination was a little hard to accomplish expecially if time continued to go on and loop again. So I tried out a version, where you can control time flow at your wish as a main control mechanic ( going back and forwards in time, speeding it up, stopping time or resume it’s flow ).

This version is more fun and win conditions are easier to understand for the program ( just compare the time variable once it is paused ), but it still lacks some “fun” in the gameplay department. The main gameplay loop is just going going back and forward in a nice animation to trial and error until you get the right shape, which ultimately is not the most engaging experience ever, so I was back to the drawing board.

Finally, taking inspiration by some other games that I tried out time ago, I seriously considered the leap to the third dimension.

The game could easily work in 3d since the light trails can easily move on 3d space by just adding another equation to the system and making the shapes way more challenging to guess by trial and error.

Players would now need to work more with intuition than by sheer luck, by understanding how the shape would change from different angles, and positioning both the camera and the time variable the right way.

I loved this concept, with a few touches here and there like locking the camera in a few views than making it rotate in all degrees, this game finally had potential.

The problem is that all that I have already tried out was in Visual C++ and not in Unity, and I am already having problem porting the normal 2D concept in it. Furthermore I have never tried out coding in 3D, so that’s a new boundary for me as well. I am however hopeful, that I will be able to make this see some sort of light of day, or at least to design it in a compelling way and to come back on it later on to code it.

Until next time, see ya everyone!

Hey everyone, today I will discuss a question that was posed to us by our teachers after watching a couple of GDC post-mortem presentations exploring the concept of supporting your own work after release: how would you personally keep improving the projects you worked on to keep players engaged well after game launch?

I, personally, am more of a DLC type of person rather than a live-service one, so if you ask me how to support a game lifespan with a quantitative amount of work and resources, I would tell you that releasing a sizable expansion sometime after release is the way to go. However we know that is not always the case! When things like that aren’t possible, developers have to find a way to keep player engagement high while spending much less resources.

Personally as a gamer, I enjoy the type of post-launch support that makes me come back to the game and experience something different: I personally enjoy games that are intense and don’t last way longer than they are welcome, ( I hate when games use the need for grind as false content ) and instead of slowing me down, they encourage me to stick around thanks to a high replayability that makes me come back from time to time; so anytime something is introduced that makes me experience the same game in a different way, it increases it replayability by a large margin.

Additional game modes like more challenging difficulties, or a New Game + functionality, inspire me to challenge myself to complete the game again, especially if they are introduced later on the game release.

As a designer that’s how I would keep interest in my game while spending a low amount if resources.

Obviously out there there is a trove of interesting examples that I or any other designer should consider to add to their games, like challenge modes with completely different mechanics ( like Doom’s Arcade mode or Fallout 4’s survival mode ), support for speed-running mechanically dif, .

Speaking of multiplayer games, additional game modes that differ greatly from the core ones of your game, have been proven to help mitigate player fatigue or even burnout.

Overall the industry is large, and case-to-case approach is what applies for every situation, so there is no clear and absolute way to go with this.

MAnyway, these were my two cents on the topic, hope you enjoyed my opinions on it, see ya next time with another design brief update!

Hey everyone! And welcome back to another design specialism brief update.

Last time I just started exploring the concept that would evolve in my third brief application, and I was left to wonder how I would evolve the gameplay mechanics coming up with a visual style first.

I honestly love this challenge!

Personally, I am used to come up with fun gameplay systems first and to find a matching visual identity later, so gamifying an art style is something that I have never done before; at least in a tangible manner.

So first of all, what’s this special look I’m talking about?

Long ago I stumbled upon this program made by a you-tuber that goes by the alias of Code Parade that uses equations to create beautiful animated imaginary.

To explain it in a few words, the light trails that are spawned randomly off screen move in a path explained by the two equations on the top left. The fancy patterns happen because the t variable changes over time and thus makes the equations change!

I have loved the awesome shapes that these patterns draw since if first laid my eyes on them a long time ago and I wanted to use them in some way ever since. Finally it seems that this program’s time has arrived.

So, I started to think about ways to implement gameplay into this game.

The thing that first came to my mind and was that stuck, even after every concept iteration I explored, was a game where you had to match the pattern your light trails draw with an existing shape given to you.

This would either be accomplished by either moving some sliders up and down and thus changing ( unknowingly ) some of the parameters in the equations ( and thus the patters the trails followed; or players would actively meddle with the equations themselves, like by switching elements ( variables, plusses or minuses etc.. ) between a pool of available ones.

