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Annotated Research:
Click to see larger images
Sources: Platform Game Design - Dev.Mag
Articles: 11 Tips for making fun platformers
How to design levels for a platformer
The benefits of a detailed GDD are clarity for all involved, keeping the dreams of what could be to an achievable end product, having strict deadlines makes it easier to translate into a schedule.
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"A GDD Helps in Other Areas, Too
Since a GDD is full of descriptions, it is an ideal resource for all PR and marketing fronts, with concepts that convey the game's aesthetic and appeal already written up and ready to copy and paste." (Source: Envatotuts - How (and Why) to Write a Great Game Design Document by Alex Sayenko 24/4/15)
The annotated images above helped me to write the GDD, thinking about the different elements I wanted to include. It gave me a better understanding of what needs to be considered when creating a game.
There were several things that I hadn't included but that made me think about the intended audience, this made me alter the mechanics a little in the interest of making the character easier to control. I want my audience to have fun playing this game rather than it to be a challenge. Exploring the level and finding the collectables is going to be the main goal.
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Other sources of great information on the topic of play testing and finding your audience:
Proposed Timeline:
Click image to enlarge
Pre-Production
Planning
Game Design Document also abbreviated as a GDD is an evolving document to express the plans, ideas, mechanics and content of the game to the development team. This helps to create the schedules and communicate the vision of the producers, the GDD is a collaboration of the whole design team allowing everyone to question and explain each section of the process.
"It removes the awkwardness of programmers, designers and artists coming to the producers and designers and asking what they should be doing." - (Source: Gamasutra - The Anatomy of a Design Document by Tim Ryan)
Game Design Document - Version 1.0
R&D
The section below is a collection of primary and secondary research data, this illustrates the journey I've taken to learn what it takes to run a small game project.
I kept a blog to track my learning progress, all the blogs are to the right of the page from newest at the top.
In this post (left) I mention Neil Blevins, he has written many educational articles that I've used throughout my degree.
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I started this project with Neil's Art Process Overview article where he explains the 22 stages he commonly uses when creating a piece of work.
Source: NeilBlevins.com
Article: Art Process Overview - Nov 11th 2013
Above are screenshots of forum questions about what questions to ask and how to get the information you would like to know from your players.
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The aim was to see what information I should be looking for, this lead to mainly detail questions and questionnaires. Translating this into questions relevant for my demographic was proving a challenge, because I'd been in the mindset of posting out a questionnaire online and collecting the data for analysis. Until I came across;
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An outline for how to conduct a play testing session
and create reports on the session.
Source: Future Learn Game Design and Development with Abertay
University by Brian Schrank Chair of Game Design at DePaul
University in Chicago -
Rum Runners play testing questionnaire by Game
Programming Lab 2010 - Thomas Siegrist (ts) David
Gerhard (dg) Philipp Keller (ph) Jonas Hauenstein
(jh)
Source: ETH Zurich -
Designscape – A Suggested Game Design Prototyping
Process Tool by Jon Manker
Source: Elundamos - Journal for Computer Game Culture -
The Game Begins with an Idea - Chapter six of
'The Art of Game Design' by Jesse Schell
Source: (ISBN: 978-0-12-369496-6)
Below are four slides which take you to the relevant section of concept material for the game. Each section has information about the process and intentions for the particular piece of work.
My initial aim was to gather reference material to support my idea and create moodboards.
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This will help to develop my ideas into concept art that will drive the development of the art style I want to achieve throughout this project.
Play Testing
Experts in play testing:
Mia Consalvo
Research Chair in Game Studies and Design
University of Montral
Author
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Finding your audience: click images for fullscreen
Source: Motion Twin.com An indie games company with over 13 years experience
Article: Play testing Your Indie Game; Do's and Don'ts
During the 2017 GDC (Game Developers Conference) Mia Consalvo gave a talk on the topic of Ethical Player Testing.
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Throughout the talk I made notes taking careful interest on the sections of Procedures/Guidelines and Children
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Left a brief history of Mia's background in the games industry.
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Below are my notes and conclusion on Mia's talk.
Source:SlideShare - Mia Consalvo
Gareth Griffiths
User Experience Designer/User-Testing Lead
Activision - Skylander
Source:LinkedIn - Gareth Griffiths
During the 2014 GDC (Game Developers Conference) Gareth Griffiths gave a talk on the topic of Skylanders and Playtesting with children.
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Left a brief history of Gareth's time at Activision.
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Below are my notes and conclusion on Gareth's talk.
Addition interesting perspective taken from 'Designing Interactive Play for Sick Children in Hospital' written by Ruth Sancho Huerga.
Left: A screenshot of my Zotero; Minor Project folder.
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I have a tendency to do excessive research most of which doesn't get to reach the final cut but all provides a valuable source of knowledge.
My aim to start, find out what my demographic liked about popular games that this game was going to take reference from. I chose to test 3 games for 30 minutes with a small group of 4 children; two boys age 7 and two girls age 10.
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The games were:
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Sonic 4
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The Cave
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Max curse of the brotherhood
Unfortunately I wasn't able to get access to Crash Bandicoot on the Xbox One
Taking what I'd learnt from my research material above I chose to document my observations and ask the following questions after each game session.
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Did you enjoy the game?​
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Why​?
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What did you like most about the game?
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Why​
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What didn't you like about the game?
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Why​
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How was it to control the character?​
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Easy​
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Hard
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Would you like to play this game again?
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Why​
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Above - Questions I asked the candidates about their gaming preferences and experience.
Below - The data from the player testing, including my observation notes.
(Click image for fullscreen)
Following collecting the data I wrote my conclusion regarding what was learnt from the testing.
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Click the PDF for the report
Planning & Tracking
Shotgun - Planning & Tracking
I'd chose to trial Shotgun for my Industry Research module and use it to manage 'Escape Camp Comfort'
Here is my article on how Shotgun works.
At first, it was like most 3D related software, daunting with the number of possibilities. With that said I was approaching this from both Project Manager and Artist point of view.
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The final image shows how the platform can be customised to suit the needs of any user, also the artist would only see what is relevant for them. Shotgun administrators and managers have full customisation over what the platform looks like and could make it appealing for animators, concept artist, modellers, etc.
Here is a post (Right) detailing how I collect an log my research using Zotero, also mentioned is The Results Machine, Shotgun and a few other tools I find useful.
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A related post that is featured at the end titled: 'Organised Foundations' explains my experience with project planning and tracking with other software, how I plan to do things differently and the feedback that lead to changing from animation to game with this project. (Link below)
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Organised Foundations
The Results Machine - Planning and Tracking platform.
Exert from an end of month report and detailed look at a specific task sheet.
Sept-October 2017 (PC)
Sept-October 2017 (SP3)
Oct-November 2017
December 2017
I started using The Results Machine on both my PC and Surface Pro but there isn't a function to sync between the two so it was far less confusing to keep all on one system.
Interview Nick & Anna Makin from Makin Games who I met at EGX 2017
Click the PDF for the full interview.
Interview
EGX
During EGX 2017 I attended a few of the talks held, first was on the Rezzed stage where spokes people from Steam, Xbox Marketplace and PlayStation Store discussed how indie developers should approach publishing their games on the three platforms.
The images (right) are the notes I took.
