Game Testing

Image by kgregson via Flickr

I have 10 groups in my Critical Analysis of Games class (26 students). Each group had to create a game using the Icehouse pyramid game system. They could add anything else they wanted - boards, cards, dice, spinners. The games had to be playable within 10-40 minutes. I didn't want any 1 minute throw the pyramid (like 56 card pick up) games.

We tested the games today with other students from class, volunteers from my Qualitative Research class, the chair of the TV-Radio department, and several of the administrative staff from the 3rd floor. It was kind of organized chaos - 10 tables with games spread out, people milling around - some playing, some taking notes and observing.

The goal of the play testing was to get feedback from people who hadn't seen the games before. We needed to know if the rules made sense and, maybe more importantly, was the game fun to play. A secondary goal was to let people in the class see other people's games - kind of set up a little competition to improve the games.

A full set of pictures is on flickr - I am not a photographer but you get the idea - lots of people, lots of tables, lots of games, small room - ha ha. - click here to see the set

Image by kgregson via Flickr

I think we met the goals. Most groups had notes. A couple of groups discovered problems with their rules or winning conditions; they made some changes on the fly and adjusted their documentation.

We may test again on Monday if I can find some other people to come in, depending on the feedback I get Wednesday in class. They will turn the game in on the Friday before spring break. I also want them to put the rules and game documentation online and encourage others to play.

Students in Critical Analysis of Games Blog About Games

Image via Wikipedia

The students in my Critical Analysis of Games class this semester are blogging (I teach at Ithaca College and we're just starting up a new major in Game Design and Immersive Media). They have to apply the game design topics we're discussing in class to one or two games all semester. The goal is to get a really deep understanding of their game and show that they can apply the concepts in class to real world games.

They got to pick the game they wanted to analyze. Here are some of the games being studied this semester - Portal, Star Oceans 2, Psychonauts, Turok, Okami, Conkers Bad Fur Day, and Ace Attorney: Apollo Justice.

Here's a link to a list of their blogs - http://kimgregson.com/mambo/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=118&Itemid=39

A second reason for the blogs is to help them establish a professional presence. I hopt that they will keep blogging as they go through the program. They'd love some comments on their blogs if you have time to take a look.

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This would be cool to get involved with

Image via CrunchBase

The iPhone Developer program for universities - http://developer.apple.com/iphone/program/university.html

I can see the game design students making games for the iphone and since we're an all mac shop (our students have to buy macs) it would be another way for them to use their hardware. And I like it because mobile gaming is a huge new market. Would be good for our junior level special topics class maybe - combo with topic like casual games.

Of course everybody is making iphone games - this is a photo of a iphone dev camp! so the chance of getting any market share is slim - but there are competitive games to study and maybe we could interview other developers/get them to talk to the students. The business angle of the app store would be good to investigate.

You can develop on your mac and test. But we'd need some iphones or iTouches to test on. Wouldn't that be a hardship? - ha ha. Tho imagine asking the dean for money for iphones "just for testing, really, nooooo - no phone calls". Wonder if you can play games with out service Just kidding about the dean - she'd spring for the money for a couple I think.

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Trying to Interest People in New BoardGames

Image via Wikipedia

Just read a post on BoardGameNews from a guy who tried to get a couple of his friends to play modern board games and they refused regularly. - http://www.boardgamenews.com/index.php/boardgamenews/comments/tom_rosen_joe_and_bob/

I've noticed some of these same qualities in my college students. Specifically - they don't want to read rules to learn new games. They see games like Colossal Arena and Race for the Galaxy are too complex, have too many pieces, take too long to set up. And some of them do take a while to learn or to set up - but the games seem worth the effort with good game play and different ways to win.

Not sure what to do about it - any suggestions?

Great News

Image via Wikipedia

BIG NEWS!
The game design major at Ithaca College was officially approved. It will be a BFA in the Television-Radio department of the Roy H. Park School of Communication. It's multi-discipline and multi-school. Students take classes in screenwriting, programming, art history, as well as game design. They play and make analog games as well as videogames. They study analysis of games, the videogame industry, and legal issues. It will be in the catalog probably in 2010. Unfortunately students didn't know about it when they applied for admittance for the Fall 2009 school year. I need to get to work promoting it for Fall 2010. However, students already admitted can switch to the game major.