These concepts all have some absolute potential. However, there is no sure way to get some feedback on how fun they play based on concepts alone, so I have to give it a quick try in a mechanical demo.

I am a little nervous about my coding abilities and the fact that the source code is written in C++, a language that I have studied in the distant past, and that I don’t know in the extents of what I want to do.

I’ll try it out in a unity project and let you know how it goes, see you until next time!

Hi everyone and welcome to the latest design brief article

So, this week I had to get started on the third and final brief

This time I was a little torn on which brief to tackle, there are so many viable options after all, but in the end I chose “Death of the Artist”.

In this brief I am tasked to design a videogame that would require no art resources during production, like creating original assets or touching existing ones to fit in the game, no artist is ( virtually ) allowed to work on this project.

My mind started wandering on various potential takes on this brief, here’s some:

First off my mind went to a game that utilizes only text to function, in the vein of an old school text adventure or a simple 2d game where graphics would be replaced by ASCII text, much like the original Rogue game. But I found all these approaches quite dull and immediate to what a game with these limitations could inspire.

Secondly, and more interestingly, a captcha solving game, where you would have to solve the typical problems of a Re-Captcha only with intentionally ambiguous questions and a timer to make the challenge more tense.

My thought process was that since normal captcha security checks utilize either stock photos or altered alphanumerical characters, no art would need to be produced.

And finally a project that I had in mind for a while and that would be based on a program that creates shapes starting from equations. I had no idea at the time how this game would function, so I kept it on the back of my mind.

With plenty of ideas at hand I asked for feedback on the concepts and quickly realized how I unknowingly breached the limitations already.

My favorite concept, the Captcha game, would still need artists to touch up the stock images or to distort the text in a semi-unlegible way; so yeah, that’s off the charts.

Of the various text game ideas, I can’t find any that I either like enough to iterate on or that I am comfortable enough to code. ( because, in case I did not mention it, I will also go for the extended work part of the brief, that requires you to actually build a demo of your design )

So after all, I find myself drawn to the “math to graphics” game more and more. So that’s the concept I’ll try to work on for the following weeks. I have to figure out how to implement fun gameplay onto the interesting visual style of the the program I want to use would provide me.

Hey everyone and welcome back to my brief update blogs that now resemble more a cooking show in tome than anything else.

Last time I was meddling with that promising cube game that… sadly got scrapped. Basically talking with a friend from second year, he showed me his past briefs and would you look at that game that is nearly exactly the same I was planning to do! Even though that would’t have been a huge problem in retrospect, I think that being able to surprise my teacher is an important factor in getting a good mark.

So afterward I landed on…..

Fully design 3 Ubisoft mobile games and pitch 5 more

Whoa! That’s a quite hefty challenge. So I spent a while coming up with the ingredients and this is what I came up with:

• An Assassin’s creed game inspired by SquareEnix’s wonderful Go mobile games.

• A Far Cry game where you have to shoot arrows with bow at enemies or targets

• A Trials bike game where the focus is more of momentum than keeping balance and not crashing

These are the three “main” games, that are supposed to be set on active modern IPs

Then the five briefer concept that have to be about old, forgotten or abandoned IPs are:

• A walljumping Prince of Persia game inspired by the Sands of Time’s platforming challenges

• A Just Dance game where you use your phone as a controller ( that sounds as crazy as it is )

• A Child of Light game with its simplified combat system

• A For Honor game where you have to parry and strike foes in melee combat using the stance triangle from the original game ( I know For Honor is not a dead game… yet, but for the sake of this brief I’ll classify it as such )

• And for last, but certainly not least a Rayman Raving Rabbits dance minigame. You got it right.. I brought back an obscure minigame from an obscure and pretty much disliked videogame all around ( although that would have been the best game ever if you had asked a 10 yrs old me ). Yeah Baybeee.

My apologies.

So I had these little precious concepts and the only thing they needed was to be criticized a little, and since we don’t have all that time to wait for it I already prepared it for you ( sorry I had to slip a cooking show joke in here ).

I know what to change and what to refine, for example the Assassin’s creed game is a little too similar to said Go games ( it MIGHT be classifiable as a Rip-Off ) and the Trials game is a little too similar to the original ones.

I have some refinement to do, but this sound like a promising start. See ya next week, where we will learn the recipe ok how to make 8 mobile games in a week. Byee.

