I graduated! Hooray! Lets bring that into perspective.

Four-and-a-half years ago I started at the Utrecht School of the Arts (or Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht – HKU – in Dutch). I was 16 years old when I got accepted for the course Game Design & Development and I was barely capable of doing anything. I recall I called myself an artist during those days, as my only skill was a bit of photoshop. Fellow students were a lot more mature than I was (they probably still are) and I had to fight to keep up. Maybe I was a bit too young when I started, but I made it through nevertheless. I was a bit less of the typical ‘student’, you could say.

I must say I can not recall all lectures and projects in those first two years, although I did take extensive notes during each and every one of them. I remember how I managed to fuck up my first exercise, the ‘perfect a4′ exercise, in which all you had to do was turn in a blank A4 with your name, a date, the lecturer’s name and some other data – I got the date wrong. I get the exercise now, though: it is about the experience of the paper. Just one person aced the test back then, I now understand why he did. Correct information is just part of the deal, feel is the rest.

I remember I learned how to make low-poly 3D models from Kent Kuné, who later became the most influential game designer in my career. I made a pirate-tricycle for his lessons which was pretty awesome. I remember programming Tic Tac Toe in C++ for this bare-footed programming lecturer, something I currently cannot reproduce. I remember interaction design and psychology lessons which were too theoretical to be of practical value. I remember this awesome level design workshop which my team and I nailed with a fantastic looking Team Fortress 2 level.

There were a few visionaries at the HKU too. These people taught me how to differentiate game mechanics from other parts of a game. And why ‘serious’ games should not be called that way (but rather applied games, because they should be fun).

But the biggest memory that remains is that I did not finish a single game in the first two years. I had not learned how to make games at all. I remember realizing that. It was pretty painful. But ending the two first years also marked the end of the theoretical side of the Game Design & Development course. Practical exercises were coming up!

What changed everything was my internship at W!games, now Vanguard Entertainment, where I worked on Gatling Gears for half a year as part of my third year internship. I learned very valuable lessons there which completely defined the designer I currently am. I learned to see challenges in tasks which I understood fully. For all my life I had been quitting on tasks after I figured out on how to do it. Thankfully my mentor René Derks recognized this problem and I took his advise with grace. I learned to separate emotions from design from lead game designer Chris Nengerman, who brilliantly stepped back from any discussion when it became a fierce discussion and went back to every person separately to calmly talk about it.

But most of all, I saw Kent Kuné building games in his spare time. He knew a bit how to script with the Unity3D game engine and was able to create any prototype he wanted. Every week, he would show me a new version of something. I was amazed, completely inspired to work with the Unity3D to build some of my own ideas. It was pretty tough in the beginning, but it was definitely a beginning! Kent showed me the importance of having your own tools and testing your own ideas. Games can only be fun when they can be played. I can not imagine what I would be doing now without this knowledge.

After my internship, I refined my scripting skills with the half-year student project Vogels!, which turned out to be pretty successful in terms of health games. I did not learn a lot from Vogels! in particular. Keeping it simple was the main message, but it was during this project that I started to think about the meaning of experience in the context of games. That my games were being played by real people with real thoughts and experiencing their own thing. And that everything they did wrong was my fault. An important realisation, especially when you want to grow as a game designer.

Although making games for handicapped people felt immensely good, I wanted to focus more on entertaining games. My fourth year’s project, The Jelly Reef, was a great introduction to exactly that, but surprisingly taught me more about managing other people than about game design. It taught me about intrinsic motivation of myself and others, leaving others with responsibility, communication and – most of all – I learned about working hard the hard way.

It was during this project I had my so-called ‘burnout.’ I remember I worked on either the project or a project of my own every minute I was awake, for two straight weeks. My body literally stopped me from continuing like that. I have been learning how to deal with hyperventilation, stress and adrenaline ever since. It’s coming along slowly, but my struggle is becoming less.

The Jelly Reef was a great product of the extra miles some of us took to make the game the way it is. All of the team deserves credit for that. Some people in the team really did prove themselves and these are very likely the people I will be working with even after graduation.

And then, of course, my graduation project. The HKU offers a special program, that I still fail to understand, in which you stick 3 more months onto your Bachelor project plus a bigger paper (a so-called supportive narrative) to make it a Master project. My supportive narrative turned out to be a good insight into my way of thinking as a designer: analyzing a problem, coming up with solutions, building those solutions, testing those solutions and then drawing a conclusion.

Right now, it is too early to reflect on the game I have been working on during my graduation project, Fingle. It is still not done, but it definitely will be soon, and a reflection can then be found on my blog. A full blown iPad game. My first commercial title. The first of many, I hope. I couldn’t have wished for a better ending at the HKU than to graduate with this game. It is a true piece of art, if I may say so myself. I can’t wait to tell you everything about it, but that has to wait for a bit longer, unfortunately!

And then, suddenly, I graduate.

Adriaan de Jongh,
Master of Arts in Design for Digital Cultures 

Together with my friend Bojan Endrovski, I will be starting a game studio.

Hello world

It has been silent for quite a while on my blog. Nothing coincidental, I tell you! I’ve been increasingly busy with my graduation project and supportive narrative. And I moved and have no internet and my new place. Anyway.

For my project, I set out to make an iPad game that would explore interesting social interaction. This is a vision, meaning it basically means nothing at all without a more concrete idea. I started brainstorming and generating ideas and build a number of prototypes in Unity to test the ideas. As I am an official Apple Developer, I could try my ideas directly on the iPad. The following is a video I made right at the ver beginning of this project, showing how I can prototype on the iPad.

From all of the prototypes I build, the project quickly came down to 2 concepts and, after some more iteration and playtesting, 1 concept. I will get into this concept more specific in another article later.

I’m currently working together with Bojan Endrovski (http://furiouspixels.blogspot.com/), a very talented programmer with whom I worked with creating The Jelly Reef and who is currently building a full featured iOS engine. The concept I prototyped will be the first game built in his engine, which is quite exciting. So far, most of the core elements of the concept are implemented and running smoothly already. We have set up most of the pipeline and will go into full production anytime now.

Building this iPad game is quite exciting but also a big challenge. Not only is it our first iPad game, it is also our first commercial title, which means the responsibility is completely ours – if the game flops, it is our fault. We are convinced we can make a solid game out of the concept, but there are still a number of things we don’t have so much experience with, most of them aside from the game. We have some ideas – I’ll discuss them when the time comes!

Stay tuned for my next article! Exciting times!

I participated in this year’s Global Game Jam more with the role of programmer than a designer. Another chance to make an awesome game with a team, in 48 hours. Simply put, you move a small creature around and make sure he doesn’t get eaten. And you do that by letting him eat your fellow creatures. And entering his rear entrance. And eating him from the inside, after which he will explode. It’s crazy. You can download and play it at the end of this article!

But let me put emphasis on ‘chance’ in ‘another chance to make an awesome game’. Because you might as well be working 48 hours on a game that might not be as awesome as you would hope. And in my opinion, that is what happened to our team that weekend. We showed that we were truly capable of building a game, but the core idea of the game just didn’t show the potential of becoming an original or refreshing game. We were eager to build a game and we were certain that it was the course of creation that would make the game awesome, but that turned out to be a wrong assumption. That is the biggest lesson of my global game jam 2011.

As I mentioned, I do think we showed that we were fully capable of creating a game in the amount of time that was there. We prioritized well, we worked hard and had a pipeline all set up in just a matter of hours. We came really, really close to creating the game we had in mind. And big kudos to us for that!

What I think I personally did right this project was looking at the game from a user experience a lot more. This made me see a lot of usability issues, that we were -sort of- able to fix in the time we had, making the game actually playable and understandable for players without us having to say anything. Unfortunately, some bugs caused inconsistencies in the game, making it confusion for the player and painful for us creators to watch them struggle with it. But hey, we made a game in 48 hours, you can’t always have everything.

Maybe it was my experience with previous playtests too. I’ve seen people struggle with my previous games and that sure opens your eyes to some of the more standard mistakes and assumptions. Its hard to explain, I guess that is why they call it experience.

Enough talk. Play Bottom Feeders! Windows or Mac. Forgive me for its flaws.

After months of hard work, my team and I can proudly present to you, The Jelly Reef!

“The jellyfish, pink and green, need your help. Sit down around the Microsoft Surface and swipe the water with your fingers to guide the jellyfish away from harm. Save as many as you can to discover more dangerous locations, strong currents and more captured jellyfish.”

“[..] an entertaining game for the lobby in the building of the Dutch Game Garden, which would simultaneously introduce you to all the companies that reside in the building.”

www.thejellyreef.com – check it out!

For even the smallest project, I write reflection on the course of the project. Creating The Jelly Reef has been a completely new experience for me in many ways. Read on to see why.

Assignment interpretation

The assignment we were given was in conflict with itself, and that became more and more clear to us near the end of the project. We were making a fun game, but also a game that needed to introduce the different companies that resident in the Dutch Game Garden. In a hindsight, we did a good attempt trying to aim for both byproducts, but the final game has unfortunately suffered from it. The introduction of DGG residents feels like a completely separate entity, outside the fun of the game.

Two things we could have done to cope with this problem. First, if we would have been honest with ourselves regarding this problem, as this problem was hinted to us mid-project already, we could have looked for a different implementation. But the other thing that we could have done is to have the courage to talk about this problem with the client and negotiate about what he wanted us to make and what we wanted to make. Obviously, we wanted the game to be all about fun, the client wanted it to be all about the introduction. Did we fail miserably by starting with a game concept in which these two goals weren’t merged?

Development

Our programmers Jeroen, Bojan and Peter did a fantastic job. Being students, it is amazing what they managed to squeeze into 3 months of development time. And this is simply because of the effort they put into the project and all the extra time they spent from the beginning on, ‘instead’ of at the end of the project. The excellent communication between the design department and the development department resulted in a robust level editor that was designed to make it easy for us designers to create the game. All their time was well spent.

From my perspective, the technical development process was handled fantastically. They used iterative methods to make their own schedule, had a very down to earth todo list and stuck more or less to their plan. Their feature lock gave a good sense of how close we were getting to the end. Every feature in their code was well thought through and was always made with a designer or an artist watching over their back. Although they were still required to crunch in the last two weeks, I am absolutely sure that it was not caused by faulty development planning. Read on.

