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[12LandsBoundlessSpace]

Hello, all! My name is Connor and I am currently a university student. This semester I'm doing an independent study in game design where I'll be developing my first game from scratch, hopefully to eventually market and release to get a start in the field of game dev. I most likely will not be finishing it in that time but my goal is to have all of main concepts down for the overarching gameplay and a couple of playable areas ready. And the game I will be making is Project Raspberry (WIP title), an exploration and atmosphere-focused metroidvania! I will be developing the game primarily using Game Maker Studio 1.4.

One of the requirements of the course is to write weekly reflections on the text I will be reading to give me some more background in the theory behind game design. For now I will be reading Rules of Play by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman and writing on that. But in the meantime I thought it would be interesting to also keep a development log with updates on what I finish each week and my thought process at the same time.

Stay tuned, the first entry is on its way shortly.

[12LandsBoundlessSpace]

Entry #1: It has been a slow start unfortunately but I'm going to work on picking up the pace from now on. The biggest concept I got out of the section I read this time around (from Rules of Play is the concept of "meaningful play." When designing a game, it makes sense to make it "meaningful" because if it's "meaningless" then what is the point? But on that note, the idea of meaning is vague and very general. What does it mean, and to who? Are we talking about meaning limited to within the game itself or meaning that extends into the player's life as a whole? And once we decide this, how do we go about constructing our game such that it is meaningful?

In truth, there isn't just one right answer to this, but the bottom line is that it's important to try to achieve meaning on some level. According to the authors, meaningful play arises from the relationship between a player's actions and the outcomes of those actions. This makes sense intuitively. The underlying "meaning" is determined by what the player can control (making decisions within the game), and how this control affects all aspects of the player's experience. The deeper (more widespread or longer lasting) the consequence an action has the more meaning is attached to it.

But in addition, in order to attach any meaning to an action, two conditions must be present: The player knows the result of their action, and the action has a lasting effect. If the player never finds out what their choice caused then the result is effectively no different than it having no consequence at all. (Note that this is different than giving vague clues to what the consequence might have been and leaving it to the player to imagine the scale of the impact, which can have a great effect if done right.) And similarly, if the action's result is negated instantly then once again, the player might as well have not acted at all.

Then we can get into specifics on how choices are made meaningful. The book included four concepts which I found quite interesting:

"1. A sign represents something other than itself.
2. Signs are interpreted.
3. Meaning results when a sign is interpreted.
4. Context shapes interpretation."

Design involves taking these concepts and implementing them, and that in and of itself can be difficult. But we know some things for certain. In the process of design we are building an environment in which elements are arranged to allow our participant, the player, to discover meaning. That means we must create signs which represent something. We also must create the context in which those signs are to be interpreted. (An interesting thing to consider on this note is the idea of predicting some of the context in a player's real life environment and encouraging the player to use this context, as well as the context we provide in the game, to interpret the sign, which extends the meaning beyond the scope of the game and into the player's life.)

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Right now my development work on the game is very theoretical. I am trying to be sure I not only grasp the fundamentals of design but am considering them at every turn . It's easy to be lazy and create something on a whim but if I want this game to have a lasting impact (which I do, both on myself and on any players), I will need to be intentional about every aspect of it.

A few things I have decided for sure:

-I want the game to be surreal. This is not necessary but is a personal decision on my part since I enjoy environments which aren't exactly like real life. But at the same time, I want the game to reflect elements of real life.

-I want the game to use each element to the fullest, including the story, gameplay, art, and music. In particular, I am a musician so I would really like to make the music important to the game somehow.

-I want the plot to be easy to follow on a surface level but quite complex on a deeper level. The player should need to play multiple times to experience all the game has to offer, and should experience a new level of depth each time, rather than having the same experience with different elements on playthroughs after the first.

All of these are overarching ideas rather than specifics. And they have led me to the next logical consideration, how do I apply what I have read about meaning as I determine how to implement these design choices?

I have actually made some tangible progress as well, though very little: I'm working on the bare bones of the engine. This means player and wall sprites and objects with placeholder graphics and the first room which I will use as a test level.

My plans for what to do next include thinking about everything above and reading on in the book on game design, but in addition, I intend to complete the basic engine by next week. I am also writing a game design document to help me keep track of all aspects of the game, which I would like to finish by this Friday.

