Making A Run For It

Jason Wiles

12/9/13

Professor Scudder

Making A Run For It: A Reflection On How The Escape Came To Be

           Creating The Escape was akin to the classic story of the turtle and the hare, but with one noticeable difference- the hare was on the same team as the turtle. My team, Ouroboros Studios, was victim of its own best qualities. We would switch between two team dynamics: a slow and steady team with no stress and consistent progress, and a quick team with our stress magnified a hundredfold. We would morph into this machine of assets and implementation twice in the year- right after we had our mid term review, and the week before the senior team presentations. The sudden ramping up of production created a strain on the team that was so sudden, it created fractures within our team, fraying our patience with each other and hurting the team as a whole. Thankfully, we normalized quickly, and were able to finish off the year in a solid fashion.

The game itself was created on a whiteboard in the first two weeks. Our process was simple: We made a large list of features and mechanics and tried combining them to create something unique, sound of design, and fun. By picking three items off the list, we could come up with a general idea for a game. For example, by choosing controllers as a control surface, emphasizing a challenging skill level, and melee combat could create a classic arcade fighting game like Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, or Tekken.  We held brainstorming meetings twice in the first week to look at this list and come up with various ideas. We were able to narrow them down to two: a Team Vs. Team shooting game centered around building and repairing your base and attacking and destroying the enemy base, and a Parkour racing game with effects that would trigger as you stepped over them.

The Team Vs Team game was based off of a combination of the Team Fortress series and the more recent Battlefield games. Team Fortress is known for creating one of the most popular maps ever- 2Fort. This map was the basis of our level design- having two fortresses positioned opposite each other with a no-man’s-land in between the two would create a clear story and a great space for all of our mechanics to be fully experienced by the player. The Battlefield games have a fully destructible environment, so players can shoot walls down to create a pathway that was not there before.

We based the Parkour racing game off of games like Split Second and Mirrors Edge. Split Second had a feature that made players able to trigger the creation of obstacles in a spectacular fashion- while racing down an airstrip, for example, a player could trigger the explosion of the control tower. This feature informed our use of triggers to create obstacles in the map. Mirrors Edge was a single player first person running game where the player could maneuver around the world, watching their arms pump and their legs move while they vaulted over obstacles and leapt from building to building. The experience of moving quickly around the world and creating your own path around the environment was a key touchstone to creating a great experience actually moving around and with creating our levels.

Going through the process of selecting our game’s concept from the list of potential ideas was a very difficult and a surprisingly emotional event. Between deciding which games were out of scope, arguing about the time, resources, and potential of games to move forward, along with balancing your own bias towards ideas you created made this decision a very hard one to make. The worst discussions were over ideas that we brought back into scope by changing the design slightly. I learned how doggedly people would fight for ‘their’ idea, how important saying even just one positive thing about each idea was, and that moving forward is key. We would occasionally revive dead ideas after making statements about a totally different game concept. Insisting that a dead concept stays dead would have saved the entire team a lot of headache and wasted time. But people always want their idea to be the one to move forward. Managing expectations and convincing people to put the group ahead of their own ideas is a key thing to do. We ended up trying the Team Vs. Team and Parkour game concepts, with the Parkour game clearly winning out.

Our QA testing told us a lot about how our game could have been viewed by our target market. Players reported enjoying the game, rating their satisfaction at around 75-85% overall. Improvements to the triggering system were well received, but we clearly needed to develop it further to make it more obvious to players what exactly was happening. However, players enjoyed trying to top their best times and reacted positively whenever a triggered obstacle blocked them, as long as they understood the controls well enough to quickly react and maneuver around the obstacles. When the professors got their hands on our game, however, they reacted with decidedly mixed reviews. The unforgiving nature of the game and the necessity of being quick on the controls caused several professors to give up nearly on the spot. But the few that did stick with it enjoyed their time significantly more than others.

This told us that our game was very difficult to those who were unused to the pace of high skill level games. Casual gamers could be frustrated to the point of disliking the game. We did not anticipate this being such a massive issue for us, to the point of barely considering our title. It puts forward the idea that allowing individual success is a total necessity. We did not design the game to be easy to understand and difficult to master. We designed it to be sink or swim, and it did not cause the players outside of our demographic to like our game very much.