Graphics

Our artists Tim, Tim, Bas and Sandra have been working hard on every asset or level in the game. It looks fantastic, but getting there was a rough ride. Because of a few unfortunate events, I felt that half of the art team was not really ‘connected’ to the game, and by that I mean that sometimes the artists would create bits and pieces of the game without actually iterating on it or seeing it in action, placed in the game, before tagging it as final. This caused a tremendous workload for the development team at the end of the project, as we discovered that implementing the art assets required more features that we had built so far. But where we suffered most was coping with the feedback issues the game had. More on that later.

Feeling connected to the game is crucial and it is the role of each individual as well as every lead of the team to make sure every single person is working on the game and not on individual assets. Only by putting your hard work in a context can you judge its effectiveness. This is one of the most important lessons I have learned from this project.

But this problem did not just come from faulty personal development processes. More difficulties caused this. We did not have enough hands on building the game, putting placeholders and trying to implement all the cool stuff the art team had created. Three weeks before the deadline, our team was forced to split up because our local Surface table broke down. Also, during the project, my body started hyperventilating as a result of the rough time I was giving myself, and I was required to take a week off for my physical condition, leaving the rest of the team behind without the ‘game visionary’ that I tried to be. Unfortunately, our team was not able to cope with all of these difficulties entirely. It had a negative effect on the game and on the spare time of everyone of us.

Don’t get me wrong; the eight unique, multi-layered levels look absolutely amazing and the animations just make you want to touch the game. Kudos to each and every one of the art team.

Design

Overall, I was not satisfied with the design process that took place for the gameplay content that is in the game. The nine levels we have were also the nine levels we first came up with. Sherida and I started way too late with creating and thinking of levels and that was one of the reason why art was having a huge workload at the end of the project. We also did not playtest enough. There was always the raw fun of swiping the jellies and avoiding death, but I do not feel we came any further. Finding the right puzzles and seeking for fun situations were things I would have loved to do. In this perspective, I think the design department failed. Sure, the eventual game is fun, but we left that more to luck than to thoughts. I feel responsible.

Admittedly, for this project I spent more attention to the code department than the art department. Because of my previous experiences, I felt it was more easy for the development team to lose track of the overview than the art team… which is a pretty common mistake by many developers, under the name of ‘feature creep’. Although that seemed to be less the case for our programming team, I can remember a few specific moments where I could stop them from making more than what the game would require. I think that my focus on the code department is what made me ignorant for the workload of the art for the levels. If I would have noticed that sooner, we would have started creating levels earlier and much more of my idea of a good design process would have come true.

Let me note here that part of the reason we started so late on the levels was because of that hyperventilating week I took off, right when it was time to start working on the level design. As my role was crucial in the two-man design department, not much design happened in the week I had to rest. A lot can or can not happen in a week. That week would have made a difference!

Another thing that went wrong with creating The Jelly Reef was usability design. It started way too late and wasn’t recognized as visual design at first, requiring both a designer and an artist. Not having the right artist on location required insane communication skills from the design department which was more or less impossible. Visual artists iterating on words, can you imagine. It resulted in that 80/20 thing big shots often talk about: in our case, 80% of the user’s experience was created in the last 20% of our project time. People didn’t get it, we saw that too late and had to work very hard on the last moment to make people understand. And to be honest, even now usability could use a few iterations more.

As for motivation design, we had a pretty sweet model implemented into the game, but to be honest… we have no idea whether it is working too. As said before, we did not playtest early and enough.

Project Management

In total, It took us 4 weeks longer than expected to finish the game. On a 3 months project, that is a lot.

What project management meant to me this project was actually people management. I wanted everyone to achieve the best result for the sake of the project. I have always believed that it is the responsibility of the project coordinator to keep all the team members motivated, but this project I have found something that only every individual can do for himself; taking initiative, showing discipline to iterate on your work and killing your darlings. In some rare cases I couldn’t help myself taking that impossible road of trying to help an inactive team member‚ its the feeling that you get when you are given a chance but there is nothing you can do to take it. But my actions to change the mentality of some of my team mates, maybe even their character, were and will always be unsuccessful.

Every department created and updated his own agenda, more or less based on their own workload. We never set milestones based on those assumptions, but I don’t think that has had a negative effect on the game. We did the best we could and we did not need to manage that.

Individual Reflection

As the project coordinator, I feel that most of the mistakes I made had to do with treating the different personalities in our team, expectations of team members and communication. It remains incredibly difficult to work in a team.

There have been moments that I wish I had been more honest and strict against one or two of my team members, but I have seen team coordinators doing that in other projects; it is not the kind of guy I want to be. I think I can be a hard worker, also trying to push the limits of others, but I will always try to keep the atmosphere friendly. I do not want to create games in a social environment where people are afraid to show me their weaknesses. I have seen this going wrong in enough student projects already. I rather deal with the downside, having a few demotivating people in your team and work hard with the rest.

Other Notes

This project I have seen the power of all-rounders. People who are not afraid of looking at difficulties that arise outside of their field of study. From my own perspective I think that I was able to create some very interesting levels because both the art and code team granted me great insight into their challenges and strengths. I saw multiple examples in our team that proved some people to be all-rounders and their effort was really what connected all the departments.

Am I overall satisfied? Yes, very! I’ve seen a lot of people playing the game, putting themselves in the dangerous world of the jellies – feeling good when they manage to save a few, face palming when they fail to do so. And the childen that played it – don’t get me started on that, It will get me all emotional!!! The Jelly Reef is not a finished product, but it sure shows its potential a hundred percent!

How do you come up with new ideas?

I find it incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to come up with something that I have never seen or heard before. If I try to think of something that does not exist or I have never thought of before, I will always end up with combinations of ideas. More down-to-earth, I can say that I have never created something without inspiration.

What came to my mind first was that designers found a way to inspire eachother, using a gathering we call a brainstorm. Everyone yells ideas hoping to ‘inspire’ other participants who will then come up with better ideas by combining parts of them. Association is an important factor during this gathering. Our brain maps information that in some way connects to other information, and we come to think of those associations all the time during one.

But then again, those ideas have to start off somewhere too. And this is what I have been stuggling with for a long time. Brainstorming solo. You can’t call for ideas and associations continuously out of the blue.

Lately, I have had one inspiration when it comes to inspiring myself to create games. Movies. The shorter, the better. Since the arrival of Vimeo, I have been watching short films on the HD channel nearly every day. But I never really ‘used’ it as inspiration until I got inspired by the gimmick of shkizhein, a character that had a visual offset from his body. This inspired me to create Offset (working title), a project I am currently working on.

I did a little experiment with myself. I sat down behind Vimeo and watched and rewatched some good shorts with the intention to be inspired for a game. And it worked: the third film got me inspired. Now I suddenly feel much more in control to come up with new ideas.

Why is vimeo working for me? It’s packed with movies that contain great ‘gimmicks’, trigger a variety of emotions and contain all these different visual styles that you can associate with many more things. The internet movie space is an environment that offers much more ideas than any other. An environment as dynamic as it could get. An office does not offer that, nor does a cafe or a walk through the park.

So, how can we change our mentality to come up with more new ideas?

I think we should revise the meaning of the word ‘new’ in the context of ‘new ideas.’ From my perspective it seems that new ideas are created by connecting different existing dots, but it seems that people around me all ought to think we are coming up with new dots. A new idea is a combination of existing ideas, and that is not a bad thing at all.

With that being said, traditional brainstorms need a make-over. Something such as Vimeo, an infinite source of ideas, would add greatly to the flow of ideas. Or a big pile of artsy books. As long as you don’t constaint yourself by only having other people being your input. Get some ideas in the ring and connect the dots!

More and more game designers are trying to make players do things with much more meaning. And this group of designers is growing rapidly.

Just to give you an idea of who I am talking about, here are 3 presentations from people who are aware of this motivational power games contain and try to apply it to something further away from traditional games.

I first heard about this subject at the NLGD Festival of Games 2009 (read my highlights), where Jonathan Samel Baskin held a talk named ‘From Branded Games to Games as Brand’. He believed in the fact that games had stronger motivators than any other form of interactivity that is currently used by companies or brands. Trying to combine these two separate things would make it an incredibly strong brand.

But motivation is a dangerous thing, and I will tell you why.

Imagine life as a game, something like what the designers above me were trying to say. You would get +10 points for brushing your teeth, +50 points for wearing two different pairs of socks because you got an achievement from a socks company, and +25 points for picking a biological product at the supermarket instead of a ‘normal’ one. If this is how it has been going your whole life, points are basically telling you how much value objects have in your life. Or maybe even how much certain people are worth to you, as some friends of yours like to listen to metal music more often than others and thereby you do too, for which the record label gives you another +10 points each day you see them. What will points take over?

Moral. Empathy. You could name every single thing that makes us value aspects of life or that of others. If there is an old lady crossing the streets but she needs your help, would you help her if you would get no points for it? Why bother if it has no value? Intrinsic and extrinsic values meet. You wouldn’t know better.

Obviously, these are very extreme examples, but you can already see consequences of motivating people with rewards in various games. Would you help an old lady cross the street in GTA? I thought so.

So how likely is it that out future will look like a big game? Are these motivators a threat to our daily lives and how we interact with each other?

Developing for women is hardcore

Ard Bonewald from GameHouse held a great talk about designing games for casual players and gave us a top 5 with tips for doing that. Although the talk was very generalizing, he could prove his approach was working because he had his game company running based on it!

1. Girls think games are bad for you.
   Make her feel less guilty! Make the game play quick (<3 min.) and make it safe to stop at any point. What helps is when the game offers meaningful entertainment, like brain training.
2. Girls are powered by emotion.
   Make it a interesting game, emotion is in the details. Make it personal!
3. Girls play games at the hardcore difficulty.
   Girls don’t read tutorials. Let them play the game, not the controls. Players can remember 5 things at max.
4. Girls don’t like losing or are afraid of failing.
   Failing makes it too personal, as if they have failed instead of just failed at the game. The game should be emotionally safe and encourage rather than punish them.
5. Girls can not be captured on a list.
   Don’t try to generalize them, they are all unique. Make them feel this!