That's all for now, but expect the next entry soon! Later entries will be weekly but since I've fallen behind I would like to make enough progress to finish 3 entries by next week.

[Alce]

Sounds like an interesting project! Love the theoretical discussion, I haven't read Rules of Play but I'm getting the impression something I'd enjoy. Looking forward to reading more of this devlog!

[12LandsBoundlessSpace]

Entry #2: More like a mini entry this time around, but I think it's still worth posting because it's the very first thing I can show off for the game. It's EXTREMELY basic, just a red player and black walls with a basic movement engine. I coded the engine from scratch.





Since making an engine like this is fairly trivial I won't go into all the details, it's easy to find a tutorial to make something similar. But there are a couple of design things I'd like to highlight:

When I was creating this engine I wanted to think ahead. This means that if there's any parameter that I might find myself fine-tuning, I create a constant for it and adjust that instead. Some examples include my gravity, friction, running speed, jump height, and speed cap. And I made my gravity and friction global rather than local variables so they can be used by other objects in the environment. This all prevents me from having to duplicate a lot of work instead of referencing work I've already done, and this sort of thing is important so that I don't lose my mind when the going gets tedious.

The second thing is attention to detail. Coding the engine was pretty fast and easy, however, in making a platforming game the specifics matter. It is important that the player's movement feels right. It shouldn't be too fast or two slow. And for me it was more complex than the most basic situation because my engine has horizontal acceleration, and thus I needed to tune the friction, acceleration, and speed cap as opposed to just walking speed.

I learned the hard way how important this is awhile back. I was coding a similar platforming game for Ludum Dare 39. Overall the feedback I got on it was pretty good, however, I had multiple people point out that some of the platforming sections were difficult simply because of how easy it was for acceleration to carry the player off the edge of a narrow platform. This is not how it should be. The difficulty in a platformer should not lie in the physics working against the player (unless you're making a game where that's the distinctive element). The movement, as the central focus of the gameplay, should flow well and feel tight, and the difficulty should come from forcing the player to learn the potential of your physics model to the fullest.

The engine is still far from finished, obviously, but the next step is to start filling it out with more details. First that will likely include more environmental elements and player moves, and then I can start filling in my world. I'll have another update soon, but the next one will likely be about my game design document as opposed to more progress on the engine (or maybe both).

[12LandsBoundlessSpace]

Entry #3: I know things have been quiet but I've been hard at work on this game, molding it into something amazing. And it's still very bare-bones but it's starting to take shape. Unfortunately this means I am still behind both on my development log posts and reading. However, hopefully things are set in place now for me to catch up by the end of this week.

The reading for this time around was quite complex and is difficult to summarize but I'll try to draw attention to the parts which stood out to me. First, I read about interactivity. This is a surprisingly complex term. That fact might not be intuitive but makes sense once you think about it. Everything we do has an effect, and these effects can spiral outwards to have a huge impact eventually (the butterfly effect). So we have to look at things a bit differently, because it's unhelpful and trivial to look at interactivity as a term which applies to everything. As mentioned a couple of posts back, we have to narrow our scope when we look at "meaning" too. An choice we make may have a consequence, but how is this significant if we never find out what the consequence is? This helps us narrow our definition of interactivity. It has to go two ways. One participant makes a choice, the choice has an outcome, and then they see the result of their choice as feedback. For example, if I were to flap my arms right now and it causes a rainstorm in 50 years halfway across the world, (A), I might never see that outcome, and (B), if I do I definitely will not know that I caused it. However, if I leave a faucet on and the sink overflows, I can connect my choice with the outcome. I chose to leave the sink on and it overflowed, and I can see that my choice was what led to that outcome, and thus, it was interactive.

Now that we have examined these core components of what makes a game tick, we can start to look at defining games themselves. Unsurprisingly, there is not one generally accepted definition of what a game is. The book actually covered many, and some of them are wildly different from others. However, a couple of elements persisted across all of them. A game must have one or more participants who interact with a system under certain constraints in order to achieve a specific outcome. Other elements which varied between definitions included specifications like that the system must be separate from real life, participation and choices must be voluntary, it must be non-serious, must have no effect on real life, or must be a contest. While it's hard to decide on one specific definition of what must be true for something to be considered a game, these things all fit within a general vague idea of what a game should be. However, they are also extremely general, especially our distilled definition.