Does this mean that game can fail because they’re too difficult? Perhaps, but probably not. We can look at games in the Kingdom Hearts series, which start with an hour long tutorial area. Those games have moved large amounts of units, and they hold the players hand constantly. But we can look at games like Dark Souls- a punishingly difficult game that encourage learning through repeated failure- which have sold millions of copies because of their unique difficulty. In the Champlain environment, perhaps we should have been closer to Kingdom Hearts. But through Dark Souls, we can see the shared values- that difficulty breeds fun- can sell well too. It’s a rough line to walk, but difficulty can create a successful game. What Dark Souls does so well, however, is put the character back in the game quickly, with the same chances they had of succeeding as before, but with more knowledge moving forward, knowledge that can lead to winning the challenge set before them. By implementing a quicker demo level, maybe our game would have moved forward.

The actual tech and design of the game were not within my areas of expertise, as I am a game producer and only educated in project management, marketing, and business administration. I was more interested in the target market and how our game tested with potential consumers, and my expertise in the implementation of tech and design is minimal. As such, my input here will be brief. We were aiming for a competitive experience, one where skill is rewarded with better times and therefore more success. We implemented a leaderboard feature that would track the time of the player and their competitors and display them side by side. We hoped to improve engagement and competitiveness between players, and we saw that it did- testers would visibly react if they won and a fair amount of trash talking was exchanged during QA sessions, especially over best times.

I learned that while the ideas of the game may be apparent to the designers, the player will need and want as many systems to improve their experience as possible. While the leaderboard itself was a fantastic addition, the addition of a guiding arrow or icons that helped the player get a better idea of the trigger system would have improved enjoyability as well. Many of the professors were getting lost in our corridors, and an arrow to guide them would have probably gotten them to stay and play. If we could have had a system that clearly indicated where and how triggers would impact the environment, the blocking effect would become both immediately apparent and useful. For example, if we placed a button with a comedic icon of a bridge opening up and depositing a stick figure that used to be running over it, it would be quite obvious that the player should press it when another player was on the bridge ahead of them. Players are not stupid, but players do need some basic guidance to grasp the game.

This whole project was a learning experience for me. I learned what it was like to have a member who constantly acted as a devil’s advocate, but to the detriment of the team. I learned lessons on how to effectively set up and give a demo (note to self, turn on the sound before demoing your game, and don’t make demo players feel like children). But what did I learn about myself? I tried to give my teammates the least stressful time they could have doing this capstone. I set goals too low and was happy with any progress, refusing to inspire my team to create more assets, refusing to push my team members. We became complacent and only created the bare minimum to reach our goals, and in longer time than would be optimal. Because of this, we sacrificed production for less stress. I should have pushed my members further, as this class did not require much time at all from any member. My emphasis on having an easy time is a great management tool, but only when the team is producing. I need to balance my desire to create a stress free environment with actual results. I learned that I need to think outside the box then it comes to my responsibilities. I could have created marketing materials, I could have made various elevator pitches, and these would have upped my low hours spent managing, making a marketing plan, and creating QA materials that I handed out and studied during and after testing sessions. I’ve grown from this experience and look forward to implementing what bits of knowledge I’ve grasped in the future.

Close to the End

Presentations are coming up soon, and that has me nervous. Could this game actually go forward? Can we actually get our shit together as a team? Lets see how the next week goes. Lets hope for the best.

Changing 126 years of practice

    This week we decided to remove the Co-Op aspect of our game and decided to make it a single player, free-for-all racing game. Some people would say that I did not try hard enough while designing the levels, mechanics, and player experience. It seems that way when you first look at it, but from my perspective it felt like I was put in charge of adding a whole new aspect to this sport that has been around for centuries. I based the way we treat racing in out game on the spot of auto racing which has been practiced since 1887. The first auto races in history began when gas powered cars started to become more main stream. Most humans are by nature competitive, almost everyone wants to be considered "the best" at one point in their lives. Racing was born from new car owners wanting the the title of fastest driver and soon there were dozens of small racing competitions. In present day we almost 40 different types of auto racing but all of them share one common aspect, each type of auto racing has each participant racing for only themselves. With the huge emphasis on competition most forms of racing have stayed a non co-op event.