Prototyping, rapid iterating and design goodness

Kellee Santiago from thatgamecompany gave a fantastic talk about the company and their approach on creating games. thatgamecompany is trying to push the boundairies of games, trying to show emotions in games that have yet been successful in the medium. It surprised me that they used about the same vision and goal approach I talked about earlier. With their games, they wanted to create an emotional shelter. Sometimes, hard fun is your enemy. They often lie close to emotions that are already explored in games, such as frustration and high tension.

Flower, their 2nd PSN title, had a huge amount of prototypes, as game development at thatgamecompany is based on rapid iteration and play testing. Most prototypes of Flower did not ‘feel’ the way they wanted the game to feel. Most of the times, the prototypes were completely abandoned, but the eventual game ended up using all the things they learned by creating those prototypes.

“Find the magic, execute the magic.”

“You don’t want to bet anything you don’t want to lose.”

Kellee notes that the iterative game development process does not really fit in the game industry, while it is the ideal process; it has difficulties with deadlines. This makes the planning and coordination a challenging task, in which estimates of wandering game designers and expensive iterations prove themselves difficult to plan.

Her presentation contained some very good advise for starting studios:

• Find your project scope upfront.
• Define the quality of each prototype.
• Define the quality of each iteration on the game.
• Wandering is OKAY.

The thing that ‘surprised’ and relieved me the most was the fact that everyone at thatgamecompany was able to create his own prototypes and was able to program or script themselves.

The New Gamemaker

Alan Yu, vise president of ngmoco, gave a very insightful presentation about creating games for the iPhone throughout the years, and gave hints and tips on how the next generation of game makers is going to survive.

He and his company realized that the only way to become and stay successful was to connect or merge business with game design. Basically, there are 3 ways of making money with free iPhone apps:

• Direct subsidy, e.g. buy 1, get 1 free.
• 3rd party ads.
• Premium content.

When the core compulsion loop of the game is limited or regulated, you create an environment in which people want to continue. This is where the money comes in.

Creating games for the iPhone takes less longer that traditional games and the market is moving too fast to hire specialists. For game developers, this means that they have to be fast and flexible. Shipping games is very important; creating a lot of small games means you have had a lot of opportunities to fail & proceed successfully.

And the rest…

The starting presentation of Toru Iwatani was fun to watch, but did not bring us any new insights on game development. Masaya Matsuura was creating a cool music rhythm game which he talked about. And David Perry talked about his history of games and how he thinks his company Gaikai will change the way people play games.

Till next year!

Lately, some general game development pitfalls caught my eye and I decided to combine them to one post.

Please comment on missing pitfalls!

Entering production without something fun.
It appears that in practice, games that are not already fun before they go into production have a really hard time to find the fun at all during production. Beside the fact that working on a not -yet- fun game is bad for the morale of the team, visions of the game are almost never the same for each team member, resulting in unclear goals and uncertain artist and programming work. Having a fun vertical slice of the game that captures the core of the game early in the process greatly enhances the production because everybody knows where the project is going and can work on fine-tuning that feeling, instead of continuously trying to find that fun factor.

Start big, end up small.
3 core mechanics, 25 levels, 20 skins, 4 environments and a 6-player co-op campaign to start with, end up with 1 mechanic, 3 levels and no multiplayer. Unfortunately, this happens a lot in practice and is a very demotivating, economical and time consuming issue. Starting with something small and ‘finishing’ it long before the final deadline will not only be very motivating, it will also increase the chance on ‘happy accidents’ and remove a lot of stress from you and your team.

Peer reviews not taken seriously.
Designers can often have the habit of not playing each others work, being too focussed on their own work and neglecting to play the work of others. A peer review is something that should be structurally integrated in the process, as it will lead to sharing ideas and a healthy environment for constructive critique, after which the designer responsible for the work can iterate on his work.

Starting too late with play testing.
Doing play tests early in the game development process means a more stable version at the end of the process. It helps to set your focus on what is important and what has to be changed and will eventually lead to better end results.

Not enough games played.
Teams, but mostly the game designers, are expected to already have a strong knowledge of games, what works and what does not with the genre you are currently working on. Unfortunately, this is not often the case. Devoting time to play games with your team can greatly enhance the ability to express ideas or come up with new ones.

Too much importance on design documentation.
A designer can try to imagine how the game would play, but more often there are too many interactive elements that can have a huge impact on the eventual game play and the overall ‘fun’. The only way to prove your theory is to actually see it in action. A lot of great ideas are discovered through experiments and ‘happy accidents,’ but unfortunately, these are discovered quite late in the process and often treated as correcting previous errors, as designers are expected to get it right the first time. Try to test more than to write!

Not taking advantage of placeholders.
Team members, particularly artists and animators, generally prefer working on final assets than low-quality ones that will have to be replaced later. Unfortunately, this often means that the designer has to wait to test his features, resulting in a slow-down of the design process. By extensively using placeholders, the design process doesn’t just speed up, the designer can focus more on the game play than the decoration.

Not keeping design documentation up-to-date.
When documentation is not kept up-to-date, people lose faith in it and at some point they will stop using it as reference. When the main goal of design documentation is cross-department communication, this is a disaster and the design documents are seen as ‘worthless’ by the rest of the team. Although time consuming, design documentation is important because of its ability to keep all the information together and to leave few room left for wrong interpretations.
Also, design documents do not have to be bibles. Don’t try to make them as such – try including as much as visuals as possible, as images can really say a thousand words.

No external play testing.
Unless the game designer is able to erase all experience with games from his memory and think like a casual gamer, you will need external playtesting in order to test your ideas. You would be suprised how intuitive your ‘most-intuitive-interface-ever’ would be according to a 45 year old mother. But also for the hardcore audience, original features that work perfectly might not be that straightforward for your hardcore audience. And what about difficulty and feedback? If you know the drill and the underlying system, you play the game very differently from a new player.

Vogels! is a rehabilitation game that helps patients with a hemiplegia recover.

Vogels! won the Diamond Trophy Award at the NLGD Festival of Games 2010. It was nominated for the Dutch Game Awards in three categories and for the Wozzie Award, named after Steve ‘Apple Co-Founder’ Wozniak, and was featured at the Cross Care Cafe by Izovator.

The game, or rather the red bird in it, is controlled by a gravity-compensating supportive arm of which its position is tracked and ‘copied’ in-game. For each new game, the patient calibrates the game to fit the level of impairment of the patient. In-game, the patient flies, following a path, through various parts of the world and grabbing birds.

You can download the mouse version of Vogels! below. Please keep in mind that the mouse version of Vogels! does not give the same experience as with the Top/Help Arm Support for which the game was originally designed. As the main purpose of Vogels! was to rehabilitate patients with a hemiplegia, this mouse version only gives you an idea of the game and its atmosphere.

Download Vogels!

Vogels! was created for Focal Meditech as a proof of concept by Team KOMODO, five Utrecht School of the Arts students and two Utrecht University students. My role in the team was Game Design and Project Coordination.

My post-mortem & more pictures

Team KOMODO
Sandra da Cruz Martins - 2D Artist
Ronald Houtermans - 3D Environment Artist
Adriaan de Jongh - Game Designer & Project Coordinator
Francis Laclé - Programmer
Tim Remmers - 3D Character Artist
Eri Shiroyama - Audio Designer
Jens van de Water - Game Programmer

Team KOMODO together. Francis his birthday was a lot of fun

A side view of the supportive arm with which the game is controlled.

At the Festival of Games 2010, our game was a huge success!

Toru Iwatani, creator of Pac Man, observes our hardware while playing the game

Totally unexpected, we win the Diamond trophy, 'Best-of-show' award of the Festival of Games, together with an iPad! Picture by Zuraida Buter...

Post Mortem: What went right!

• Translating real life mechanics into game mechanics. In essence, we took what the arm offered us, combined it with how the patients would use it and then created the mechanics for our game. The process of taking all the elements and concluding them to what would now be our core game went very smooth, as all decisions seemed very logical thanks to the great base of research we had done.
• The additive process and checkpoints. Every two weeks we had a milestone in which we would have a next version of the game ready. Because we were more or less finishing added features to the game every two weeks too, it was possible to remove 60% of our game just 4 weeks before deadline without any trouble, giving us the opportunity to focus on what was truly important for the game and to prove the concept we had been working on in the past months. Fortunately there was enough room for this hacking and slashing – killing your darlings is painful, but we have to stay realistic!
• Implementing research into game design. Having one designer (read: one guy who takes the final design decisions) on the team that is also the man on the research appeared to work great. Because we did research specifically for game-related information and issues, a lot of data could directly be distilled into our game, e.g. the length of the game, how instructions work, calibrating, role of the therapist, etc.
• External help. There are always people who can do something better than you do. Asking for help is never wrong. I think we were very lucky to have Lies van Roessel as our supervisor as she got us help from all around.
• From exchange student to sound designer. I think none of us even though of Eri, our exchange student from Japan, becoming this good at audio design. She literally started with zero knowledge of audio and music in games and managed to fully equip our game with immersive game sounds and effect which most of them, she recorded herself. She created sound moodboards and already knew in the early phase of the game how it was supposed to sound like. Again, she couldn’t have done it without the external help of audio designer Richard van Tol, who gave her lessons and critique on her audio design.

Post Mortem: What went wrong!