It's hard to see how this would apply to a game like, say, Rain World, which is one of my recent favorites. It's easy to see who the participant is and what the system is. The constraints and desired outcome are more complex. In this case our constraints are just what has been built into the game, what the player can and cannot do. These are the "rules," even though they are implicit and not written out. The desired outcome is also difficult to pinpoint. [MINOR SPOILER WARNING:] At the beginning the player is given a goal within the game. They are not told how to reach the goal or even whether or not it is possible. And by the end, it turns out it isn't possible, and the goal or win condition ends up being something different from what they were told in the beginning. Then can we really say that this game has a consistent desired outcome? Can we have games where the desired outcome and rules change? In my opinion the answer is no. In developing a game we can create the illusion that rules or goals are changing, but this really isn't the case. In reality, our rule set from the beginning includes the possibility to change to include other predefined rules. In addition, looking back at Rain World, the "goal" was never to find the character's family. The actual goal within the system is to reach the ending, and we do that by following the rules the system has set for us to do that.

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And now back to my progress on Project Raspberry. This week I worked on two things in particular. The first is a basic environment. I wanted to get a feel for the rough scale of the areas the player will be exploring. This allowed me to do more work on fine-tuning the engine, making sure it didn't feel too fast or slow. I believe the test area I am building right now will become a sort of hub in the game and the environment will be rocky and mountainous. In working on this I came to terms with a constraint which is going to be rather difficult and annoying to work around but might make things interesting: I like levels which expand in all directions, especially upwards, and when resizing a room in Game Maker it is only possible to expand to the right and down. There is no easy way to move objects as a group. (No mass delete either which is already getting on my nerves.) Thus, in most cases I will need to decide how large I want a room to be from the beginning. I could choose to make it easy and vastly overestimate every time, but I don't know if that would be wise in terms of game performance, as I am not sure how much room size will affect that.

Right now tiles are all grayscale. The next step is to start molding it into looking like the environment I want. At first this will be just colors and not textures because I am not much of a graphic designer and I want to focus on functionality before looks. Even so, looks will be quite important in this game so I'll try to get the functionality down quickly so I can develop the environment into something less temporary.

The other thing I worked on this week was my Game Design Document. I considered posting it here but I don't want to do that because I intend to update it as I make progress on the game, and it will contain spoilers on everything. I wrote it in six sections so far: story, gameplay, characters, world, music, and endings. In each section I wrote down everything I have in mind so far in detail. In some places this was very vague as I have not thought much about certain aspects or expect them to change as I make progress. In other parts I already know exactly what I want, and so I was much more specific.

Now that I have all of these different pieces in front of me: the basic framework of the game, and a document specifying where I want to take things, I can put some effort into building a strong prototype by December.

[12LandsBoundlessSpace]

Entry #4:Things are really coming along now. I'll talk about specifics below, but first, this week's reading:

This time I read about two particular topics, and then one of the authors went over a personal example, the first in the book of seeing how these concepts are applied, which was quite interesting.

The first topic was that of the "magic circle," or the enclosed space in which a game is played. This space can be sectioned off in space, time, or both, and is rather vague. The idea, in short, is that once you begin playing a game you have entered the magic circle. So the circle lasts from the beginning of when you play to the end in time. In space, it is defined by every element involved in the game. So for example, for chess, the magic circle consists of the board, pieces, and players, and is entered when the game begins. The authors also highlighted the fact that it truly is special because outside of the game, the individual elements have no meaning. They could just be decoration on their own, but the act of playing the game by the rules gives the elements meaning.

The step up from this and the next major topic discussed in the book was the idea of schemata. A schema is a way of reducing a game down to its most minimal elements, the things that define it, sort of a template if you will. This was examined on three levels: rules, play, and culture. The rule level is the most intuitive. This consists of the game elements with the system which remain consistent between variations. A chess board can be made of wood or glass or metal, so the board material is not a part of the schema, however, the pieces remain the same in every version of a standard game of chess so they are. On a play level, the schema consists of what players will experience when they play a specific game. This is much more vague and not as rigorously defined as a rule schema, for obvious reasons, however, there will be certain elements of player experience that will remain more or less unchanged across instances of a game. These elements of the experience can extend outside of the "magic circle," as in many cases the player will retain an element of the experience outside of playing the game itself. This particular layer is easier to understand if we think about video games rather than something like chess, as many of these are meant to have an emotional impact on the player, or a certain message. The final layer is cultural, which is made up of the essential aspects of the place a game has within its surroundings, extending out to a global scale.

