I find it interesting that you have filmed your play testers.
I filmed the testers because I wanted to see (and show) how they interact. I wanted to create a game which would make for a rich interaction between the players. When players solve a puzzle together they share a feeling of accomplishment. But they will also get annoyed with eachother from time to time if one of them messes up. I wanted the players to be able to tease eachother a bit, so I allowed for shooting eachother, which doesn't kill you but it'll put you of flying. Players liked to do this, especially after all the happy friendly working together.
Could you talk a little about the process
A short summery of the design process:
- Find out why people play games.
- Find out what makes a game fun.
- Formulate a design process which is focussed on making a game fun to play.
// start of design process
- The search for a good starting point. Experiment with very basic game mechanisms. Experiment more. And more.
- From here I followed a very iterative process, continuously building and adjusting the game, from a very basic core mechanism (double gravity) to a prototype with a more complete set of game elements.
During this iterative process I had a lot of people trying out the game. Most of them inexperienced players, so I could see what ideas they understood from the start. I wanted the game to be really easy to start playing with.
- Finally I spent time on polishing the game a bit. Worked on the graphics added some sounds (still crappy though) and removed the bugs.
With the final prototype a did some more testing (of which you saw the clip).
and especially what you have learned from it.
So many things, but I'll stick to the core.
Games are artificial sets of rules and goals. We accept these rules as being true as long as we play a game. We create these artificial spaces to challenge ourselves, and more specifically, we want challenges that give us satisfaction by the progress we make in them. The challenge shouldn't be to easy for you won't notice progress if you're already able to do it in the first place. The challenge shouldn't be to hard for you won't notice any progress within a reasonable amount of time.
Noticing the progress (or learning) is what our brain likes, it rewards us with a pleasent feeling, the fun in games.
(In this I found the following books most useful: Johan Huizinga's
Homo Ludens and Raph Koster's
A Theory of Fun for Game Design)
This core idea can help you in a lot of game design decisions. But there are ofcourse more things to take into account, like styling and quite important the social interaction between players.
Let me get to the part about the diamonds later, have to get some work done.
Richard