• Scattered group. During the whole project, we had 2 part time programmers. If you have ever made a video game, you know where most of the work and effort goes into; code. We met the programmers two days a week which was the bare minimum, and emailed most of the remaining days. Eventually, I had to help the programmers with lots of game code to make sure we would make it, which was not the ideal setup since I was slacking on design tasks in the meanwhile.
  Beside this unlucky fact, a major mistake that we made was ‘finalizing’ the concepts of the game without the programmers involved. They missed most of the concept phase because of their busy schedule and thereby did not feel as much connected as all the full-time members. I wonder if there was anything we could have done to prevent this – the project had to continue and we couldn’t wait for the programmers.
• Unspoken expectations about each other. The tension was incredibly high sometimes because we did not talk about ‘what was normal’ at the beginning of the project. As the team coordinator, I tried to keep everyone motivated and effective at work, and though I had a good idea about what ‘hard work’ included. I mistakenly asked team members to stop having fun during our project days and found out that there are many different work styles one can have. If we had just gone through this quickly at the beginning, none of this would have been an issue.
• Few world iteration. We had a round world which made it particularly difficult for the world artist to iterate on it. And lets be honest, lack of motivation did not make it any better. It also came to my mind that, when you go into crunch time not fully motivated, you are going to have a problem finishing your work.
• Documentation. Nobody was checking the design wiki, I had a lonely time in there… All communication was done outside the wiki, which is not a problem at all, but it did make the documentation redundant. Art used their wiki to put together their images, which did seemed to work fine.
• Vision-less weeks during production. At some point in our process we stopped using our vision as the main argument of our choices. I think we were lucky that we eventually had the game vision that we wanted all implemented. Next time, I’d rather not leave it to luck and keep the vision of the game I’m working on in the back of my mind all the time…
• Mid-project Media Management students. I don’t know who at our school thought it would be a good idea to involve first-year media management students with the project while there was already good coordination and a steady planning. It was a stupid idea, they did not even show up most of the times.

Team KOMODO!

Supervisors:

Vogels! Exhibiting!

Many were interested in our game at the Cross Care Cafe, organised by Izovator.

Team KOMODO together. Francis his birthday was a lot of fun

At the Festival of Games 2010, our game was a huge success!

Toru Iwatani, creator of Pac Man, observes our hardware while playing the game

Totally unexpected, we win the Diamond trophy, 'Best-of-show' award of the Festival of Games, together with an iPad! Picture by Zuraida Buter...

Why are we making games for an audience? Can’t we make games for ourselves?

What if a demographic group, for which we have so many trouble creating awesome games, would make games just for themselves? A female group of  game designers, artist and programmers that would create a game for just them – what would come out? As far as I know, this has never been tried before, I guess the game industry still remains a men’s world. But beside the female games discussion, what if a group of people that all love kite surfing would make a game to do just that? Or people with a dog fetish? Oh, I don’t want to think about that…

Anyway, if such group would make a game they love, a game in which they can share their love for the subject with others, where the fun of that group is transfered to any player, wouldn’t that be the ultimate hit? Hell yes!!!

I have a close to home example, one that shows that this theory can indeed apply. This years Global Game Jam, I participated with a team of which most members work or have worked at W!games, a game studio in Amsterdam. We all knew what it took to make a game and went into the project with the mindset to create a super awesome game. We threw in all the elements that the game we wanted to create would have and came to a concept really fast… All in all, it was the best process I had ever participated in, it went excellent. In the end, we had a game that was not far from the exact thing we had in mind and we all loved it. Because it was only created in 48 hours, we did not have the time to make it very accessible for other players, but after a few games, every player would get it and like it. Those players are the audience alike.

Working with development phases when creating a game is not going to clear up your process. In almost any case it shifts focus from what is truly important to the game.

At the end of the day, it’s about getting your game on the table. It must be well thought through, look good and must play good. I think development phases can mean a great deal if you wish to achieve that and phases can help you and your team to focus on what the phase is for. But then again, than it is not about your game anymore, it is about completing the phases and completing the process.

I believe that if you focus on the steps that must be taken in order to create the game, there is no confusion and you will never be ‘stuck’ in a previous phase. I have never done a project in which the design document was completely written and final the moment the production phase started – another problem of development phases is that there is always an overlap. And that is not going to clear things out.

This is what generally goes wrong with student games – school requires the game to be created by clear phases that must all be completed before the other. The problem is that for most students, this suggests that when you are in the production phase, you don’t have to work on your concept anymore. And beside that, writing complete design documents based on assumptions is never a good idea – the same goes for planning. This is the reason why most student games are either crappy or not finished.

You must be thinking about SCRUM now, but that is on a whole different level – SCRUM does not let you look into the the coming months, only into a week or so. Thats why I like the word ‘milestone’ – milestones don’t need names, they only exist when a certain level of production is (or is going to be) achieved and they are great motivational boosts when you are near or at one. Now, take it from here.

How can we combine the boring parts of other disciplines, work fields and such, with games to make them more fun – and a more complete experience? This is a question who came from Jonathan Samel Baskin who held a presentation about this subject at the NLGD Festival of Games in 2009. He had the opinion that people don’t believe in the lies and stereotypes of brands anymore. He thinks that if we turn our brands into games and use all the powerful elements games nowadays use, brands would make more sense and tell costumers their true story. And I think he has a point.

Games are very strong if it comes to binding costumers (or players) to their experience and maybe even better at creating memorable experiences. Almost nobody reads through policies and terms of use – a game with these simple lines of text at its core would surely make these important aspects much more present.

Why can’t brands be more game-like? Why can’t, for instance, people ‘fight’ for their products? Why are brand products often not related to each other in terms of the relation between the product and the costumer? Why don’t brands have achievements and why are costumers not rewarded with titles when they achieve them? Why is there no interaction between the costumers who bought certain products from a brand? I could instantly think of a dozen examples of how to turn a brand into a MMRPG!

I can not imagine the examples I called have not been tried, but I haven’t found any game or brand yet that has become successful in it.

Please comment, this is presumably a very interesting topic.

Team Syntax Error brings you the first game with sensible use for the controller rumble, created in less than 48 hours during the Global Game Jam 2010. WTFAQL received an honorable mention by the #GGJ2010 judges and was featured at #Indigo 2010.

4 players.
1 traitor.

The idea of the game is fairly simple. There is a cart rolling upward in a long -with monsters filled- cave, but it’s light is quickly fading. When the fire extinguishes, the team loses the game. By grabbing fuel from the cart’s surroundings and throwing it in the cart, they may have a chance to get to the end and win the game.

But, at the beginning of the game, one of the players will feel a short rumble. This indicates that he is the traitor, or the ‘spy’. He must make sure the fire extinguishes before they reach the end of the tunnel.

All players are able to strike the monsters to make them go away, but be careful not to hit your fellow players too – it will slow them. This negative effect is the core tool of the spy, but he alone has some more powers that will effect the group. Color swapping: the moment everybody is yelling ‘IT’S RED, IT’S RED!’, the spy hits the button and he might not be red anymore. Inverted controls: choke points are hard, choke points with inverted controls are harder.

Read about ‘the making of’ on bashers.nl

Team Syntax Error:
Rene Derks
Garry Dijkema
Adriaan de Jongh
Kent Kune
Sander Smid
Sander van der Vegte

To give an idea of the style of the game...

A screenshot of the game.

Best team photo. EVER.

A few months ago, the makers of World of Goo did an experiment. They gave away their game for any amount of money that you would pay for it. The result were fantastic:

http://2dboy.com/2009/10/19/birthday-sale-results/

The first thing I realized when I read through the results was that people are currently paying money for games they have not played before. And that is somehow strange, because how can we know its value when we have no idea of how much it will entertain us? I find it a dangerous thought that the amount of money that you have to pay resembles the amount of joy you will have from the game. And even worse is the way we think about a game that we have already bought, see http://goo.gl/eBqX for the reasoning. So not only are we probably paying way to much for games, we think about them much better when we pay a high price.

The second thing that crossed my mind was Runescape. They have a pretty good pay-model which would let people play the game, let them see what their fun is worth – and if they like it, they can pay for it and receive even more fun!

What is interesting about the World of Goo experiment is that they ask the player how much they think the game is worth BEFORE they have played it. So this experiment is all about expectations. And this simple thing is what all games have to cope with. It seems very interesting to do some more research into expectations and how to raise them. Ain’t that what marketing is all about?

An interesting next step would be to ask a player how much a game is worth after he has played it. How should that work? Interesting thought.

Can you imagine the most successful entertainment game ever, created by Blizzard, being a serious game? Well, I can. If you believe that World of Warcraft is purely about entertainment, you should stop reading here.

I have a confession to make – and it is a confession because I am ashamed of it. When I started playing World of Warcraft when I was 14, I immediately became an addict. My life became World of Warcraft 24/7, when I wasn’t playing it I was thinking it, when the servers were offline I was watching movies of it, I spend a minimum amount of time with my friends and worst of all – and the reason I quit – I felt bad that I was socially underdeveloped compared to other kids of my age. In other words, I had no girlfriend. And the moment I quit, I knew that I threw away the two years of my life that I played the game.

But now that I have grown up (a little), I have started to see things from a different perspective. These years might have not been as useless as I thought, I think I even have learned a great deal from this game! And lets start with just one of these: world economy. I will need to explain the economy in order to let you understand my point, so here comes the intense reading:

In a way, the world economy in World of Warcraft (WoW) is exactly same as the economy in our world. In WoW, money is rewarded after a player has killed a unit in the game world. A player can not only use this money to buy items that are necessary in order to advance through the game, he can also buy items that make the player more powerful. This can be done through an ‘auction house’, a marketplace in which players can purchase items by bidding on it or buy them out of the auction house for a higher price. Items are also dropped by units in the game, and because of their scarcity, these items could have a great value in the auction house. Players often hunt loads of units down in order to find valuable items that they can sell in the auction house, it is exactly like demand and supply.

Players also have the ability to choose between ‘professions’ that enable the player to craft different kinds of items, but because a player is never able to craft all the different kinds of items, another economy arises: players offering services to each other for small fees.

And then there is the underground market, which goes far beyond the game itself: buying in-game currency with real-world currency. Beside the Japanese companies ‘grinding’ (repeatedly killing the same enemies) for money and selling it in real world to real people and trading the money in-game, people even bought 3rd party software that would play the game for them and make sure the player would have a constant flow of income. Even today, years after the release of the first copies of WoW, Blizzard is still trying to ban all of these companies and programs.

If a player wants to become a strong and powerful player, he must know this complex system from the in- and outside to use it in a efficient way and to take an advantage out of it. And from my experience, almost all player in WoW know the drill.

Now that you know how the world economy of WoW works, I don’t think I have to tell you in what way it looks like our economy. Almost every part of the economy in WoW can apply to a part of the economy in our world. From the constant flow of money that players receive from their actions to the scarcity of items, from analyzing market behavior to selling your services, all these things can be translated directly to real-life examples.

