MA Game Design
The following case studies of two recent narrative games (Fallout 4 and Disco Elysium) will analyse how their dialogue systems are rendered through their user interfaces (UI). Of particular interest to me are how a player physically interacts with dialogue, how games visually present text, and how they communicate feedback on player choice. Fallout 4 …
Continue reading “Critical Play Project: Case Study (Dialogue UI)”
In my research for this project, I identified two key approaches to dialogue systems in games. The first system – the so-called ‘hub’ system – has been widely adopted across game genres. The second – which I’ll call the ‘hatch’ system – has been developed almost as a response to the pervasiveness and rigidness of …
Continue reading “Critical Play Project: Case Study (Dialogue Systems)”
This development log will track and summarise some of the research undertaken during this project. I began this project with the objective of making a philosophically engaged game, specifically connected to language and dialogue. With most narrative-driven games using dialogue systems to simulate acts of speech, I decided that J. L. Austin’s seminal text How …
This was my first attempt at using a 2D lighting system, and I found the process to be both challenging and creatively invigorating.
One of Xinyu’s earliest sprite submissions was the seaweed spritesheet – it contained long strands of curved seaweed, with bulbous ‘heads’.
Upon deciding on an underwater environment for the game, Xinyu and I both agreed we would need fish – and not just a single floating fish, as Xinyu had already drawn, but schools and shoals of fish.
Xinyu got to work making some different fish sprites, and I revisited Zans’ tutorial on boids. Boids are objects that react to each others’ position, rotation and speed to create formations, and depending on the variables entered they will appear to move like birds, fish, cars, meteors, pedestrians… The possibilities are endless!
And by ‘Week 5’ I mean all anything I did between the end of term and the submission date.
Feedback session (14/12/2020): During the feedback session I shared the results from the playtest, and also some of my concerns re: the balancing. David reassured me that the game was already in a submittable state, and that some of these balancing questions could happily be solved if I wanted to work further on it after …
Continue reading “Designing & Prototyping: 18 Card Game (Week 4)”
Week three progressed much better. After having stressed about the unviability of the object stacking idea, I spent an hour before our consultation with David iterating on the basics of the project, but inserting more limitations. How could I keep the narrative and visual elements of this burger stack idea, which I liked, but engage …
Continue reading “Designing & Prototyping: 18 Card Game (Week 3)”
This week I mostly brainstormed the initial idea for the stacking game. The ‘cards’ are circular, and represent different ‘layers’ of a burger: bun, lettuce, sauces, bacon, cheese. Written on each one are a series of prompts that could describe objects in a room: thick, squishy, flammable, living. Players are split into two teams, and …
Continue reading “Designing & Prototyping: 18 Card Game (Week 2)”