We have a website for the major - and a blog - the blog might become the site's homepage, still playing with that.

Homepage (for the moment) - http://parkgameportal.com/
Blog - http://parkgameportal.com/wordpress

On the website, you can play games and other projects made by students in the program, see some photos, read descriptions of the classes.

If you know anyone interested in studying game design, have them drop me an email at kgregson@ithaca.edu or give me a call at 607-274-7348 and I"ll try to answer their questions.

Visit from Firaxis Executive Producer

Image via Wikipedia

Firaxis makes the Sid Meier's Civilization games. Friday February 6, 2009, Barry Caudill and screenwriting alumni Liam ??? visited with students at Ithaca College. They gave some good advice for students interested in working in the videogame industry.

• The big message - it's tough to break into the industry. Don't give up. There are steps you can take to be more attractive to game companies.
  
• Be willing to start small and work up. Be adaptable and versatile.
  
• Communication is key - written, oral, with team members and managers, with publishers and consumers.
  
• Sometimes there are designer/writers, designer/scripter; at Firaxis they have designer/programmers.
  
• If you want to get into the industry as a designer you need some programming so you can create your own prototypes. You're better able to get across your own ideas if you can create your own prototypes.
  
• Quality Assurance is a good starting point especially if you want to move into a position as a producer.
  
  
• Companies are looking for experience which makes it tough for new grads. You can make your own game and take to the interview. It's not enough to have ideas - you have to make stuff. You can make videogames, game mods, even analog games (board/card games). Show you can implement ideas and finish stuff. There are lots of tools to use to make games - XNA Unreal engine, NeverEnding Knights engine, flash... You need to let people play your game and get feedback. So playtest early and often.
  Go to game jams - you work with a team to create a playable game.
  
• The more you know the easier it is to talk to other people on the team. They use a variety of software - Visual Studio, MS Office suite, visualization tools like Visio and PowerPoint, lots of project management tools, graphic tools like Photoshop and 3D StudioMax, Python and other scripting languages, XML for game text, and software for source control.
  
  And - to my students who wonder why I assign strange projects and make them play with boardgames about bean farming and zombie brains - - - see I don't make this stuff up. The pros give the same advice. And they'd both played Bohanza, the bean farming game - ha ha!
  
  Here's alum Liam Collins:
  
  

  
  Here is a photos of Barry Caudill:
  
  
  
  
  

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Global Game Jam

Two students from the game design major here at Ithaca College went to SUNY Albany to participate in the Global Game Jam at the beginning of February 2009. They met people interested in making games from other colleges. Sounds like there was a ton of food and enough participants to have 6 groups making games

Here is a link to the game that their group created. They put the game up on YoYo Games since they made their game with Game Maker, software distributed by YoYo. They'd really appreciate any comments and feedback. You can leave it on the YoYo site or here on the blog and I'll make sure the students get the message.

URL: http://www.yoyogames.com/games/show/69679

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We kicked off our time in SecondLife today in Qualitative Research class

They all made it off orientation island - that's a great way to start the semester.

Today we went to the New Resident Q&A hosted by Bob Bonderfeld, who has been in SecondLife since 2003 when it was in beta. I sent him an IM asking if it was ok for us all to come; sometimes a space isn't set up to handle more than 20 people.

We met in an outdoor plaza. Bob had a lot of chairs set out that we just needed to left click on to sit. He was using voice chat - we didn't have any mics but we had speakers so we could hear his commentary and the students typed their questions. They asked questions related to their research project topics and got some good advice.

Some had trouble seeing the chairs (or maybe they just had trouble sitting still) The students were laughing and talking and helping each other out which is exactly what I want to see develop over the semester.

Here's a photo one of the students took during the session - Thanks Sly Deezul

In the next couple of weeks we will observe other types of classes locations and cultures in SecondLife.