Yeah! We’re back for round 2 of my awesome design brief adventures! ( I just noticed that the more I go forward with this, the more I treat it like a game show where I am the host, or something like that. That’s just how I see these articles now. Well, I guess I’ll just roll with it for the time being )

So last time I was choosing my brief, and little to no surprise, I actually chose….

( No drum rolling, I promised XD )

Design a match 3 puzzle game on the face of a cube

Whohoo! So yeah, this looks to be quite an easy brief, I specifically chose it to help me catch up with the rest of the course work, and to use some code scripts for my other projects ( oh didn’t I mention that I should, at least attempt to, code this game? On second thought this will not be as easy as I though ).

So, what do I have in store for this one?

I bounced through a bunch of ideas, like 3D puzzles where you have to watch the same scene trough looking at different faces of the cube and having cool mind-bending prospectives.

Or a match three where you have to switch and rotate the whole faces to make combinations of the edges on the faces and edges.

Then I remembered that I cannot code any of this stuff.

So I reverted back to a simpler design, the very first idea I and probably most of you had. I mean, really? Cube…. 3 tiles…. move them around…. it’s basically a fancy Rubik’s cube game that only awaits to be made!

So the design of the game so far is the following: a 2D game where you control a Rubik’s cube in the usual way ( selecting a row or column and rotating it ) where your objective is to match three tiles of the same color next to each other, to make them pop and get points. When those tiles disappear, you get a new set of tiles with different random colors.

Compete for most points or put stupid objectives on the face of the cube and…. that’s it!

It’s simple yet really elegant design that requires very little meddling.

The only change I would make is to add a Tetris moment ( as of tetris the move in Tetris the game ) where popping four columns at once feels awesome and rewarding to set up and execute, so I would make possible to do face clear, like completing a whole face with the same color at once. As is it’s impossible, normally I would change the rules to be a match four instead of three and try it out, but the brief specifies it’s match THREE nature and I must abide. So the next best thing would be an ability, maybe tied to a meter of sorts, that would basically stop tiles from popping up as long as the effect is active, and to pop them up all together and reward you with amazing score bonuses once they do. This mechanic, inspired by a similar meter in Tetris effect would make the gameplay far deeper, and allow players that want to get better at the game, far more depth to delve into; while also rewarding the typical setup centric gameplay that Rubik’s cube is centered around.

That’s it for today’s article, we’ll se how things follow suit with this brief. Until next tiiime 🙂

Wow, this took some heavy work. But my apocalyptic card/board game is now complete!

It took some heavy face lifting to get my game in the right spot, but here we are.

So, first of all, what is my first goal with this brief?

Make something fun; even though I know it sound obvious, when you try to get other objectives in there, you might lose vision of what your goal is in the first place and this being my first board game, I wanted it to be really fun and playable again and agian

What are those other obectives? They changed a little from last time, but still I want players that play my game to feel a range of emotions that go from caution ro tension, from hopelessness to sudden resolve and from mistrust to faithful gambling.

All those great concepts are all packaged in a single game of AI: Artificial Interference.

In a game of AI: Artificial Interference ( “AI ( the game )” for short, or maybe just “the game” ) you will either secretly be a scientist working on a revolutionary AI project or an AI-controlled fake scientist that is trying to make this project go awry and have it conquer the world ( in order for this situation to make sense we will pretend that scientists are working remotely or something on those lines ). Also yes! This is a hidden role game, a gente that I wanted to try and tacke in a while.

Players will take turns to place down some beautiful hexagonal pieces

In order to form the neural map we know and love already. Why hexagonal you might ask? Well first of all they look cool, no point debating that. Second, of all the regular shapes that intersect with each other in order to create and orderly and filled out field, hexagons have the biggest design space to be used ( I mean it quite graphically )

Gone are the redundant and mechanically shallow special effects and welcome are the rules on how to actually conclude the game: if players place down these special node tiles,

at the end of turn a vote is held between three players chosen by who placed it; the node is then given to the team that got the majority of the votes. If three nodes connected by the network belong to the same team, that team wins.

I am really satisfied with how this game shaped up to be, the social deduction games on who to trust and who to not are always fun to mess with and the tiles placement adds a some gameplay to a genre that often relies on said social interactions to engage players.

The fact that there are a lot of strategy and counterplay involving the tiles and the voting is what really sold it on this idea, and when I tried playing it with friends it turned out to be an absolute blast.

That’s why I think you should give it a try! Follow this link to download the printable resources and the rules. Hope you enjoy it at least as much as we did.

