Mageball Post 2

Date: Friday 18

So the main story has been fleshed out and approved by my teammates. The two teams and now tribes who were once ready to go to war with each other due to an incident, but a wise mage named Thaddus managed to convince the two to realize their error and showed them how similar they were using Mageball as the tool to do so. The game takes place after that day, ten years, and now it's a world wide sport that's loved by all. The next part of the narrative is to continuing to flesh out tribes while working with the art team to plan out the art assets that we can use to help tell the story.

Mageball Post 1

Date: January 11, 2013

So I've met my new teammates for Senior Game Mageball. On this team I am the narrative designer and I've been given free reign on this project mostly. The team doesn't have a lot for me to continue by since their game barley had a narrative when it started and now it's up to me to work with them in creating one. I'm already in the process of creating the world and the culture of the two teams. More to be developed in the future

Champlain Blog post 13

While I wasn’t able to attend the workshop on Wednesday due to my job, I was able to read the two readings on the wiki and this is my response to them.

!Q 1. How can Henry Jenkins's idea of "narrative architecture" apply to game design even in games that lack a strong, conventional narrative plot line?

Jenkins talks about how narrative can be told not just through dialogue or narrative or some grand big story, but through gameplay and art itself. This is something I’ve always believed in personally. All parts of the game tell a story in more than one way. Take for example the game Bioshock. The entire world you travel in is the ruined underground utopia that carried philosophical beliefs of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism. You get the feeling that this wonderful, grand city was once something amazing, but now it’s a ruined waste land with insane druggies trying to kill you. The large scale buildings, the advance technology, the big streets and advertisements for wonderful powers and abilities, all speak of the underwater city’s rise and downfall.

Another example would be Fallout, where you have a desolated wasteland that’s been ruined by war. There are radioactive areas, a tower that broadcasts news and information, towns with various people and their own quests. You don’t even need to follow the main story in the game and spend hours exploring the level. Each new area gives new insight to the world around you and the people you interact with will give you a sense of their own backstory and how the towns they live in are like.

Besides art and level design, gameplay is another key element that can be used to tell narrative. Take the game Journey, where your goal is to get to the top of the mountain and you have to rely on help to do so. However, you can’t speak and can only communicate through sound. The single goal of the game is one big tale of how you and another face impossible odds to reach the top of a mountain. That itself is a tale and how you get to the top is the process of how the story unfolds.

Designers can use anything from level design to music to help relay the game’s world, lore, characters, and more. Narrative is not limited to just one means of telling, but in all forms.

Q2 : How might I position either my capstone game concept or one of the concepts to be produced in the spring as part of a larger transmedia enterprise?

Our game I can see being part of a transmedia enterprise, but it might be considered a bit controversial in some aspects. Please keep in mind that as I write this that this is an idea and nothing more and that the issue being brought up is serious and should not be joked upon. I am not an expert in psychology nor the understanding of kidnapping and the damages it can bring up. Again, this is just an idea.

After 9/11, many people went to various therapies that had them watching the towers fall down or just hear the sounds of planes in order to help overcome their fears of what happened that day. It’s been proven to work and similar tests are done, like watching fire for those scared of fire or hearing gunshot for those who have been near shootouts. My idea is something similar

What our game, Pale, could do is be a psychological test to help people who have been kidnapped or stalked by strangers, and are attempting to face their fears. Being surrounded in a lone place with only one way out while trying to avoid possible danger is something that can help people open up to what happen and face the reality of that feeling. Granted, there doesn’t need to be a person in the game chasing after them, it could just be sound effects to give the illusion of the presence. The way the player controls their character in the game could reflect the player/patient’s emotional and physical state of being. Psychologists can use to see how they are reacting, and help them understand their patients more.

The game could be changed by locations, objects, sounds, and more based on each patient’s memories of how the location of where they were kidnapped. In return, they could be placed in other areas to see if it’s the location that they fear more, or the thought of being chased.