Twitter Info

Image via CrunchBase

I mention twitter in my classes and try to get students interested in social media.

Here are a couple of resources for new twitter users

A History of Twitter - neat insider background story about the creation of a new tool

TweetNet - info for beginning twitterers

A look at how the interface has changed over time - good use of hte Wayback Machine to get old screenshots

Here's my twitter stream - http://twitter.com/kgregson

I've added links to some stories about Twitter (actually Zemanta added the links - I love the zemanta blog add-oh.

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Library Widget Test

Image via CrunchBase

A post about style, look and feel

I read in the text book for next semester about levels in games and it mentioned that US games tended to be conservative with styles and Japanese games more adventurous. Here are some images nad videos from teh games the book mentioned that seem to be worth looking at. I think we could find some US games - i wonder if next gen consoles might have the computational horsepower to do cooler graphics, more realism, hyper realism

Vib Ribbon


Official VibRibbon homepage

Youtube video demonstration

Rez



Wiki page

Space Channel 5 (for the dreamcast

Wiki pge for the game

YouTube video

I may have a game buying addiction

IImage by kgregson via Flickr bought some more game for the game design program - mostly card games because they have some interesting gameplay mechanics and rules. And remember I've said you can make a game about anything - check out these topics - zombies, sushi, sammich making, bean farming, school politics, medieval politics.... And I bought most of them locally (in Binghamton) at Jupiter Games. Here's a link to their website and to a yelp page with a map. The store has game nights on Friday that would be worth going to. They regularly attract about 30 players. They have a big collection of games open to play. And people seemed open to teaching games to newbies (for folks from Intro to Games & Society - they have Race to the Galaxy and know how to play it! And like playing it!!!)

Image from Coloretto via WikipediaHere's what I bought over break.

• Wasabi (card game - make sushi by Joshua Cappel and Adam Gertzbein)
  
• Bohnanza (card game about bean farming by Uwe Rosenberg)
  
• Coloretto (card game by Michael Schacht)
  
• Ticket to Ride (dice expansion)
  
• Citadels (card game about medieval cities, nobles and intrigue - by Bruno Faidutti)
  
• Grave Robbers from Outer Space (card game based on b-movies)
  
• Lunch Money (card game - girl grade school students beat each other up for ...)
  
• No Thanks (card game where you want to get the lowest number of points - by Thorsten Gimmler)
  
• Zap Bam Pow (card game)
  
• Road Race (dice game (we may just use the dice in other games but we'll try this one first)
  
• Phase 10 (card game)
  
• Frog Juice (card game about spells and concotions)
  
• Slamwich (card game)
  
• Monkeyes on the moon (card game, strategy about developing the monkey civilization by Jim Doherty)
  
• MMMM...Brains (dice game by Reiner Knizia)
  
• Pink Godzilla Dev Kit (cards

Image via Wikipedia

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game interface ideas from other fields

Check out this dashboard from a Ford car (the Fusion I think) introduced at the 2009 Detroit Car Show - here's a link to the post.





Like a videogame, the info needs to be scanned often and quickly, and understanding it can't distract too much from the other tasks underway (shooting monsters and cruising along at 75 mph (don't tell my mom I speed, ok?). This dashboard has taken those needs into account with visuals such as bar graphs for gas and power steering fluid levels, for average MPG. And check out those vines; they live or die based on how fuel-efficiently you drive.


Check out the link in the article cited above for the Lamborgini dashboard - wtf?


Once you learn what all the dials and needles do (read the manual? - I don't see much text on the dashboard itself), is this a better idea for a videogame interface?

Here are some pictures of other dashboards for comparison.

Image via WikipediaImage via Wikipedia




We need to look for interface ideas in lots of other info-rich places - maybe those car GPS systems, or even things like complicated phone bills or monthly statements from people with actively traded brokerage accounts or mutual statement quarterly statements.