Now it’s time for me to move to brief number 2! What will it be? I was thinking about the match 3 puzzle game… Well I guess we’ll se in the next blog post!

So, during the last design brief article, I was in a very confident position with my card game concept, and all I needed to do was to playtest it out to see how it turns out.

Well…

The game itself looks fun and extremely promising, but the part that I understated the most was certainly the card castle building one. It just doesn’t work! Most people are not that good at doing it naturally, card of most material and sizes don’t help necessarily, and even those better suited for the job don’t help less talented players with not dying the very first turn they are tasked to do the castle ( a demographic of players which I am totally part of by the way ). And I’m not even getting started on the countless table-related problems ( being slanted, being shaken, being super slippery huughhh )

No no no no. This just does not work. And the base game sound really good mechanically but without the castle mechanic, it’s just simple, not deep enough. We can certainly do better.

There are a bunch of potential designs I wanted to tackle for a while regarding card games:

• One is about playing a little bit more with card faces. I mean, every single game that involves cards depicts them in the same way: with a front and a back. With all the action happening in the front and nothing going on on the back. That is something that I wanted to try and have an interesting spin on

• The other is about playing a little bit more with the space on a card. What do I mean by that? When you think about a field of cards all placed down on a table, you imagine them all sitting next to each other, and treating the entire face of the card as a full space, but what if that was not the case? You’ll see how I tackled this in a moment.

So I started all over trying to come up with a design that would make use of these two ideas and this came forth:

A game where the card you have in hand have an effect in the front and a little circuit graphic in the back.

You can choose to either use the effect in the front, or to place down the card on the table with the circuit facing up.

Now comes the most interesting part:

Inspired by games like carcassone, where you have to build a network of roads and cities, here you have to build an electronic circuit using the shapes you have in the back of your cards.

The fun part is that you can basically place cards wherever you want on the field, filling all those white spots on the cards! As long as you aren’t cutting any line you can place your cards however you want!

Or at least nearly. The lines can be intersected however you want, but only with other lines and on the same note, you can only place circles on top of other circles.

This already sound quite fun doesn’t it?

Because it really is! And trust me, even without a clear win condition games already play out in a cool way.

But there are some inherent problems with my design that are sadly linked to the ideas I wanted to use:

• where having useful informations on both sides of the card was meant to incentivize players to choose which information to give out( by holding cards either way ); it played awkwardly when players wanted to check the other side of the card while keeping the other secret and incentivized smart counterplay, mostly in the form of hiding the cards under the table or somewhere else.

• The concept of overwriting blank space on card in theory plays well ( and in digital probably would ) in paper plays just bad. With cards moving each other and getting unaligned and with piles getting awkwardly high and unstable, this was a design concept to re-think

• Finally, the theme of the game. Although it worked fine on a surface level ( the circuit being constructed is the neural map of the skynet AI that will destroy the world ) on a deeper level it lacks tangible role for the players, any sort of justification for their actions and any sort of conflict.

These are all problem that I will have solved by next time. For now, seee yaaa.

Heya everyone! My name is Leo, and this is my blog that will talk about game design, whoho!

I should note that I am a terrible writer, so probably this and many other posts will not have a proper beginning and end. So yeah. Let’s go! 三三ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ

First of all, why did I choose this name: the Art of Game Design?

Well because it is my firm belief that Videogames are indeed a form of art, and on every blog post I will try to convince you of that aswell.

So yeah, let’s start with a really interesting topic, that everyone in my class will love to read about ( did I mention this is a uni project? Oh my, why am I lying to myself? Who else is going to read this besides my teachers? Hi Andy! ಗ‿ಗ ) what is that I believe classifies something as art.

Art is, in my opinion, whatever is capable of purposefully make another human being some feeling or emotion besides mere entertainment.

That painting that inspires you awe for how articulated it is? Art!

That movie that made you fall in love and made you feel the butterflies like a teenager? Art!

That thriller book that kept you in tension and dread for the whole run? Art!

That song that transported you to a whole new dimension for a couple of minutes? Art!

The latest videogame which story mode left you with nothing cause it was easy and bland? Not so much.

But that other videogame that made you feel challenge, anger, joy, sadness, fear and fun? HECK YEAH!

Even the online troll that spawn-traps you, he might feel like an artist if you ask him, as I said, emotions don’t need to be strictly positive!

So yeah, this is just a small intro to my concept of art, so that in further posts we can all start on the same level. I don’t know how to conclude.ʅ(ツ)ʃ. Did I already mention I’m a terrible writer?