Design: Self-control

Your final game design challenge is to consider the problem of gaming addiction and how you could design a system which allowed a gamer to regulate how much time they spent gaming. The challenge is to make a time-limiter that people would actually pay attention to and comply with, rather than one that they resented and ignored.

Design: UNSW ARG

Alternate reality games (ARGs) are a genre that blends real-life treasure hunting, interactive storytelling, video games and online community. ARGs blur the boundaries between real life and the game. The game should not provide an overtly designated playspace or ruleset to the players.

Your task is to design an ARG that could be played at UNSW next year in O-Week.

design: fairytale game

This week’s design challenge is to make a game based on an established story – a fairytale.

Choose any popular fairytale and consider how it could be turned into a game.

Consider:

• What is the setting?
• Who are the characters?
• Who is the player?
• Whose point of view does the player adopt?
• What elements of the story would you keep? What elements would you need to modify to fit the new medium?
• Can you make the transition without sacrificing the core narrative of the tale?

Design: A social game

Your task this week is to design a social game for Facebook which makes interesting use of the friendship graph. Most Facebook games actually have very little social interaction, other than ‘spam you friends with ads’. Your task is to come up with a game that promotes interesting interaction between multiple friends, without requiring them to all know each other or all be logged in at the same time.

design: social media

There are many social-media games which offer incentives to advertise to your friends and get them into the game but often they have very poor social dynamics once they are there. Design a facebook game that offers more meaningful social interaction with other players, but still allows casual ‘play-anytime’ gameplay.

design – surface computers

Consider what games you could design for a device like the Microsoft Surface. What constraints would this controller place on your design? What new opportunities does it open up? Come up with a game idea that takes advantage of what this platform offers.

design – system driven

Games are often “found” rather than made. That is, you discover a contained closed system which inspires your design. Game designers are always on the look out for “elegant” systems – ones that use a small handful of interacting mechanics to produce a rich play-space with interesting dynamics.

Your task today is to consider the physics of fluids. Suppose you had a simulation engine that could model the movement of air, smoke or water in 2D or 3D. What game could you make from this system?

design – a game for mum

Come up with an idea for a game your mother would play.

It is easy to make this a joke. Resist the temptation. Instead try to think of something that would genuinely interest her.

If have no idea what your mum would like… ask her! She might surprise you.

design idea – a toy

In lectures this week I said that every good game is based on a good toy. But what makes a good toy?

Design a toy that is fun to play with and offers multiple possibilities for players to set their own goals.

game design 2 – the ball game redux

In last week’s tutorial you analysed the experience of the ball game from our first lecture. Your task is now to design a computer game that incorporates some of the dynamics and experiences of the original. Go back to your one-sentence summary of the experience – can you recreate that in a computer game? Can you generate some of the same play dynamics? How?

Try to place your game in a new setting, not just “multiplayer a first person shooter in which you throw coloured balls around the room”.

Justify why the dynamics you carry over make sense in your new setting.