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check it out - i won a t-shirt from Loot Ninja for writing a caption to this picture

http://loot-ninja.com/2008/12/29/winners-zombie-t-shirt-contest/

Trying to get my family to play new board/card games

It's not easy. We tried slamwich - my dad hated the slapping part. We played "MMM...Brains" and that one went over a little better although we think the rules need a bit of elaboration about phase 2. At Thanksgiving we tried Apples to Apples and that didn't go over. Maybe with a bigger crowd.

Still to play - Monkeys on the Moon.

Games they do like - We did play Quiddler and 5 Crowns - those are long time favorites. And dominoes.

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This could be a good series of posts

Over on the Nerfbat blog, Ryan Shwader is attempting to break down the concept of being a hardcore gamer starting with this post. He's started by looking at time spent in teh game and he promises to look at other concepts such as skill. I've had this on my list of things to study for awhile - ok for like the last 4 years. I'm glad to see someone tackle it and I"m going to be reading.

Check out the comments - why do people seem to react so violently when folks try to define things like hardcore. Why do they feel threatened or feel the need to ridicule? Very strange.

New Game Designer Makes Good - Inspirational Tale

Check out this post on the Lost Garden blog - about a game prototype called Little Girl Fishing that is being developed. The developer was paid $4000 and a performance bonus.

There is a good discussion of the process, the tools (he used flash). It's interesting background reading - and inspirational.

You also find out about the prototype experiments on the Lost Garden site. If you're ever at a loss for a game idea, check out these experiments.

What I did on my wnter break

I'm preparing 2 new classes - Fun & Games (a seminar discussion class for 18 senor undergrad students) and Critical Analysis of games (for 30 undergrads) - trying to find readings, think of assignments, and read a lot of extra stuff to add to the lectures to help make sense of all the new material (new to me and them)

I"m also determined to play a lot of videogames. I checked a lot out from our collection at school - i bought them but never had time to play them over the semester. I checked out a lot for hte DS - I like the 2 screens and the different input options. I also took a couple for the XBox360 and the Wii Image via Wikipediaand one for the PSP. I have a couple PSP games at home already that I need to play. I figure I"ll blog some little summaries/reactions to the games and ideas I have about using them in assignments. We bought a lot of the games used and many don't have instructions which is a pain for me. I discovered tho that hte students don't read the videogame instructions (and were ticked that they had to read and understand the instructions for the board games we played. I have found good guides and instructions on the IGN site and have put links to them on our website

Reviews
Image via WikipediaMeteos (for the DS) - a puzzle game. I bought it used and it didn't have the instructions. I think I need to read the guide I found on IGN - there are things going on on the screen that I had no understanding of even after playing for 2 hours and sometimes winning. As a puzzle game tho it's kind of typical - match the tiles up in groups of three to have them blast off. Things happen really fast tho - I'd concentrate on the right side of the screen and before I knew it I had lost because of something on teh left hand side. There's some kind of outer space theming - the falling tiles are takng place on different planets. I can see assigning students a group of puzzle games to compare or compare puzzle games on different platforms or different kinds of puzzles. And in the fun class we're going to talk about puzzles so it might be interesting to have them play puzzle games and see what the fun is. Someone I follow on Twitter recommended I check out the Disney verson of Meteos - I'm a big fan of all things Disney so I will look for it when I go shopping later.

Image via WikipediaLumines II (PSP) - another puzzle game - kind of like Tetris with the falling tiles but the tiles are made up of 4 smaller blocks and each block can be one of 2 colors. You have to maneuver the tile so that you get 4 smaller blocks of the same color in a 2 x 2 arrangement (not a 1 x 4 unfortunately - those I seem to be able to build with no problem). Themusic (in my opinion) is annoying. And some of the flashing skins are hard on my old eyes. The 2 x 2 squares don't disappear immediately - only when the timeline (that maybe is moving in time with the music, I can't tell because the music irritated me and I turned it off) crosses over it. The timeline is a neat feature they added to the tile matching puzzle. if you can work it right, you can stack up 2 x 3 or 3 x 3 (or bigger theoretically) and get more points. You can save at the end of each game. There are 22 levels as a beginner, another 22 for the A level and a third set of 22 levels for the S level. And then lot of other ways to play including competing against the cmoputer. Assignment possibiities: It might be interesting to try and lay out historically the feature development in the puzzle genre - any of the genres probably. Same with some of the euro games (like from carcassone to settlers to stone age). Another assignment - compare puzzle games on the different platforms - how do they take advantage of the strengths of each platform/how are they different from platform to platform.Another assignment - take the timeline feature and work it into another genre - and think how you'd have to change the win/lose conditions and the rules.

