Rachael Leddy Multimedia Development

  Source This week, I read two different articles and watched a video on why having some sort of storyline or narrative to your game can be quite important. In the first article , they talk about whether games can be considered 'art' or not. The article starts off by talking about how a game being 'fun' isn't the only prime intention of the game, that games can also be critically assessed on how they are designed and how they look.  I agree that as much as a game should be fun and enjoyable, a game should also be nice to look at, you don't want things to look out of place, or for there to be too much going on in the background or forefront of the game while you're playing it. In the second article , they talk about  what every game developer needs to know about story. They mention how to approach bringing a story into a game, games are not movies, so you don't exactly need to have a beginning, middle and end, just a sort of structure to tell a small stor...

  Source After nine weeks of doing reading assignments and writing blog posts on articles I had been reading or videos I had been watching, I think they were very useful to me and I've learned a lot. Each week the readings would cover a different topic within game design, something I had never looked into before, and would give me a greater insight into the world of gaming and the world of creating games. If I had to pick a favourite reading, I would say either the Games MDA readings or the GDD readings as both were probably the most effective when learning about creating games and were probably most helpful when it came to start creating my own game. Before reading these pieces, I would've never known what either were, I think the Games MDA reading helped me get a better understanding of the framework when it came to creating games and it also helped me know what aspects were most important and least important when it came to creating a game. The GDD readings were probably of...

Source This week we were reading about Gamification and how to put the 'fun factor' into your game. The first article I read was about Gamification design and what fun has got to do with it and if there is such thing as designing for fun. In this article they talk about how fun is only a by-product of good design and how bringing an aspect of fun into a game isn't essential. I agree that fun shouldn't be the sole purpose of a game when trying to design it, but I disagree that bringing fun into a game is not essential. I think when designing a game you want to design something that people will enjoy playing and something that people will feel the need to come back to play over and over again because of the aspect of fun in it. I think that while you want the game to be greatly designed and have a good purpose, the need for pleasurable engagement should be there too, or else you would essentially be making a game that is destined to not do great. Fun is such a broad word ...

Source In this weeks reading was all about the flow in game design and it also talked about what kind of decisions game developers have to make to keep their games interesting and keep players engaged in what they're playing. This article  talks about all of the learning curves when creating a game and what kind of games are most likely to have more engaging audiences. After reading through it, it seems that games that are fun and have goals are usually the kind of games that people will be more likely to play. People won't want to play a game that has no definite ending or no rules to be able to get to that ending, they will end up getting bored quite easily and click off the game. After reading that article, I watched this video by Game Design with Michael.  He talks about what flow theory is in game design. In summary, he says that flow is a theory about making games challenging and engaging and also matching different skills to the players playing level. The game should ma...

  Source What is a game design document? I'm still learning a lot about game design as we progress through this module, so learning about game design documents this week was quite interesting. I read this article  by Lennart Nacke about what game design documents are and also some rules to follow to create a good game design document. Game design documents have two main purposes, for memory aid and also they're a communication tool. They mostly help us in defining how a game will work in detail and also how to communicate with other people on your team, that help create these games, on how you plan to develop the game. Some rules for creating a good game design document would be to know your target, just so you know what needs you are dealing with while creating the game. To keep the game design document short, just so its straight to the point and easy to read, wastes less time. And also to use clear terminology, you don't want people to be confused about what they're ...

Source The first article I read this week was " MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research " by Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc, Robert Zubek. I didn't get too much information for this blog from this article. Before reading this article I had no idea what the MDA framework was. I done a little bit more research outside of the provided sources and I came across a blog written by a guy named Andrew Fisher, who is a game designer, and this was his definition of what MDA is, and it was able to help me understand a bit more. " This framework was originally taught as part of a workshop at the Game Developer’s Conference, and was later published in a paper in conjunction with researchers from North-western. It introduces a fundamental way of deconstructing game systems to give a shared vocabulary and methodology for people of all disciplines working with games. The framework proposes that games can be understood by dividing their components into three distinct ca...

Game Elements   What are the qualities of a game? Games have a lot of qualities to them, some follow a series of rules and objectives to get to a finish point, some have a certain sequence that they have to follow in order to complete the game, some games even tell a story. Games like Cluedo have different rules and objectives to games like Fortnite or other first person shooter games, but at the end of the day, they all follow rules and objectives to get to the end of the game. The article also talks about having a critical analysis for games. As designers we know how important it is for people to critique our work so we know how to make it better, so telling a game designer that their game is good is a great confidence booster for them, however you're not telling them anything that they can work on to make it better, and those critiques are what they're looking for. Bibliography:   Links that I read The qualities of great games What are the qualities of games? What is a crit...

  Source What is a game anyway?  This is such a complicated question to answer because there seems to be so many different ways to define a game. One definition I would like to focus on in this blog post is "A game has 'ends and means': an objective, an outcome, and a set of rules to get there" (David Parlett) This statement is quite interesting because it is stating that a game always has an end, and it has an objective to get to that end goal but also a set of rules you have to follow to be able to get to that objective to be able to end the game. One game that reminds me of this statement is the card game 'Go Fish'. This is one of those games that always has an end, because eventually you run out of cards. But, you still have an objective and a set of rules to follow in this game. From all my years playing Go Fish, the objective was always to have the most amount of paired up cards to win in the end, and the rules were to always ask the other player for a c...