What are the qualities of games?
As we have previously discussed, it is hard to label what a game is and isn't, you can find the link to my blog post about this here, but this latest article tries to put a list of classifications on what a game is, or as the article calls them "atomic elements". The atomic elements are the most basic things that each game has in common, and what they are all made up of, these are listed as:
Players; how many and what their relationships with each other are
Objectives or goals; what are the players trying to achieve
Rules; rules are rules
Resources and resource management; every item that is under the control of the player
Game state; everything that makes up a snapshot of the game
Information; what the player knows and doesn't know
Sequencing; how players take their turns
Player interaction; how do players interact with each other
Theme; narrative, story, and background
Games as systems; everything as a whole
All of these terms help us to narrow down what makes up a game so we know what we need to focus our time on and give us more language to use as we talk amongst our class groups if we need help with any of our game development project.
Prototype your game
While watching the video on prototyping your game I realised I hadn't even thought of prototyping or making any real-life iterations of the game beforehand. They had the idea of making a 2D version of the game first out of pieces of paper, which was also covered in the article here, which in my case works really well for the racing game, the sidescroller game and the kerbs game ideas I came up with.
This idea of making a very basic and barebones version of your game on paper, that only allows for the most basic mechanics of your game is a really smart and interesting way to begin the prototyping phase, that never would have came to my head. The idea of getting others to play the game while it's in this phase is a really good idea too.
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