But economy is not all. World of Warcraft contains one of the strongest forms of communities I have ever experienced. These so called ‘guilds’ are organized groups of people with hierarchies that have a shared goal, which can vary from ‘having fun’ to ‘raiding dungeons’ in order to become stronger as a whole. These communities demand things from players that no other game has ever achieved, including time, money for website hosting, taking effort to recruit other players, creating fair hierarchies and rewarding players for loyalty. Joining a guild is very much like a job interview, extremely difficult when you don’t have the experience, very easy if you have the right friends.

And another thing is the Player vs. Player (PvP) combat system. Players can team up with 1, 2 or 4 other players and be part of an ongoing competition between each other. In order reach the top in these competitions, you need a really strong team with an insane amount of experience. How to create and organize such a strong team is a tremendous effort.

There is so much to learn from World of Warcraft, dare I say more than any other serious game has ever learned anyone. And I believe World of Warcraft is not the only game that is teaching so many people. Games have the great ability to show players how certain systems work. If only the serious games market would focus on this fact instead of creating ‘educative’ games.

This article is about having a goal and a vision for your games and how that influences you as a game designer. Having goals and a vision for your game can have a huge impact on your final product. Why are these useful? It gives the game a direction and adds constraints to the product if used well. How to create these goals and visions is a tough and long process, it requires a great deal of research in what you like to do and in what you can do… So will they pay-off?

First of all, is there a difference between a vision and a goal? I think there is, and it can be found in the fact that a vision is much more general and can be interpreted in many, many ways. This is what sets the direction to your designs. The goal, on the other hand, is what narrows your vision, adds constraints to them. For example, if the vision of your next game would be ‘to create a multiplayer game with high dependency on each other’ it would be very broad. The concept could be used in a whole lot of of totally different games. To narrow it down, your goals could be ‘to create a story-intense game’, ‘to give the player interesting destructive choices’, ‘to let the player fully customize the characters’, etc.

Bear in mind that a game does not need a vision and a goal, but it does make it a lot easier for the team and the designers to have such for your game. Why, you ask? Let’s start with a direction for your game:

Imagine yourself working in a big team: everyone has his responsibilities for the parts that have to be done. Most of these parts require you to temporarily ‘narrow’ your vision, and a dangerous pitfall is forget what the product that you are working on has to achieve – and maybe you come up with things that do not fit that idea. A general vision or goal can bring you back to the level which tells you what you want to achieve. And this doesn’t just count for individuals, but for smaller parts of a team too. The different departments in a game studio, for example, are often specialized and focused on one aspect of the game, and what brings all these different focus points together is the direction and the vision of the complete game.

What this last thing means for a game studio is that everybody has his expectations of the final game, and this can be positive or negative for your final product. Positive if the vision of the game inspires the studio and is a little ambitious but achievable, negative if your vision is not challenging your studio in any way.

So having a direction for your game can help a lot, but how can constraints help you or your team to create better games?

A good example would be the indie games industry. Independent game studios have a sh*tload of constraints: time, money, resources, no business relations, marketing skills, you name it. But still every month, indie game developers manage to create games that reach the mainstream audience and sell thousands of them, some of them comparable to AAA titles. So how do they do it? How do they manage to create wonderful games with so much constraints?

I think the answer lies in the solutions of these problems: studios must come up with creative solutions to do ‘more with less’, to use everything they have got in the most optimal way. And that optimal way does not have to be the most straight forward way. Although constraints might sound like an inability at first, if you think again, it can also be used the other way around too: constraints can be used to help you focus on what is really, really, really important for your game. If you have no time and no money, but still want to make a great game, it has to be cheap and easy – and now that you know that you can use this inability to create a better game, you could even see it as an enormous challenge!

Once you realize that constraints can also help you instead of just blocking you, it’s like a new dimension opening to you. Now that you know where to focus on, you can see the bigger picture much easier and directly know what you can and can not do. If something doesn’t fully support your vision, leave it out! If something blurs the vision of your game, leave it out! If an adorable extra feature takes too much time for your programmers to make, leave – it – out!

The goals and vision of your game can simply be tools that you can use in your team. These tools give your team a direction and constraints. And if used well, these two small things might make the difference between being successful or not. So think about it: do you want to be successful?

It is this one magical experience that drives players to play games for days, months or even years.  It is the most proved and addicting aspects of games. What is this ‘team play’ and how is it used in games? What makes team play such a powerful game element?

Imagine yourself setting a goal that is far beyond your capabilities. You can either try to accomplish that goal and fail or… you could ask for others to help you. Every person that is going to help you reach your goal will extend the capabilities of you and your group of people we call a team. So to work as a team basically means to use the extended capabilities of every individual. Every individual must act on the behalf of the team or else the capabilities won’t add up to the people who do. If the full capability of the team is required to reach a goal, you need real team work, something that is not as easy as it may seem and something that needs a lot of preparation and organization. This part of team play is what we call team strategy or tactics.

In many recent video games, this last thing is where most games are based on. Think of an MMO like World of Warcraft where 25 individuals team up to defeat dungeons, or Left4Dead where 4 players all take a role in defending themselves and their teammates. Or think of almost any team sport – soccer, baseball… even tennis with 4 people is mostly based on strategical positioning and shooting.

Is there a difference between teamwork and team play? Is there a difference between working together and playing together? Which term you could use would depend on the context, on the goal of the team and whether that goal is brought to the team with a cooperative mind or setting. Both terms suggest interactivity between the team members. Team play would suggest that the team members have fun doing their part of the work that has been done, but why can’t team work be fun?

Anyway, we can conclude that the goal is what makes team play so powerful, impossible as an individual but possible as a team. The accomplishment of difficult tactics or strategies only add to the reward of achieving the impossible. Even if there are no explicit tactics, is can be a huge reward for the team members to accomplish implicit tactics.  But are there also other factors that strengthen that sense of being part of a team?

If you have ever been part of a (successful)  team, you would know that there is always this one team member that is better at what he does than everyone else in the team. I would like to call these people team heroes. These people inspire others to do their own task better, whether that task is the same or completely different. Beside respecting each person’s individual capabilities, strong team members also trust in each other in acting with their full capability.

So to wrap this up, a team is easily created by gathering some people together and giving them the same goal, but for a stronger sense of team play, a lot more is needed. Tactics make sure the process of achieving the goal is done organized, team heroes inspire team mates to do their work (better) and team members being dependent on one another will create trust in all the team members.

Achieving the impossible is possible. You just can’t do it by yourself.

In a previous post I talked briefly about how the experience and expectations of players influenced game designers and game developers, to create games for the people who were already familiar with other games and their habits. But there is another problem: what about the expectations of the designers themselves?

Designers have been playing games too. Disappearing bodies, health bars, WASD controls, all of these things are elements of games that designers often fall back too. And there are tons of them. Pick up any random shooter and you will find at least 20 of these cases that would not be believable in the ‘real world’. And let’s be honest; I can’t do it either.

But it is not just the designer himself who causes this. There are programmers who tell you what they are capable of (or everything they are not capable of), producers, investors and marketeers that ask you to come up with cheap solutions so that the job can be done faster and there are gamers who will always expect a certain level of familiarity. In only a few cases, designers have almost absolute freedom in what they design – too bad that in these cases, designers create what players want and that is, unfortunately, mostly what they expect.

So what is it for me? Is there a way to overcome these game habits and create something that is more believe able than any other recent video game? Let’s hope so…

When I started this post it was late, but I couldn’t finish the post because my eyes wouldn’t let me! Tuesday was rough, we started early and worked quite hard from the start. Again, Sherida couldn’t come because of her illness. A lot had to be done in one day and we agreed that this would mean working at night too…

Queen Mosquito

Because so many things happened the last two days and I can not remember exactly what and in which order all these things happened, but happily they did. The programmers slept 2 hours last night and spend the rest of the night coding  implementing, while the artist worked hard to make all the art for the background.

Playtesting

The spawn pools were successfully added to the game, giving us the possibility to start the level design. We also got a menu which was made and animated, sounds were added along with Background Music, an awesome cursor was added that added a lot to the feedback to the player whether he was pushing or pulling the flock, the code was cleaned up so that it would run smoother, at least designed 4 levels were added, a lot background art was added, the game was playtested for the last time and a presentation was made.

In-game style

After the presentations our game was played and we all agreed that we had to playtest even more, but that happens when you make a game in a week; you have to make choises on what you are going to implement and do within tha week, when the time is up, time’s up!

Ronimo playing our game

The day ended with a very inspiring and cool tour through W!games. As a team we promised each other to remake the game to a version that could be played without a WiiMote, a web-version.

Starting Screen Style

It has been an awesome week in which we all learned a lot – not just about skills but also about teamwork… About the fact that creativity DOES come outside in the sun and not behind TL-lights. And working hard, as a team, working for each other, that’s what is most valuable!

To try the game with one player (not how it is supposed to be though) you can go here. Use the mouse to aim, press A to confirm or PUSH your mosquito’s and S to PULL them.

Monday morning started with another walk through Utrecht. Decisions had to be made; where is our game going? What do we want to make? What would work best? 2 players? 4 players? Or back to a single player? Any more resources? And how can we do all this without lowering the drop below 30 fps? The warm weather combined with a soft breeze did us nothing else than good.

We decided to go for a multiplayer (2 vs 2, 1 vs 1 or 4 player deathmatch) manage-the-flock game in which there would be multiple ‘respawn pools’ that could be controlled in order to constantly receive reinforcement mosquitos. About 2 hours later, the programmers finished a battle-mechanic prototype in which rules of conflict were added between two groups of mosquitos. We playtested it…

… and came to the conclusion that further playtesting should conclude whether it is fun for 1 player to have 2 WiiMotes. In the battle-mechanic prototype the 2nd WiiMote did not add much and was, most of the times, only used when a player wanted to divide his group or pull back a lost group of mosquitos.

So, we created a to-do list and got to work… And we are still working! We already finished a bunch of artwork, animations, the cursor, some sounds including dieing flies and planting queen mosquitos and ofcourse there are loads and loads of code taht are coming through. Tomorrow is the last day and we’ll have to work hard… But it sure is going to be an awesome game!!

With a lot of candy and chips, we started the weekend with a ‘meeting’ talking about possible stories, enemies, elements, etc. the game could have. We had a prototype that the programmers built last night which we used to tweak the parameters of the flock and some parameters about the influence of the player.