   And this is the reason why I, as well as the rest of the team decided to make our game a single player game. Even when forced to work as a team, people who are really competitive will act for themselves out of their passion/habit to be the best and to grab that first place spot. This has been scene in QA sessions since we have started. The first few maps where more open and as soon as the race started the players would pick their own path and completely forget about their teammate. When I created a map that put the same team members on completely different sides of the map they still would just run off by themselves in the hopes of winning by themselves. With the deadline for Capstone quickly approaching I had to either continue with the co-op and most likely present a broken game that misses the mark completely or change what the game is and create a better quality racing environment that also provides a hook.

Sick and Tired

I don't like excuses. I don't like bullshit. I don't like lies. I'm at my breaking point. I should avoid the whole "playing fair" thing because i knew what we were getting ourselves into with this. I just wish it didn't bite me in the ass where it might be my fault we don't get art done. NOPE. not ok.

Mike Vautour - Time

Time seems to be a huge factor right now. I'm getting more and more worried as time goes on and more pressure keeps getting piled on my shoulders. I simplified the assets enough where i won't have to focus on environment much more after this week, and i can focus on character stuff. Thank god for small miracles.

Matthew Jordan- Another day another Question

Our free-running racing game is a very unique game because it is an attempt to mix together two very popular styles of gameplay into one, racing games and free-running games. Racing games have always been a popular game genre; people love to race one another in a friendly competitive setting. Free running games are a fairly new genre but players have latched onto them because of the experiences once can have while playing them. As for what we are adding to our game that makes it different, the game itself is actually something completely different. The two styles of gameplay are significantly different from one another and there have not been games dedicated to the combination of both. Some games have a free running mechanics in them and will have races as sort of a side mission that the player has the option to completely ignore if they want to.

            A major aspect of our game is the inclusion of co-op racing where team members must help one another in order to win the race. Both the acts of racing and free running are very independent activities. When racing the runner only has to worry about themselves and what is in front of them, getting into first place is the number one goal of every racer. Free running is more or an expression for the runner. People who free run use it as a way to relieve stress and express themselves by creating a path way that they alone have chosen to run. In our game we want to take both of these fairly individual activities and make them more of a team based activity. In our game you are always watching your partner because you both need to cross the finish line in order to win. Having co-op makes the players who are more used to worrying about themselves start to focus more on the path ahead and what their actions will do to affect their partner.

            The second major aspect of our game that makes it so different from anything other similar games is the addition of a changing environment. When players run through the tracks in our game they will find that our racetracks are not like most other racetracks. The environments in our game are always changing whether the player wants it too or not. As players are running the map they can activate various triggers around the map which have a number of effects on the map that can both help and hinder the player. This was put into the game to help create an environment where players must be quick on their feet in order to win while helping their fellow teammate by creating new pathways that are easier to traverse.

            This post is my response to a prompt from my Game Development Capstone course. The post asked me and my group to answer the question “How the expanded range of game possibilities that we’ll discuss in the workshop can be applied to the game that you’re making. For example, if you are making another iteration of a game set in space, what could distinguish your game amongst the others of its kind? The answer to this question could be the foundation for your post” in a way that connected to our section of the project.

Another week and i'm still Mike Vautour. 10/21 Update

Another year older, and another year wiser they say. And i believe that. In the past week i feel like our team has made a lot of personal strides, and everyone is really united right now. If i had a nickle for every time i thought that this semester i could but a gumball, but at least we're at the point where we can finally bust our asses to make this game. So lets make this game.

Capstone Workshop - Mike Vautour

1.       The game we chose to look at is called Mount & Blade: Warband, and it was released in 2010. It addressed its intended audience well. The game didn’t look great from what I’ve seen, but the different mechanics and gameplay that it introduced were fantastic and innovative.

2.       The intended audience is rts (real time strategy) players, and people who like medieval settings. Also people who are a fan of sandbox games. This worked well for its intended audience. It really set itself apart from other games in the sense that you have to fully control the combat (which is what really interested me). You also have full control of what you want to do in the universe. You can put yourself in power; you can follow someone in power. Honestly there are no limits to what you can do.  There are also 300 vs 300 people battles. Not many games can handle that amount of networking, and art while still having a functional game. The concept seems to be historically accurate, and it seems to be concise throughout the entire thing, and they also added a lot of accurate representations of how combat works while keeping the mechanic simple for a player to use. If the art was better I would say that they would innovate the way multiplayer games are going now. However the art in the game wasn’t that impressive; especially for when it released. It was still an impressive feat to have 300 v. 300 battles.

