Design
“All games are educational…Good games are hard to design. But designing a good game around specific subject matter is really difficult.”
– Will Wright
During the Design stage you will need to....
- Develop a range of Game Ideas that attempt to meet the design specifications / design brief
- Develop game designs, describing the main features, key media and objects/sprites for each.
- Create a range of possible designs / drawings for sprites and backgrounds.
- In groups choose ONE final game design. Justify your group's choice, explaining how your chosen game design will best serve your goal and explain your choice.
- Create drawings for all the sprites and rooms.
- Evaluate and choose your final sprite/ background designs.
- Write a list of conditional statements for your final game.
- Use the key questions from the Approaches to learning Area of Interaction – to evaluate your performance during the design stage.
1. Generate a range of Game Ideas
- Check your educational objective as written in your design brief.
Write down the objective of your game. This should already have been done as part of your design brief.
- You now need to develop one Game Ideas for your game.(short descriptions of the main goal of your game)
Example: An educational objective may be to teach about healthy eating. The Game Idea could be a maze game where you need to collect healthy food - you score points for healthy and loose points for junk food
2. Create a Game design document for your idea above (see below).
What is a Design Document?
Lets look at the simple game with a clown bouncing around between some red walls. You may have made this earlier. If not you can follow the instructions for "Your first simple game" found under the game maker resources here
In this game the player should try to click on the clown with the mouse. Each time he/she succeeds he/she gets a point.
To make this game, we will require two different objects: the clown and the wall. We will also need two different sprites to represent these objects in our game. We need one sprite for the wall object and one for the clown object. Finally, we want to hear some sound when we succeed in clicking on the clown with the mouse. We will just use one room in which the game takes place.
Note: If the clown was to be animated one way when it moves right and another way when it moves left. The clown object would have two sprites - one for the right movement and one for the left movement. |
Example: Below is an example of how we might complete the table above for the clown game.
Game Name |
Catch the Clown |
Educational Objective of the game
|
Practice mouse skills |
Game Idea:/ Brief Description
Catch the Clown is a little action game. In this game a clown moves around in a playing field. The goal of the player is to catch the clown by clicking with the mouse on him. If the player progresses through the game the clown starts moving faster and it becomes more difficult to catch him. For each catch the score is raised and the goal is to get the highest possible score. Expected playing time is just a few minutes.
|
Game flow - How to start / end /move between levels
|
| Levels - How many levels in your game |
Special
Are there any other special features of the game that deserve a mention? |
Score system / Punishment and Rewards
How does the scoring system work? - How are you punished for making mistakes? Describe the rewards in this game. |
Controls:How do you control the game - mouse? arrow keys? |
| The key resources |
|
rooms
|
the places (levels) in which the sprites/objects live |
sprites
|
(animated) images that are used to represent objects used in your game |
sounds
|
either as background music or as effects |
backgrounds
|
the images used as background for the rooms |
|
3. Create a range of possible designs / drawings for sprites and backgrounds.
4. In groups choose ONE final game design.
Develop ONE design specification for your group
Evaluate your individual Game design documents against your group's new design specifications. (identify the good and bad)
Choose a final design. Create a final Game Design Document for your group. (see below)
Fully evaluate this against your group's design specification, explaining how your final game design will best serve your goal (design brief).
Game Name |
|
Educational Objective of the game
|
taken from the design brief |
Game Idea/ Brief Description What type of game. What is the main goal. Where is it set - time and place. How educational is the game -
Do you just need reflex skills to be successful or do you have to think as well?
If you have to think as well then describe the idea(s) that the designer has used to make you think
|
Game flow - How to start / end /move between levels
|
| Levels - How many levels in your game |
Special
Are there any other special features of the game that deserve a mention? |
Score system / Punishment and Rewards
How idoes the scoring system work? - How are you punished for making mistakes? Describe the rewards in this game. |
Controls: How do you control the game - mouse? arrow keys? |
| The key resources (see example below) |
|
rooms
|
the places (levels) in which the sprites/objects live |
sprites
|
(animated) images that are used to represent objects used in your game |
sounds
|
either as background music or as effects |
backgrounds
|
the images used as background for the rooms |
| |
|
5. Create drawings all your sprites and rooms.
Each group member must create a range of drawings (spritse and backgrounds). You should not use the computer at this stage.
6. Evaluate your sprite/ background designs
Compare your designs against your design specifications and evaluate (identify the good and bad) each design
Test them and chose the best. You must agree - use the results of your tests to decide!
7. Write a list of conditional statements for your final game.
CONDITIONAL STATEMENTS - Time for Brain power!! What if......
see here for help
8. Evaluate your work at this stage of the design cycle:
- organization:
- What aspects of my organization do I need to develop?
- How can I best organize myself?
- reflection
- How have I been reflecting?
- How can I make my reflection more useful for my learning?
- How can my reflections help me learn?
- thinking
- What tools have helped me think in different ways?
- transfer of knowledge:
- How can I use my knowledge, understanding and skills developed so far in other subjects (Maths, English etc.)
design |
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0 |
The student does not reach a standard described by any of the descriptors given below. |
1-2 |
The student generates one design, and makes some attempt to justify this against the design specification. |
3-4 |
The student generates a few designs, selecting one design and fully evaluating this against the design specification using one test. |
5-6 |
The student generates a range of designs, each compared against the design specification. The student chooses one design and evaluates it fully against the design specification using detailed tests. |
Investigation design plan create evaluate
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