After this tweaking, we decided to go for a single player experience in which we had to think of enemies which required different ways of attacking. We thought of 3 different enemies called Sockmouth, Trashpit and Chef Pepper which all required different strategies to ‘kill’ with your flock of mosquito’s. The artist started drawing, the programmers started programing, and the designers started thinking of the level design and ways to challenge the player even more.

About an hour later, we were playing the prototype with 2 players, each player holding two WiiMotes. We discussed about it and actually decided to go on with this concept and built another prototype for it. Here is how this session went:

A prototype was built today which we are going to test the next time we meet, monday. Then, we are going to talk about it and make a final plan about where this game is going. And after that, crunch time!

After we decided to name our team GRASP, named after the first characters of our names, we started this day with a flocking awesome prototype of a flocking group of bees. With the mouse, we were able to push or pull the flock or part of it, we could try different types of flocks and we could see how external influences would work, e.g. wind. The next step would be to find the right variables that made the flock and how the player would have influence on these.

So, Paul and Guido started with building the next prototype in which not only all the WiiMotes would work (4 of them worked in an earlier prototype!) but also in which you can change the variables in real time, while we are playing and testing it. The plan is that we are going to tweak and change the flock and think of fun concepts after that, elements that could make this game challenging and complete. We already have a lot of ideas of how we could use the core mechanic, but we are still open for everything

Meanwhile, the artist are creating moodboards and going through heaps of styles which they could implement in our game.

This day went really quick and we did not book much progress, tomorrow will be better, I hope!

Some images of today and yesterday I haven’t posted yet:

The fact that 3 out of 5 people did not sleep well last night and woke up too late to get on time might make you think that we had a rough morning. Well, we had that rough morning. We left day one with a lot of open doors and no decisions and it was clearly on everyones mind that we were kind of stuck when we ended. After a few attempts to come up with a concept that would have fun and meaningful core mechanics we decided to go outside and smell the fresh air. And that helped; within 5 minutes we had a great core mechanic and some good ideas of how we could use those mechanics to create a fun game.

When we got back inside, we immediately collected tons of marbles and some items that could represent possible enemies and started prototyping how it would work. Here’s a video of us trying to think of strategies and ways to create interesting enemies.

So, where is the game and concept really about? Shaping a flock, basically. We were inspired by an article about swarm theory and flocking, some images I’ll post next time.

The idea is that the player controls two WiiMotes and is able to push or pull a group of flocking mosquito’s by pointing one of the WiiMotes at or near the mosquito’s and pressing the push or pull button. By pushing and pulling the group you can create shapes that are effective against certain enemies, help you through obstacles or help you avoid danger. We are still in the proces of coming up with good idea’s to make perfect use of this mechanic, that already seems awesome!

We started with creating a digital prototype today and have the next playtest session planned for tomorrow. We are using Flash (AS3) along with WiiFlash Server that makes the connection possible between the WiiMote and Flash, but it’s a rather unstable connection – something that I already found out a while ago when I worked on an interactive installation at Konijn2000. Also, we are using this awesome tool called Dropbox as a subversion repository, and it’s much and much easier than that Tortoise SVN I had to use on previous projects!

In a second thought, it’s funny that before we started to make this concept tangible we all seemed to be on the same line about our ideas and thoughts. I think that is what makes this phase so hard and may disappoint so many of us; not being able to implement or merge your own ideas with the ideas of your fellow designers without completely ruining the feel and look they had in mind. And to comprimise is one of the hardest things to do. Can’t situations like this be avoided?

Tomorrow is going to be an awesome day because we get to play the concept! Looking forward to it!

To be continued!

EDIT: Some more last minute photo’s from notes we took:

Today started the DGG Summer GameDev organised by the Dutch Game Garden, in which 3 teams of approximately 5 students from multiple disciplines will make a game. Being part of the 2nd team, I will make a daily journal containing our development and process. My team consists of Sherida Halatoe (GDD @ HKU), Rik van Duijn (DVTG @ HKU), Paul Brinkkemper (UU), Guido Soetens (UU) and myself. We do not have a team name yet, but that will come soon, I promise!

Start of the Summer GameDev

One of the National Geographic Magazines

Today started with an opening talk of JP van Seventer, followed by a presentation by Jasper Koning, designer at Ronimo, about the process of making their first WiiWare title Swords & Soldiers. When the teams were announced, every team sat together to talk about the formal elements of the team, who would be team leader (Paul), lead artist (Sherida), lead code (Guido), lead design (Adriaan) and blogger (Adriaan). After that, the assignment was announced: search the National Geographic magazines provided for systems or organisms that could be a good base for your game. We got 2,5 hours to find three concepts and presented these to the other groups.

The three topics that inspired our group were about fighting flies and swarm intelligence, natural elements such as light, water, temperature, wind, etc. and the use of lightning, which could be used in a game as a light or as a path. We will make a decision tomorrow which of these topics will be the base of the game we are going to prototype and built the coming days. Who knows what this will result in!

Last but not least, we got a very long but interesting presentation from Floris Kooij from Guerrilla Games about concept creation in their design team. The two methods he gave us were very useful!

To be continued…

And now, for something completely different: Wordle. It’s not a game, it’s a word cloud generator. And awesome. Check out these clouds I made:

Hive Mind Design Doc Cloud

Cover Letter Cloud

Hippy Business Cloud

Awesome huh! Make some yourself at http://www.wordle.net/

What you hear is correct! I got an internship at W!games, a company at the heart of Amsterdam (awesome links huh?). So far, they have released 1 game (My Horse & Me), but they are up for more good! (and better!) Anyway, how did I eventually end up there?

It all started with the idea of going to Japan and the UK, but when I found out I would not be able to go there, I looked here, back home, for companies I could go. The first one I found was Ronimo, a small company in Utrecht that has recently published their first Wii game Swords & Soldiers. I came in contact with a designer there thanks to a former teacher which got me his email adres. After sending my cover letter and resume, I had a intake with two of Ronimo’s designers. The conversation did not go that well; I said a lot of things that were not appropriate and they did not see any potential in me. I did not now exactly where companies were looking for and how to sell myself, how to communicate my skills. So… The next day they declined me. Bummer… Next!

The second company I tried to apply for was Guerrilla Games, possibly one of the biggest dutch development studios. They worked on several big titles such as Killzone and Killzone 2 and are a pool of experience. I heard from a lot of classmates that they sent emails months ago without any response so I had to figure out a way to get in. I contacted a teacher who also happened to be a former Guerrilla employee and he gave me an email address from a senior designer there. I sent my cover letter and resume and I was invited for a chat with the guy. When I got at the building the company residents in, I had to go though all kinds of security measures before I could enter, it was almost a bunker! The chat with that designer went really good and he gave me an assignment, making a FC2 map in 3 days. You can find the result here. I turned the map in and waited 2 whole weeks for the response: the map was excellent and it showed some good thinking and design process. But 3 days later he still declined me by saying that “It’s a time pressure issue. With my increasing workload I won’t have the time to devote to you.” and nothing more than that. Dammit.

And that lead me to W!games. I forgot that I signed up months ago at W!games to be a playtester and it surprised me that I got an email from them asking me to come by. The testing was really fun and afterwards I asked the designer who was leading the test how they thought of internships. They were up for it and I had to send my covering letter and resume to him. Yes!!! They looked into it and by some miscommunication I got an email back from the lead artist that there was no spot for me in the designers team. Argh! The day after I went there for my 3rd playtest session and told this to the designers there, who were surprised because that’s not what they talked about in their team meeting. After a few days and an apology they invited me for a chat. The chat went really good and… I got accepted the week after. W!games, here I come! And hell yeah, I’m excited!

During this journey I learned a lot about myself, what I want to become, how I communicate my skills, how the game industry works and that networking is king. I can’t stop saying that last thing, it’s full of awesomeness.

The dutch Festival of Games this 2009 had quite some interesting keynotes. Here are the highlights of the most interesting keynotes and what I learned from these… and others!

NOTE: I haven’t been to all presentations because most of them run simultaneously, therefore I might have missed some interesting ones… Hmpf!

Evert Hoogendoorn – Exploring games as Performance
During this presentation, Evert told us about his vision of games: games are not only about fun, games are about aesthetics, about exploration, curiosity, social needs, etc. Players can even be your game, where the behavior of a player can be seen as the input. What this means is that theater performances can also be games, and what Evert shows us next are some examples of performances as games: an hotel where people book a room that has a roof with a mirror in which you can see other people, looking at you and staring at other people, with no idea of who is an actor, with people climbing over the walls going from room to room… Or another example where a few players go out to the streets and try to connect two objects with people, holding hands, where random people from the streets have to close the line in order to get those objects connected.

These examples show that performances can be a game. Evert ends by saying that analyzing human behavior can learn us how to create these aesthetics and make fantastic performances; as games!

Jeremy Bernstein – Procedural Rhetoric
Although the name of his presentation is rather unknown and confusing (it refers to games as persuasive coded models with a set of potential outcomes), the point he was making in his presentation was rather clear: mechanics can create emotions. He talked about Battlestar Galactica, the board game, which had mechanics that created strong emotions for him and the people he played with. With mechanics like lack of resources, not knowing who your ally or enemy is, being in the minority AND having to sacrifice human lives even though there are already so few of them, the game created feelings such as despair and paranoia. In Left4Dead, mechanics such as lack of ammo and lack of health and being able to give these resources to each other created a feeling of dependency. In Dead Space, a player needs to pull his weapon before he can shoot, and because Dead Space is a horror game and enemies can surprise you any second, you keep your gun constantly pulled and this results in a player feeling more tension than any other shooter. Other examples Jeremy named included mechanics that created feelings such as hope, pressure, fear, etc.

He ended his presentation by asking us, “Can we create mechanics that make us feel Love? Joy? Etc.” and we all knew his answer was ‘YES!’, but how, that remains the question…

Jonathan Samel Baskin – From Branded Games to Games as Brand
Jonathan began his presentation with his view of brands and advergames. Brands are broken: people don’t believe in the lies and stereotypes brands are trying to tell us and advergames aren’t going to help that because they tell us the same story with the same low persuasion. So why not brands as games? No manuals – games to learn how to use their products. No more static profiles – more interactivity between brand information and its users. A brand as a game easily has a story that makes the users think of the brand and let the brand make sense, e.g. a tie with a blue label costs more than a tie with a red label. Games can make people loyal, e.g. ‘collect Douwe Egberts points for rewards’. Gamers can make people learn about terms and rules that so far almost nobody is reading, e.g. games can let people understand differences in insurances, for example.