The topic of schemata is complex but the basic idea is that it provides us a way to look at the big picture when designing a game, which is important. It is much easier to begin with big picture elements when designing something rather than beginning with details and then working outwards. This is something I have already been doing from the beginning but thinking about it in terms of something more strictly defined is easier.

Finally, one of the authors gave an example of their own game, a simple board game called Sibling Rivalry for two players in which two players play as siblings trying to annoy each other. I found it interesting because it was a good example of a board game that has symbolism beyond just the basic rules, as opposed to chess or checkers, and so it applies more closely to the concepts I'll be considering when working on my video game.

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Now for this week's progress. The first thing I did was expanded my test room and changed the tile layout to build it into the framework for a mountain environment. Then I started to build my landscape, first by recoloring tiles to roughly match the look I wanted. Then I added two other layer tiles, background and foreground. These elements are important. Even though the play area is in two dimensions the real world is three-dimensional, and therefore to make it feel like a real environment it helps to have some elements both in front of and behind the player. Elements in the background are not really restricted because they don't risk blocking the player's view, so they can be placed really anywhere. the only consideration is whether foreground elements will cover them. In contrast, foreground elements must be small and inconspicuous, more minor details that add to the feel of an area rather than parts of the structure, in order to be sure that they won't block the player's view and make playing the game difficult. The exception would be if obstructed vision is an intentional gimmick in a certain area, but I personally do not intend to use this concept because I feel like it interrupts the pseudo-3d feel. In real life a player's view would not be blocked by a wall to their side if there's nothing in front of them, and I want to carry this idea into the game.

Next I began working on essential gameplay concepts, as well as expanding on the story and symbolism. I would like to create a collectible object of some kind. These are a great way to provide short-term gratification to a player and give them a sense of accomplishment without being too complex. This is why they are used so widely, in fact, in almost every one of my favorite games.

In terms of symbolism, I would like to use a recurring theme of static. I believe I have already briefly mentioned that the idea of entropy, the slow decay of the universe, will be central to the plot. Static, to me, represents chaos, and as such it is a great way to align the visual aspects and layout of the game with this story idea. In fact, I would like all enemies to spawn with a static texture and then have their texture fade in. This symbolizes the fact that they come from static and their goal is to help bring the universe back into chaos. I can increase the effect by having enemies flash the static texture every once in awhile, as if they are purely chaotic in nature and only barely being held together, with entropy affecting them much faster than the environment.

This week I will implement my collectible and work their significance into the plot. I will also make the very first prototype of one type of enemy. I may build a door between rooms as well. From there I can begin to refine the gameplay into something more cohesive, and finally I can use the details to shape it into something unique and memorable.

[12LandsBoundlessSpace]

Entry #4: Hello, all! I know I've been quiet in terms of updates for the past few months but I have been working! In fact, I have a demo (Windows only at this point). But bear in mind that this is nothing like what the final game will be. Consider it a prototype and nothing more. That being said, feel free to play it and give any thoughts you might have!

https://drive.google.com/file/d/18q76GszZ3X5NhLu8IcrNnzTnor-6C8DN/view?usp=sharing

Unfortunately it has a glitch which causes the player to sometimes get stuck on corners, so if that happens press R to restart.

Now for how I got here. The game has come a long way from when I posted last. There are two rooms with defined environments, though they will need to be refined quite a lot to get the vibe I'm going for. There are four different types of switches, a few puzzle elements, and some environmental mechanics. All of them were built through a basic process of conceptualizing, building, and iterating. It's honestly nothing impressive so far. I finished what I did so far for my class and it went well, but I have much bigger and better plans for the future.

On that note, I'd hesitate to call this a true proof of concept or prototype because it captures some elements of gameplay, but not really the world structure or environment. As such, building that so I have something to snowball off of is top priority.

And with that, we've come to my vision moving forward. My philosophy when building a project is, in short, let it be what it wants to be. I did a lot of planning before starting on this but in all likelihood the final thing will look completely different. Core aspects which I expect to keep include the depth and environmental focus, and platforming base mechanic, but recently I've decided that I want to focus more on the surreal side. Games that make me think "wtf was that?" regularly are hard to come by, as are games that regularly strike me with awe, and those are the two primary things I want to achieve with this, so that will be my focus going forward, particularly over the next six months: building that.