A huge part of becoming a better game designer, is to make more games. In keeping with this philosophy, as part of Jesse Schell's Game Design class at the CMU ETC in this Spring 2018 semester, we were assigned to design and develop a game in five weeks. The goal of this assignment was to design, develop, and playtest a game of the style and type of our choosing. It could be a board game, card game, athletic game, word game, computer game, or any other kind of game you can imagine. It can be based on a theme, or be completely abstract.

Initial Brainstorming:

I had been collecting mini game ideas for a while and once we got this assignment, I felt it was the perfect opportunity to try at least one of them out. Some of the ideas that I had were:

1. A space exploration game where you are lost on a planet and need to find your way back to base camp to communicate home. I imagined the artwork on this to be like the game Astroneer and could not find anyone to work along with so I dropped the idea as I was going to be working alone and I do not know how to make art.
2. An asymmetrical physical game. It was a prison simulator, where there are 2 teams, a team of guards and a team of prisoners. The teams are standing at opposite ends of a room. The team of prisoners has some contraband; chewing gum that they must all consume without getting caught by the team of guards. They must keep it hidden from the guards at all times. The prisoners can move around freely in their half of the room. If the guards suspect that any of the prisoners has the contraband at that instant, they can shoot them with a nerf gun. If the guards guessed right, they win else the prisoners win. I felt this game would take too long to playtest and I really wanted to make a computer game.
3. A FPS Battle Royale, where you are battling online to be the last person standing, with a twist that if you keep moving, that increases your shot power, but if you stay still that would make you invisible to your opponents but your shot power would decrease.
4. A four person competitive smashing game, where you are just wrecking the world and competing to see who did a better job.

I chose to start working on the FPS idea as I had been playing a lot of PUBG and wanted to do something similar.

Importance of Playtesting:

Last semester, we were given the Marshmallow challenge, in which in 18 minutes, each group can use 20 sticks of spaghetti, one yard of tape, and one yard of string, and one marshmallow to build the tallest structure with the marshmallow on the top. As we were building our structure, we overestimated its stability and overall ability to be able to hold the marshmallow at the top without toppling over. We thought that since the marshmallow is so light, it should be no problem, as long as we can create a tall structure that can hold its own weight. But, as the clock ran down and we placed the marshmallow atop our structure, it came crumbling down along with all our hopes and dreams. The lesson we learned from this exercise was to test early and often that the thing we are building is fulfilling its purpose.

This principle of testing early and often applies directly to games as we are building a product for someone else and if they don't like it, it is better to find that out early before pouring in hundreds of hours of work into it.

After my initial brainstorming, I was very excited to work on the FPS Battle Royale with a twist and had a quick prototype with the main mechanic, a simple level and some crude networking figured out. When I playtested this level with a peer and received feedback that the game was extremely hard to play. I also received feedback on how I could go about improving the game for the next iteration. At this point, I was finding it hard to find any fun in this game and I also realized that it was not going to be easy to make a battle royale game with hundreds of moving pieces, especially as a single person team in the short time we had and took the executive decision to pivot and start working on the idea of the office smashing game.

I kept the premise of the game very simple and the story is that, you have just been fired from your job, but you feel it is unfair and decide to take revenge by destroying the office as you leave. I decided to keep the art style simple and chose to purchase a low poly asset pack. I imported that asset pack into Maya and converted the models into shatter meshes, to allow the objects to explode into smaller pieces in the game.

Over the course of the rest of assignment, I was able to playtest this new game several times with my peers to make sure the core mechanic of the game felt fun and enjoyable. I was able to incrementally add features like audio and sound effects, simple animations and interactions to the game based on their feedback. I also had to iteratively work on improving the level layout and the character controls to allow for different types of players to be able to enjoy the game. I also had to consider optimization, as even though I was using low poly meshes, because I was shattering them into multiple pieces, the rendering engine was having to work overtime to be able to draw them. I also added a fun little damages calculator to the game, to allow players to gauge what level of damage they were doing.

At the end of the assignment, we also had to submit a marketing sheet where we advertised the game, its various features and what price we would sell the game for given its current state.

Final Thoughts:

I was able to learn a lot from this assignment and have summarized my thoughts as folows:

1. This assignment really reinforced the 4F’s for me. Failing fast and following the fun. I was able to say at the workshop that the game was not leading anywhere fun and decided to change it up. I found the toy of breaking things and decided to build a game around it.
2. I also understood the importance of playtesting to find what features worked and what don’t. I also found that optimizing the game to run smoothly is very important and this game required me to get very creative about how I could save processing power.
3. This game also taught me the basics of level design and really thinking about how players would move through the level and interact with different objects and the environment itself. I also implemented a nice pacing feature where when the guests enter the elevator to go to the next floor the music changes to a more calm elevator style music to provide a moment of respite from the heavier rock music in the rest of the game.
4. I also learned that how good sound design can really elevate a game and bad sound design can make a good game play really poorly.
5. I learnt that networking in Unity is not easy and should not be underestimated.
6. I will continue working on this game over the summer and try to make it better. I will try to implement some of the suggestions that I got and the original idea that I had.
   1. I would like it to be 4 player split screen multiplayer
   2. I would like to add the boss character chasing you out of the building as you break stuff. This would be like the ghosts in Pacman.
   3. I would like to improve the coin shower particle effect that I created.
   4. I would try to implement controller support and make the control scheme a little easier for non gamers.
7. Something else that I learnt was that it takes a lot of time and effort to optimize a game for the particular platform.
8. For coming up with the price for the game, I compared it with similar games. I felt that $4.99 was a fair price for the game, given that I had purchased the assets from the asset store. I also feel the price is fair as I plan to keep working on the game and improving it.