Jonathan ends by almost begging us to pick this up, because “Tomorrow’s brands will be games!”

Elan Lee – Playing with Reality
Elan starts by stating games are like a magnet: they can pull, push or charge people. When you consider these three things in your game design, you can create games that would appeal to almost anyone. The following movie explains what Elan means exactly with pull, push and charge.

The rest of his presentation is mainly about his successful games and how they eventually worked out. The only design tip he gave was that rewarding players randomly and in public is the best reward you can give your player. During the question round, Elan admitted that not all of his games and experiments worked, but for game designers it is all about not giving up. Charging people is mainly done by making a catching game in which people have the space to be creative but also giving you input on things that did not work in your game. You never know where your game ends.

Elan ends with showing us his favorite video on the entire Internet. This is a metaphor for how we game designers should never stop trying.

…and the rest

One thing I noticed at the Festival of Games 09 was the developers trend of finding and making new input devises to expand the gaming market. Small game companies such as Soepel, Monobanda, Monodomo and Fourcelabs showed new ways of interacting with their systems. Other keynotes such as Adrian Hon’s keynote about stories in games were highly biased and not very informative, Adrian saying that people don’t know what good stories are and mixing stories and interaction is hard (oh really?). He did have some good points of how to improve the stories in our games: not letting the technical barrier influence your story, not letting the players make the story (because it’s (almost) never going to be ‘the best’), getting the interface out of the way to let the player focus more, etc.

A more scientific keynote was about what causes eye strain. The conclusion was that you can reduce eye strain by using colors that appear a lot in nature, use less busy images (images with a high spacial frequency), avoid flickering, do not use high contrast and avoid repetitive patterns. What was also interesting was the research about text and readability, where the speaker showed us that some fonts read much faster than others because of the amount of vertical space they use, and that text with a colored filter is read 25% faster because of the contrast between the characters and the background. Game designers can use this information and apply it to their games to make the eyes less busy and let the experience of the game be more the way you want it.

A few keynotes were about the game industry, but they all concluded something like this: The game industry is changing and it’s audience is growing rapidly. The companies that are already big are going to get bigger and there are going to be even more smaller companies then ever before. If your company has a good business model and you have a small core team, your company is totally going to rock!

Japan also sent some people to the Netherlands, with a guy from the latest Naruto development team explaining why his game was so awesome and how well they though of everything and stuff… In Japanese. And 70% of their team are artists. And a very friendly guy from a university in Japan where they train their students to be production slaves. And yeah, ‘design’ is not what they study there, it’s just art or programming.

And then there was this guy from Jagex, saying something like ‘we’re just doing stuff and we’ll see how it all works out for us‘. And some guys from Little Chicken actually hacking some game during their presentation, screaming for better ways to protect our flash games.

And the project fair and career fair… Some universities still don’t know how to make good games… That IPhone app built in 15 weeks? (Whahahahahaha)

And I got free lunch every day. How awesome!

I had a fantastic time and it was definitely worth the investment! See you at FoG2010!

I’ve been so ignorant! I should fill the rest of this entry with prototypes, since all the ideas in my head aren’t fun!

prototype prototype prototype prototype prototype prototype prototype prototype prototype prototype prototype prototype prototype prototype prototype prototype prototype prototype prototype prototype prototype……

I will try to explain the prototype I made by going through the formal and dramatic elements that are defined in the book Game Design Workshop by Tracy Fullerton:

• Players: This game needs two players and does not have any special requirements.
• Objective: A player has to move the marbles to the two squares with the same color as your own on the farther side of the board.
• Procedures:
  • When the game starts, each player takes 3 cards from the bunch. The youngest player starts.
    

    Prototype Turn & Move

  • Each turn:
    • The player lays down one of his action cards.
    • The number on the card represents the number of actions the player can use this turn.
    • The player either moves his marble on another board piece in the direction of the arrow of the card he is standing on
    • OR
    • Rotates a card on the board with 90°.
    • Each of these procedures – move or rotate – cost 1 action.
    • When the player runs out of actions, he takes one action card from the bunch.
    • The turn goes to the other player.
  • When a player strikes the other player, the stroke marble goes back to the beginning.
  • When a player lays down a rotate-a-row card, he can use this card to turn all the cards clockwise or counter clockwise in a horizontal or vertical row.
• Rules:
  • A player is allowed to move a marble or rotate a cards in the same turn.
  • A player is allowed to move both marbles in the same turn.
  • A player can not rotate the card where he or she is standing on.
  • A player can rotate a card twice (180°) but it will still cost 2 actions.
  • A player can move on a card from all sides but can only move off at the side where the arrow is pointing at.
  • Board cards with a no-rotation icon can never be rotated.
  • When a marble is struck, the attacker chooses to which beginning it is going back.
  • The direction in which the player has to rotate all the cards with a rotate-a-row card depends on what the card says, CW or CCW.
  • Once a player is ‘home’ or at his begin spot he can not be struck.
  • A red marble can not stand on a blue card.
• Conflict: What causes conflict in this game is that both players have to move in opposite direction while they can only move in 1 direction from each card on the board. This results in players irritating each other and making sure the other player doesn’t reach his goal.
• Boundaries: The boundaries of the game lie withing the physical board, cards and marbles but interaction also take place between the two players.
• Outcome: One of the players wins and the other loses. There is no draw.

Dramatic elements:

• Challenge: What creates challenge in this game is the urge to win from your opponent.
• Play: The only sense of play that emerges from this game is the freedom of rotating any card on the board, including cards that are right in front of the opposing player. This is more social play than formal play.
• Premise/character/story: This game doesn’t really have any premise, character or story, unless a player imagines one himself.

Time from idea to ‘final’ prototype: 45 minutes.

So what did I learn? It’s better to have more control over what the player gets and can do and leave less to chance. This way, the player has enough choice and is able to plan and make strategies. I also learned that a lot of my decisions were made to make the game monkey proof, for people trying to explore the boundaries of the game and hunting for ways to win – fair or unfair.

And is it fun to play? Hell yeah!

I’ve just finished watching a 15 minute movie of Flower. With my mouth open and watery eyes. Even though I do not own a PS3 (and this is the first time I regret it so much) the movie was so beautiful that I could instantly imagine how I would feel like playing it. Even though I did not play it, flower is already the best game experience I have had so far. And all that because of that feeling.

I’ve come to a point where I am realizing what kind of designer I want to be, maybe I should say again. Flower was so strong, so beautiful, that it inspired me to become a game designer that really creates experiences, experiences that can only emerge from the strong feelings games can (apparently) create. And now I can take flower as the example of how that should work out.

So, feeling. How did flower create this feeling for me? And what feeling did it create?

Maybe a good start is to state the obvious: Flower is elegant in style, easy to control and a player has total freedom. The grass and flowers look alive and are animated in a certain dreamy way, not far from realistic. But if I think again, I felt like I was the wind, or actually the flower parts carried by the wind. I felt like I was actually flying myself, and it felt so good going through the grass, hearing all those pieces of grass hitting each other. It was so peacefully… I forgot everything around me for a moment, not even realising that my sister, who was sitting next to me, was laughing at me. I would call that perfect place as the world in flower heaven, if I wouldn’t know better.

The desire to be those flowers, fly through the grass, being taken by the quiet sound of nature, being free… Maybe I’ll try to figure out what makes me feel this way later, I’m so much more in the mood now to play the game first before saying anything else…

Everyone knows that there are two kind of players, hardcore and casual gamers, and that there is a clear difference between these groups… Or not? What is the difference between these groups and what separates them? And more importantly, what does this ‘gap’ do with your design process?

Although I do not know the true history of this characterization, I believe the roots of this ‘problem’ come from old video games. These old games were designed so that the computer would be able to run it, the focus was completely off the people who would play the game. These games had difficult interfaces with many options and very abstract visuals. A ‘normal’ person wouldn’t pick one of these up for a 10 minute play session, if you wanted to play a game, you had a whole lot of research to do before you could actually play. This created a technical threshold which kept a lot of players away from playing video games.

I believe the gap between casual and hardcore gamers is a usability problem and has to do with two things. The first problem that occurs is dedication; is the player dedicated enough to  go through all the different assets of your game? This is not question you can particularly design your game around, but is still the biggest reason for many, many designers to create very simple games with just a few assets any person would understand in a matter of minutes. The second problem is knowledge and experience: a ‘hardcore’ gamer simply knows much more systems, mechanics and rules that apply to games than a ‘casual’ player. What follows is that designers tend to make games for the people who are already familiar with the systems they design, leaving out the people who are not so familiar with them and not making it easy for them to pick it up and play.

With the Nintendo Wii and DS, the technical threshold is much, much lower than it used to. For this generation of games, we will have to work hard to close the gap between casual and hardcore gamers by creating games that do not require a lot of dedication and even less knowledge and experience with games. Maybe all game designers should become usability experts too?

Holiday is almost over and I have had a great one! With Queensday in the middle, I had an awesome time with my girlfriend and some friends of her, relaxing and thinking of how busy I would be after this wonderful time.

First of all, just before my holiday, I had a chat with one of the senior game designers at Guerrilla Games (old website though) in Amsterdam. It was about whether I could work at their company as an assistant game designer as part of my internship at the beginning of next year. The conversation was interestingly fast and the designer eventually gave me an assignment, which was making a Far Cry 2 map in 5 days (or 3 schooldays). The map editor of FC2 is very, very simple… It’s so simple that it actually restricts your design in terms of custom objects or houses, but I saw that as another challenge. Because the editor was so simple, I could (almost) completely focus on the design, rather than figuring out how the tool worked.

I literally canceled everything I planned the days following. I worked quite hard, almost non stop, from 9 to 9, for 3 whole days. I played the game for many hours, watched tutorials, tips and tricks, tested a lot of things in the editor, asked classmates for critique, got 2 other players to help me test my map and wrote a design process document during the whole process. You can find the final document here: Three Islands Design Process. I’m quite happy with the result and I already learned a lot from this experience.