So I’m not going to say that our idea is the most creative or unique idea on the market right now. Currently we have a lot of different games that our core gameplay is competing with, and our idea is heavily influenced by the James Bond movies and the portal games. As an artist I would like to come up with an art style where I can make as little assets as possible to achieve something great. If I create four cube based assets, but make it so each side of the cube functions like its own asset I can lower my workload to create some really cool unique assets. If each side of the cube essentially became its own asset that gives me 6 assets per cube, and 24 assets for the four cubes I create. That would also help my teammates with the designing of levels, and I believe that would show my versatility as an artist. As far as the actual concept, well an underground base or lab. What can I do as an artist to have that environment stand out and seem innovative? I really need to do more research to find out what all of the tropes in popular culture are. If we were to make it to next semester I believe I can make some different assets to almost tell a story, or convey a message. Sometimes making art with a specific message can be a negative thing, and it may detract from my art as a whole but I like the idea of satire and social commentary in a game. For example if we go with the idea of test subjects we can have different test subject rooms, and we could make different test subjects based on what is popular in the media or the news right now. Like make a girl with a horse head and have her tongue stick out to make fun of Miley Cyrus. I really want to work on something that I’m going to have fun with. That’s always been the case with my artwork. I want to find a way to be innovative, but also at the same time I would like to have fun being the innovator. There is a lot riding on the art style and how it fits into our game and how it looks, so it would be a shame if I were the one to mess that up. As far as actually standing out in the genre it might be hard to get some spotlight on a racing game that features characters that are running. We should look at classic sonic the hedgehog games, and how they pulled off characters racing without vehicles. I feel like the fact that it is a racer without vehicles already makes our game stand out. Not many games would take a huge risk like that. There are a many challenges with getting a character to feel right along with giving the player the satisfaction as a racing game does. For example if you drive a car you expect to go a certain speed. As a human you are expected to go a certain speed, but in a game that speed would be too slow. So finding the right fun balance between these will definitely help us stand out in the long run. With the lab we just need to make it an interesting art style, and we need to find things to differentiate what has already been done in these setting before.   

Matthew Jordan: Context Conflict

     This week we started to focus more on the context of the game and we have come up with two solid ideas we have not been able to decide on. Both ideas have aspects about them that make them appealing which has lead to the current conflict we are in. The first idea we have revolves around the player being the size of an action figure or doll while racing around the house of the toys owner. This idea allows for fun with perspective which would mean that we could turn ordinary objects like a pencil or a pile of blocks into various obstacles for the racers. Another fun aspect about the perspective of a toy is the idea of physics, objects such as marbles or a sponge could provide a surface that would cause the player to slide around and force them to try and maintain their speed and position as the world fights against them. The toy idea is very appealing because it allows us to make create fun assets and maps that revolve around the toy theme.
     The second idea we have is more of an abstract world where the race track would form itself in front of the player as he/she ran the track. This style of map would create a race that is more spontaneous because of the somewhat randomly placed obstacles and appearing trails. The triggers would still be in play but they would need to be re worked in order to work with the new way the other parts of the map appear. We enjoyed the idea of this map because of how unique the idea is and it means that we get to have more fun creating the various parts of the map. As mentioned before we are struggling with this choice because both ideas are so appealing and are within scope.

Matthew Jordan - Everyone's game

    This week was focused on creating more of a team oriented level to show how our game could be the co-operative experience we had hoped for. In order to make this happen I needed to have more triggers to the level that would create pieces of environment that teammates could use as an advantage. I can say that actually figuring out where the triggers will go and what effect they will have on the level is was a very fun experience and I look forward to it. Another part of this week was creating a more interactive environment for the player to move around with along with the triggers. A valuable lesson I learned from last week is that when designing a level or putting together a prototype I should always design it from the players point of view. Last week when I was putting the level together I was in the mindset of a designer, I knew were all of the trigger spots where so I assumed the player would not mind there being any sort of material on the the triggers in order to see where they were. Yet when the prototype was presented materials on the triggers was the something everyone asked for. By ignoring what the players wanted I made the game less about how they would experience it and more about how I would experience it. Because I knew where the triggers were it created an environment that was almost too dependent on blind luck and most people didn't know where to go in order to set off any triggers. After last weeks critiques and rebuilding the prototype level I learned that to create the best player experience I need to be able to design as both a designer and a player.

