Here at the Games Den, we occasionally mention the Game Development Certificate. Considering you’re reading this newsletter, you’re probably interested in learning more about game development. Yet, it’s hard to know where to start. This series is here to answer your questions as I embark on my journey through the class where it all begins, CMPUT250.
I’ll use my group as an example. My group has four programmers, an artist, a writer, and an audio person. While groups typically only have six people, mine has an extra. We are all very interested in game development. Some of us have previous experience in Unity or other engines. We often understand our work in very different ways, with some coming from more creative or technical backgrounds. This makes thorough communication important. We all find some common ground in our love of playing games. In that regard, this class reminds me a lot of the Games Den. Often we have to pull ourselves back on topic during meetings or after class. Most of our members met during the pizza social. My group also has the Games Den’s own Jacob McCormick, along with another member I met in the class Discord.
Most creators get very direct control over how people experience their media. The words an author writes is what you experience. Games aren’t like other media; it is very hard for game designers to predict how their games will be experienced. Designers create rules that govern what you can do, then player chooses what they actually do, and then their experience of those chooses is uncertain. These three steps are called mechanics, gameplay, and experience. Mechanics are everything you put into a game, the rules, dialog, art, and sound. Gameplay is what players choose to do once the game is in front of them. Experience is what players actually feel during gameplay. These three concepts often go by alternative names: mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics. I choose not to use these terms because they are confusing, but they are common is discussion of game design.
Since the experience of games is so indirect, as designers we need some way to see what actual players do and feel. Playtests give us insight into our player’s experience. By watching actual players play, we can see what gameplay arises, what choices they make. As developers, we hold all sorts of assumptions about how our games should be played. Even the most skilled developers need playtests to see how real players will use their mechanics to create gameplay. The most important part of this is not passing on any of our assumptions to playtesters. Ideally playertesters shouldn’t know anything about what they are about to play. This lack of knowlage lets the game speak for itself. Once a playtester has played our game, we know more about the gameplay. Next, we need to ask them about their experience. For example, a playtester might say, “The enemies are impossible to shoot. They need bigger hitboxes.” It’s important to know what part’s of feedback are important, and what is noise. The playtester’s design suggestion doesn’t matter; it’s your game to design. What does matter is how they feel. They feel frustrated by the enemies. Let’s say we are designing a challanging game, but we still want to avoid frustration. You might instead add a tutorial that shows you how to sneak up closer to enemies before shooting them. This keeps the game difficult without being frustrating.
Since playtesting is so important, we want to get to it as soon as possible. This will save us from working on ideas that won’t work. So we create simpler, rougher versions of a game, prototypes, that we can playtest first. A paper prototype is the extreme of this. Paper prototypes test a game before you’ve even written a line of code. By building a game on paper, controlling everything by hand, you can make a prototype in minutes. My group wanted to know if the puzzles in our game would be interesting, so we built a paper prototype. Then, as a class, we went around playing other groups’ prototypes, and vice versa. Below is a video of my group’s paper prototype.
In the next part, we will talk about playtesting and prototypes. If you have any more questions, send me a message on Discord at averagestardust.