Image via WikipediaAnother puzzle game I have been playing is Boom Blox on the Wii. You knock down these stacks of blocks with baseballs and ray guns and bowling balls. Some of the blocks are bombs. Others are filed with explosive gas. It's good destructive fun. There's a big training set of lessons, then 3 areas of quests. As you finish the tutorials and quests you win stuff like castles and ray guns of your own to use in the third section - an area wher eyou can builid your own stack of blox for others to knock down - tho the backgrounds and decorations are limited to what you see in the regular game so no outer space blox. I like the destructive aspect. There are little creatures - cows and dogs and penquins - in the background. If ya toss the ball just right you can bean them in the head and make them disappear; you don't get any extra points (and you really should) but it's still fun. It seems less repetitive than the other puzzle games. And there are lots of ways thru the tutorials so you dont' get stuck having to do the same skill ove rand ovr and over till you accidentally do it correctly or in a timely fashion. And no mind-numbing droney music. Maybe that's one of the adantages of hte console - more space on teh dvd for content and better sound on the tv. I'd like to have the students make their own stack of blocks and decorate it for others to play and evaluate but not sure how to share it. Another assignment possibility migight be to look at how games incorporate avatars or characters representing hte palyer - in this game you pick your avatar out at the beginning but the only time you see that character again is when you restart the game. You don't see him throw the baseball or chase the cows. Kind of irritating that they made me pick him out and then I don't get to play as him.

Image via WikipediaSid Meier's Civilization (DS) - ok - i really don't like this kind of game - build units, place units, move units - turn based strategy. You go from the stone age to space age. There are several ways to win - that I like. It had a consistent use of the keys but i couldn't always figure out what triggered the end of my turn and it wasn't always clear to which units I'd already given a destination. It's a good example of in game tutorial level tho. Comparing the content of the tutorials with the directions for the board games we play might be interesting. Or examining the tutorial to see how they teach a variety of skills - what order does the tutorial put things in and is that the optimum pattern. This is definintely one I want to compare across platforms - what did they have to sacrifice to get it on the DS for instance. This isn't a picture of the DS version - it's just the only one I can find at the moment; I'll replace it when I can.

Image via WikipediaAssassin's Creed for the DS - just started this one (I have to play it on the xbox360 too). It's a platformer - run,jump, climb walls, run along rails. I think there's fighting - i saw a tutorial with some wicked sword moves and stabby combinations. No massive blood spurts like Mortal Kombat, but that's ok. There are some mini-puzzles. You use the ABXY keys and the LR trigger instead of the stylus. That was kind of irritating. I want to point with the stylus and have the little guy move there. There are spots where you can't see very good - seemed like my little assassin was around the corner from the camera. And now my little assassin is caught in some kind of dumb loop - i keep following hte arrows but there's nothing to do and it just keeps sending me around. Time to check for a hint online I guess (man how lame is that - but hey, this is for educational purposes, not fun!)

N+ (on the PSP) - IT's a good intro the the button mashing type of videogame - one button with the left hand (directions) and one with the right (jump). Except even that is giving me fits. I'd like to blame it on the fact that I"m left handed so i keep trying to jump with the left hand, but mostly don't think that's it. I need more practice. I am going to play the game on the DS too. I think it would be a good first psp game for the students - use a few buttons. Not much story or character development, just action. You could build a story around it I think to give the little ninja some back story.

