Game Design Basics
Creating a video game is not an individual process. Great game designers relish in the opportunity to work on creative teams of artists and choose to shed the constrictive work environment of solitary production. The design process encourages the artists to work within a collaborative team. Through the incubation process, simple ideas are grown into mature designs. This process, one that has historically been used in the graphic design industry, lies at the core of the video game design arena.
At the helm of this process is the Game Designer. The Game Designer produces an unwavering view of how the game will preform throughout the entire production. The vision and end-user experience is carefully crafted through many iterations and thorough examination. At any given time, the Game Designer will experience many communication challenges within the production team. Working closely with artists, programmers and animators, the Game Designers must communicate a clear vision of the end produce to a diverse team of technology and artistic experts. The day-to-day role of a Game Designer might fluctuate, but the grand vision of the game must remain consistent. The role of a Game Designer is to communicate this vision of the game and to engineer the user experience for the gamer.
Chapter 1: 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3 (50pts)
Project Due: Week 03
Please answer the following questions and submit your answers to the dropbox. Please submit Word Documents or Text documents only.
1.1 - Become a Playtester
Take on the role of a tester. Go play a game and observe yourself as you play. Write down what you're doing and feeling. Try to create one page of detailed notes on your behaviors and actions. Then repeat this experience while watching a friend play the same game. Compare the two sets of notes and analyze what you've learned from the process.
1.2 - D.O.A
Take one game that you have played that was D.O.A. By D.O.A,. we mean "dead on arrival" (i.e., a game that's no fun to play). Write down what you don't like about it. What did the designers miss out? How could the game be improved?
1.3 - Your Life as a Game
List five areas of your life that could be games. Then briefly describe a possible underlying game structure for each.
All Finished with your Homework?
After you have saved the project file on your personal external storage device (like a thumb drive), please upload your Microsoft Word Document (.docx) or your text file (.txt) to the 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3 dropbox on D2L.
Before you upload your files to D2L, please ensure your files meet the following naming conventions:
Submit Your Assignment- lastname_gcom_420_chapter01.docx
Evernote
Evernote
Taking notes is a vital element to your academic success and it has gotten easier with the advent of Evernote. I'm a big fan of being able to access my information from anywhere. Evernote allows to you write notes, save pictures and upload documents to a free, cloud based service. Since all of your information is saved in the cloud, you can access your notes on any device, desktop, tablet and phone, that has an Internet connection. Evernote is going to rock your world! Check it out!Copy
Copy
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Check out these awesome learning resources! I've collected a number of assets that I think will help you conquer this week's homework and laboratory assignment. Please download the following materials to your local hard disk or flash storage device (AKA thumb drive).