Games have been used for psychological treatments before and in the purpose of what Pale gives is the sense of you, the player, in an unknown and possibly dangerous location that you must escape from. It’s a primal fear we all have, but at the same time it can be used to face this fear and discover how to overcome with or come to terms with a scary situation.

Champlain blog post 12

Well, it's time to get transferred to a new team soon. There are a couple I want to work with such as Eeb and Flo, Magnosphere, and maybe Mageball. I just hope I did enough advertising of myself to get noticed by the team. All of the teams have at least one member that knows me well so my odds are increased a bit.

The only main thing I have worry about now is the final core paper I have to do. it's not due for another two weeks or so and I'm going to start on it tonight and work my way towards the finish. It's mainly me talking about how the game I worked on came to be and what are my final thoughts on it. Why did not pass? What could we have done differently? What worked and what didn't. Things like that.

I'll answer some of those questions below:

1. The genesis of the idea for the game: To create a classic horror game that was more geared towards scaring the players with atmosphere and sounds rather then violence and blood.

2. What your game’s genesis taught you about how game concepts originate: That it takes more then just one idea to fuel a concept. There are more steps and factors that have to be thought out before it can even begin.

3. How your game would be received by your target audience: When we tested the game, a lot of people were pleased by how it was more focused on scaring the player and the way we made it caused survival horror fans to compare it to other such games such as Slender.

4. What your game’s arguable appeal suggests about the values at the core of
successful games: That is the little things that need to play out with the overall look that make it stand out from other games.

5. What your work in developing your game’s mechanics and systems has taught
you about this important facet of game development: Simplicity is something that works wonders because it can do so much. We realized that complex mechanics were hindering us so we went with something geared towards simple ideas and concepts. It worked.

6. What the arc of your game’s development has taught you about the nature of
conceptual development and the challenges of collaborative work: That the scope has to start of small in the very beginning. Our biggest weakness is that we started this project thinking too big and it caused us to have to lower our scope late in the game. Designers have to plan out their games as small as possible and then make it grow over time.

There will be more in my finished work, but for now this is just a taste of it.

Champlain College Capstone Project Blog Entry 11

I was going to do a post over the break, but it slipped my mind while I was enjoying the vacation. I'll post another one this Friday to even things out. Anyway, my team's game was cut and we're officially out of the race for greenlight. We did work on it more during the break to see if we can get one last shot, but Vinny told me that Bemis already shot that down.

I feel that overall, we did good as a team despite some mess ups and a few communication issues. We all knew what we wanted and we had an idea what direction we wanted to take it. But the problem, I believe, is that it required too much execution for the short time needed for it to be done and we started our narrow scope at a very late time.

There were bugs, some stuff we had to cut, and overall additional gameplay that we tried to add, but didn't make in time. I heard from some of the others that while we did improve the game more and more each time, it felt still incomplete and that maybe we choose to high a genre to apply.

I don't regret working on this project, I've learned a lot from it and from my team as well. I just hope that next semester I'm put in a team that will use my abilities to the fullest.

Champlain College Capstone Project Blog Entry 10

Well, tomorrow is the day we get our answer if were going to be in the presentation or not. We're going to challenge for stage four and I feel we might pass it, but thankfully we're in stage 3 so if Bemis and Eric think were good enough we should be fine. Our testers love our game and it's given us confidence that things are have been getting better so we should be okay. There are a few things that we are still glitching on, but they are easy fixes we can fix.

I just hope tomorrow will work out and everything will be great.

Champlain College Capstone Project Blog Entry 9

Well, I'm going to keep this short because I'm busy with a lot of other things, including this project, but here it goes. We've managed to come up with what changes we want our vertical slice to be and we've changed the level a lot for a better. We just need to finalize some stuff, test it, and then challenge this week.

We're then going to challenge for stage 4 the follow week as most of the requirements for that week are already being worked on as I type this. With luck, we'll be ready for the presentation soon.