Mike Vautour

Challenging again tomorrow morning. Lets hope this goes well this time. Not that it went terrible last time. I expected it to go worse to be honest. I don't really know what i'm supposed to be writing in these posts. Oh well back to work...

Mike Vautour - Week 2

Testing was surprisingly fun, and we got good feedback. Like, REALLY GOOD FEEDBACK. However i still feel like our game isn't going to stand out enough. There are too many comparisons to other games (which i expected), and that scares me. I feel like we need to switch something up.

Matthew Jordan - The tic tac wars

   
     
             Going into the third week of the capstone project we were finally able to get our prototype into QA testing and it went a lot better then I could imagine. Everyone who played the game was having fun with the mechanics that were in the game and said how they wanted to play some more. Watching the testers play helped us determine where we wanted the game to go. Most of players spent their playtime just trying to kill one another in various different ways like trapping someone behind the walls and pelting them with bullets. The idea of building and destroying walls was received well but most people wanted them to be tweaked. At the end of the QA session we had a lot of great suggestions and recommendations about what people  wanted to see in our game.

       Of course I enjoyed finding out so many people liked our prototype, but what I found more interesting was the context the players decided to give to the prototype when they did not receive one. The first group of testers started saying it was a war between tic tacs who decided to start shooting each other with giant sugar cubes. Next came the great snow ball war where everyone was saying they were throwing around deadly snowballs. Hearing these wacky scenarios and seeing the testers having fun comes as sort of a relief to me because over the last few weeks me and my team have been told that our context needed to be more realistic or else it would effect how fun the game was. When first creating one of our capstone games I had envisioned this sort of world that was similar to the world in Who Framed Roger Rabbit or Cool World. In both of these worlds there is a clear distinction between how cartoons work and how real life works and they are still able to co-exist. A anvil to the head in this type of world is no big deal because of things like toon physics and hammer space. Yet after hearing the advice of our fellow peers we decided to go with a more realistic approach. Now I don't mind doing a more realistic context, in fact it's been fun doing the research about Prohibition and what weapons were commonly used in the 1920's. Games grounded mostly in reality are not bad some of my favorite games are based in reality. I just believe that a game that is considered "weird" can still be fun even when the premise is far away from reality.

Even though both games have both changed from their original designs I am still excited to work on both of them for the rest of the semester.
 
 
     

Can't wait. Mike Week one.

I'm feeling excited as the second class is upon us. We really seem to be meshing well as a team. So far in my production experience i've never had a group of people i've brainstormed this well with. There are always roadblocks. People sized roadblocks. So far so good, and i'm really excited to choose and present a game idea. I think we can make it pretty far. I'm hoping to be able to make some art soon (outside of brainstorming)

Mike signing off

Jason: Week One- I'm sure you're wondering why I gathered you all here today...

Well, looks like we started off on the right foot. 19 ideas were pitched, and two were voted on and selected. Tomorrow we pitch the ideas to our two faculty advisers and see which one they like best.

Our creative process in creating those 19 ideas was very simple. We wrote down a list of mechanics we really liked, and combined them with settings or art styles we thought fit, and threw in some filler to describe a basic vision of the game. People ended up tossing ideas out left and right. It worked really well for us, and we voted them down to the two we will be presenting tomorrow. They're hush hush for now, but we can't wait to update our readers and fans on our ideas and final decision.

The Hush Puppy Team

Matthew Jordan-Week one

Week One

            Week one of senior year has almost passed and our capstone project is underway. I was worried
after a the first class that we would not be able to come up with any ideas that we one hundred percent agreed on. Well after a few three hour meets and 19 game ideas later I could not be more wrong. As I just stated since the first capstone class me and the rest of my team have come up 19 game ideas that we all saw promise in. But, even though we enjoyed all the idea we came up with we know we wouldn't be able to make them all this year. Like the old saying "You have to break a few eggs to make an omelette" so we went a head and broke 17 our or eggs in order to create a delicious omelette, and after eating our omelettes we had two ideas left. Both ideas I feel very strong about, I believe that the two ideas we have have full potential to become very fun and interesting games.