MA Game Design
Personal aims and objectives For my final major project I chose to create a procedural narrative game – one that would attempt to stage a rehearsal of Chekhov’s The Seagull, but without the input of the writer or director – titled Chekhov’s Gone! This project was inspired by the work I had performed over the summer …
Continue reading “Final Major Project: Critical Reflections”
As I moved into the final weeks of the project, I began sharing builds of the game with people. I was interested to see how people reacted to it with no tutorialisation – I knew that I no longer had time to finesse particularly elegant versions of my original example outputs, but I hoped that …
Continue reading “Final Major Project: UI and Player Feedback”
This devlog covers my work on the agent behaviour for Chekhov’s Gone! Broadly speaking, the emergent behaviour that occurs in Chekhov’s Gone! comes out of Actors performing Actions in pursuit of their Objectives. Research Procedural Storytelling in Video Games (2019) was of particular use in approaching this area, especially Tarn Adams’ chapter on Emergent Narrative …
Continue reading “Final Major Project: Behavioural Loops for Agents”
Even at this early stage of development, I knew my project would need to include interactions between the following kinds of agents and objects: Actors, Areas, Items, Objectives and Actions. I also knew that – especially in terms of Objectives and Actions – I would likely have a lot of them, and that in order …
A major influence to this project both mechanically and visually, Tarn Adams’ Dwarf Fortress has been in development for almost twenty years. In this case study I will look at the three ways the game communicates dialogic and character information – through its event log, its ‘thoughts and preferences’ page, and its gameworld interface. The …
Continue reading “Final Major Project: Case Study – Dwarf Fortress”
I spent my first week back in the studio concepting a number of responses to the design recommendations of my thesis: Brickbreaker Dialogue Game Focusing on stretch and spatial opposition, this opens up the traditional dialogue ‘choices’ of relationship games / visual novels like Love Island or Doki Doki Literature Club to new mechanics. Conversations …
Continue reading “Final Major Project: Identifying a Direction”
My thesis – titled Time, Space and Interface: Reframing dialogue design for better flow – explored three different frameworks from game studies academia. The first two frameworks – Wei, Bizzocchi and Calvert’s categories of time and space – are used to understand games from a narratological perspective; the third – Kristine Jorgensons’ gameworld interface theory …
Continue reading “Final Major Project: Thesis Reflections and Conclusions”
Here I have collated the case study work I performed on Signs of the Sojourner, using formal analysis, Calleja’s Player Involvement Model, and Costikyan’s uncertainty categories. Hand size 5 (constant) Deck size 10 (but grows over time as fatigue cards are added) Deck update method Replace 1 card from your deck with 1 of your …
Continue reading “Understanding Gaming Experience: Case Study (Signs of the Sojourner)”
Here I have collated the case study work I performed on Griftlands, using formal analysis, Calleja’s Player Involvement Model, and Costikyan’s uncertainty categories. Hand size 5 (starting size; cards can increase hand size in the following turn) Deck size 10 (starting size; can grow or shrink as players add or remove cards) Deck update method …
Continue reading “Understanding Gaming Experience: Case Study (Griftlands)”
The following is a collection of draft paragraphs, supplemented by research, introducing some of the key concepts of my paper. While useful in the initial drafting of the work, this part of the literature review was ultimately deemed too wide-reaching for the scope, and I was able to condense it into single sentences or references. …
Continue reading “Understanding Gaming Experience: Research Log 2”