Another thing worth mentionning is that I started reading Game Design Workshop by Tracy Fullerton. As I’m writing this, I have finished chapter one and believe that this book is going to inspire and motivate me a lot to do my own projects and make my game design better. I already have the feeling that what I’m learning at school is not enough and not complete. Books like these are perfect fillers. It’s totally going to work for me!

With this reading going on, I have decided not to go in to deep into definitions for a while, let them be what they are and leaving it up to the brilliant headed to figure them out. Maybe, when I’m done with this book, I am going to make some articles of my point of view, how I learned from the book and how I have adopted the playcentric approach. But that would be a perfect ending… We will see how it goes.

I’m starting to become more and more excited to make some friggin’ awesome games, dammit I love designing!

I recently made a prototype for a game and some of the playtesters mentioned that my prototype was more of a ‘toy’ rather than a game… But if they could ‘play’ my prototype, and everything you play is a game, what is a toy?

Let’s take a look at this fantastic tone matrix, made my André Michelle. With this very simple so called ‘toy’, people make the coolest tunes and medleys by visualizing shapes, text and lines in the 16×16 matrix. The tone matrix also uses the right mouse button with which you can copy and paste your matrix and rythm and share it with others. If you take a look at what people make and paste all over the nternet, you’ll find that half of the people really tries to make music and the other half is visualising shapes and text. It was not the toy who challenged these people to make shapes or text or great music, it were the people themselves.

A toy is a game without a challenge where the player chooses its own challenge.

When I was a child, my mom would sometimes say to me ‘get off that PC and go do something else’. Not that I was such a nerd, but most of the times I couldn’t think of what else I could do than playing games or making websites behind the PC. Now, years later, I realise the importance of boredom and how I can use it to be creative and think of ideas and solutions.

Being bored means that you have no current tasks which require all focus or nothing you have to or can do for a while. You are often bored while you are waiting for something or someone. Imagine yourself being on the toilet, in the train, in your bed, walking to the grocery… These are the times that you start thinking about… stuff.

It’s common knowledge that the most brilliant ideas come from these moments, moments in which you are not forced to think about certain things, when it’s alright to think about your girlfriend or your next holiday. The good thing for us game designers is that you can use these moments to relate whatever you are thinking to a problem, a feeling, an experience or a game you want to create. So it would actually become a brainstorm session!

I believe there are only two keys that would make those moment successful:

• Don’t be too hard on yourself. If you get stuck on the subject, think of something else not related to the subject… Who cares! You have all the time in the world!
• Always have some paper with you, or you’ll forget what you have thought of in an instant!

So, next time you are bored and don’t know what to do, don’t waist your time and just think of whatever you want to think.

To realize is one step closer to supremacy.

ps. check this link, there’s more about boredom on the web!

I often notice that some developers just don’t get the meaning of a tutorial. At the very beginning of some games, they give you a whole manual of text that you have to go through before you can start playing. This is something almost no gamer is interested in and anyone would try to go through the text as quick as possible, something that could totally ruin the game experience.

Have you ever played a board game where you read the whole manual before you started to play?

(Video) games are interactive, which means that the player can have input and constantly receives feedback. Same goes for the game itself, the game gets input and gives feedback (or simply output). If you take away the input of the player by presenting him with a bunch of text, nothing else then a manual, you basicly ignore the fact that games are interactive! Also, as a designer you should note that a player does not want to learn the rules as quickly as posible, but he or she wants to play the game as quickly as possible!

A tutorial is all about learning. You want your player to know how to play your game before he or she starts to play. You want your player to master your game when he is playing it. As a game designer, you can design how your player learns to play your game. When presenting your player with different elements of your game while he is playing it, you have a tutorial.

So, INSERT * INTO _game WHERE _tutorial = ‘interactive’. I hate databases.

No humor, no movies, no sports, no fantasy, no games, …

I can see the importance of games in this world. It’s much bigger than we realise… This is probably why the ‘gamer-generation’ is growing so rapidly, playing is something we have been doing for generations and is something we are now evolving in. Feel the responsibility!

Action, First Person Shooter, Action Adventure, Adventure, Construction, Management, RPG, MMO, Strategy, Simulation, Music, Party, Puzzle, Sports, Board, Card, Adult, Singleplayer, Multiplayer, Fighting, Platform, Racing, RTS, Turn Based Strategy, Third Person Shooter, Arcade, Adver, Text Based, Casual, Art, Chrisian, Educational, Health, Side-scrolling, Audio, Console, Mobile, Online, Handheld, Violent, Web based, Flash and Serious games. I believe that’s all?

You come out of a brainstorm session with this really cool and awesome idea. Everyone is excited about it and people start drawing on the whiteboard about how things will and should go. ‘Wow, this has never done before!’ Then, some guy comes up to you and says: ‘So basicly, this is a side-scrolling turn-based adventure?’ ‘Ehhh… Yeah.’ Sounds familiar?

When you think of it, placing you game into a genre says so much about your game that it’s almost like a game is a combination of elements, being already done in other games. As shown in the previous example, this demotivates a lot. There have been so many games in the past that defined these genres, genres that could all be recognized by certain elements or specifications… When you are trying to make something new and innovative, people tend to place your game in a corner – too fast.

As for the industry, categorizing games is essential to sell: games don’t sell when you promote them as ‘the new and innovative best game!’ but sell a lot, and I mean A LOT better when you promote them as ‘the next-gen first person shooter.’ For game designers, categorising games can too easily lead to not-innovative games because most elements and mechanics have been predefined.

I would like to ask any self-respecting Game Designer to not think in terms of genres and NOT confronting fellow designers with it. Just, stop!

We have all had times in which we were too busy to play games that took longer than 2 hours. Being in such period right now, I’ve found the perfect alternative: flash games. Of course, we all know of it’s existence and we have all played one before. But playing a lot of them AND have great fun, maybe as much fun as you would have in a 40-hour game, is something you would only be able to do at Kongregate.

http://www.kongregate.com/, at first meant as a portal to a flash-based card game called Kongre, has grown to be one of the biggest Flash portals in the world. How come? Why Kongregate and not any other flash portal?

First of all, Kongregate has wisely decided to make uploading attractive to flash developers. By giving players the opportunity to donate ‘kreds’, the developers could get easy money off people who loved playing their game. Although this option is not used so much on Kongregate, it’s the first thing developers would notice and find attractive. Another great thing Kongregate offers flash developers is ad revenue. By default, all developers receive 25% of the ad revenue, which can add up to 50%,  generated from their games. The last thing Kongregate does for flash developers is award prizes to the top rated games every month, which can receive up to $1500.

With a perfect environment for flash developers and many games in the database, Kongregate has also managed to keep people playing all those games. The brilliant thing about Kongregate is that it made a game of playing games!

Every player on Kongregate starts at level 1. By playing and rating games and inviting friends to Kongregate you get points. The more points you have, the higher your level is. Almost every game with the Kongregate API integrated has at least 2 different achievements of different difficulty: an easy badge for 5 points, a medium for 15, a hard for 30 and an impossible badge (which in my experience is really impossible) for 60 points.

But it doesn’t stop with the points system. Kongregate chooses weekly and monthly featured games with special achievements which players can achieve to get a card for the game Kongre or win prizes such as an Xbox or a DVD player. Although most people don’t play the weekly featured games for the cards, the achievements are a good way to play divers and high quality games. For the monthly achievements, players will have to work hard to get a chance to win the prize, but still after you have won the achievement, the winner is picked at random for everyone who have won it.

Having not even spoken of all the innovative and potentional games, the ad revenue and kreds for the developers, the point system, the achievements, the features and the prizes, make Kongregate a very stable community that can not do anything else but grow. It is only a matter of time before they are the biggest flash community on the web.

You can find me on Kongregate here!

At the beginning of this school year I was determined to go to Japan to work as a Game Designer as part of my internship. This seemed very reasonable for me as it would the biggest experience in my life.  I quickly found out that going to Japan was going to be something I wouldn’t be good enough for: You need an outstanding portfolio, a level 2 japanese language diploma and huge motivation, and I needed to get all this in no more than 6 months. This was not possible for me since I had other things on my mind than just Japan, leave the fact that I still had to go to school every day!

When that idea faded, I still wanted to go to a foreign counrty. At that time I was reading alot in the Edge, an independent gaming magazine in the UK, and people who have also read the Edge will have noticed that it’s constantly promoting the UK game industry. My interest in the UK’s game industry grew and in January I decided to select a few companies I would love to get the chance to work.

I quickly fell in love with one of them: Media Molecule, the maker of LittleBigPlanet. I made my portfolio ( http://www.adriaandejongh.nl/ ) with a good friend of mine and added works to it that were specifically created for Media Molecule. I wrote a covering letter and my CV and sent the email… Believe it or not, but they responded in 31 minutes. Not good. I got a standard email back saying they didn’t have a spot for me, so I decided to send them another email highlighting the facts they don’t have to pay me, I don’t need much assistance and that my course at the Utrecht School of the Arts is of University degree. About 3 days later I got a personal email back explaining that they did not have the time and resources to hire me as a trainee.

Now, let me compare the Dutch game industry and the game industry in the UK. In the Netherlands, most small and medium game companies always take internships, they are a big part of the industry in the Netherlands. In the UK, most game companies, wether they are small, medium or large, don’t take internships. I wonder why that is. The current recession, the financial global crisis? Or is it the aiming for higher quality? I don’t know.

After Media Molecule declined me, my search went on and I sent at least 9 more covering letters to different game companies such as Frontier Developments, Lionhead Studios and Splash Damage. All of them weren’t as fast as Media Molecule, it took at least a week before I even got 1 message back. Now, 5 weeks later, I still haven’t had any response from 4 of them. It’s a shame how most of UK’s game companies deal with students and the outside world. They can take they example out of Media Molecule… 31 minutes, that’s a world record!

Now, It’s probably not going to be the UK. The game industry in the UK isn’t doing so good. As I am writing this, I have found 3 Dutch game companies where I could possibly go. I contacted one last night and got a response early this morning. Yeah, I still have to get used to the difference… Lets see how this goes. Crossing fingers!

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