Text Twist - a casual game - I played it on Yahoo Games - URL: http://get.games.yahoo.com/proddesc?gamekey=texttwist. I'm a big fan of Book Worm - maybe it's clear I like puzzle games. I like casual games because you can play them for hours but if you only have a few minutes you can still get in a couple of rounds. This one is a little tougher because you only have 6 letters to work with at a time. I like the twist feature which rearranges the letters because it's hard to rearrange them mentally. There is a timer to compete against. If you ahve the right kind of browser it keeps track of high scores (I was on Firefox and it didn't track them). It's an example of a game with very few rules up front (or maybe very few rules overall). It's on a lot of sites - an example of portal distribution. I can't figure out how they're making money but I enjoyed the game.

Shape Inlay - another casual game on Yahoo Games - URL: http://games.yahoo.com/free-games/shape-inlay - a stream of tiles scrolls across the bottom. You have to drag the pieces up into the puzzle shape, trying to fill it in with the shapes. The drag and drop interface is pretty slick. There's time pressure because if the shape tile area fills up you lose. I can't imagine how you could use up all the tiles so I figure you play to get the most points - you're always going to run out of time/tile space - the trick is to play as long as possible. So you maybe can't win but can delay losing as long as possible. I just noticed - there is no credit for the game creator

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Board/Card Games - some we got, more I want

Image via WikipediaI bought 5 new card games for the games classes - different game play mechanisms, some interesting themes, some 2 player and some 3-5 player, some by well-known designers
We got
Pink Godzilla Dev Kit
Frog Juice
Slamwich
MMM...Brains
and
Monkeys on the Moon

And after reading some game play reports from the big board game geek conference in Texas here are a few more games I want to buy. Amazon doesn't carry them and funagain games doesn't have a persistent shopping cart so I'm going to put the info here till I"m ready to buy some more games

Eselsrennen - you race donkeys
Wasabi - a tile layiing game wher eyou're trying to build sushi
Cities - a tile laying game, can be played in about 20 minutes, builds on ideas (and meeples) in Carcasonne
Coloretto (tho the new game by the same designer Boss Kito is supposedly not good at all)
Code 777 - a dice game
Gulo Gulo - a kid's game about removing eggs froma bowl

Child's Play Charity

This Child's Play charity effort organized by the folks at Penny Arcade would be a good thing for a videogame student group to work on once the major gets started. It's respected and well-known int he industry and it would just be fun.

Here's a story from Wired about the 2008 efforts

SL Research Projects are In

Image via WikipediaThe qualitative research class (2 sections) turned their final projects in on Friday. I"ll post some comments here about them as I grade and hopefully some good pictures that they took.

There were a wide variety of topics this semester - role play, sexual subcultures, drug culture live music, fashion, education, dating, how you learn appropriate social behavior, bar culture, religion, and sports. Each group did participant observations, content analysis, and interviews in SecondLife. They got some good interviews - store owners, people who work as DJs, preachers, people who build and invent things in SL...

I'm not sure we'll do again role play and sexual subcultures again because they are the hardest to get people to talk about. The role play people usually stay in character and don't want to be interviewed. The people actively having sex in SL are ... well .... occupied, and don't want to be disturbed by students (or anyone else for that matter) either. In each case, the students got good stuff, just not from the people actually heavily involved in the topic.

Image via WikipediaSomeone suggested we add a topic about money for next semester and I like that idea - how people in SL think about hte in-world currency (do they actively try to earn money, what do they do with money, do they ever put in or take out real world money from the game...)

The FCC talks about videogame addiction

Check out this blog post from Alley Insider - a board member of the FCC has pronounced that people are becoming addicted to WOW and that's making them drop out of college in droves. There's a link ot the FCC doc as a pdf file.

First - why in the world is the FCC involved with WOW? They don't have enough to do with melamine contaminated baby food? Talk about mission creep. Well - some kind of creep, that's for sure.

Second - bad research - there's never just one variable that explains anything involving human behavior. The comments point out that tuition increases are through the roof and that having a college education no longer guarantees a good career. Also very good explanations for why folks drop out of college. And my favorite explanation - a lot of people in college shouldn't be there in the first place so they get weeded out.

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