My Games Design Experience

As soon as I finished my game, I needed to see what people thought of it. I printed out a questionnaire and gave out a copy to each member of the group. Only 4 of them came to take a look and responded back, which limits feedback a bit. Here are the 10 questions I asked and the answers I got. Question 1: What do you think the game should be called? (Because I'm still struggling with ideas) Not everyone could think of an idea either. I only got 2 responses for this. One person suggested it should be called 'City Escape' because of the city setting and another suggested that it should be called 'Love Attack' because you rescue your girlfriend from a kidnapper that you have to fight like in Super Mario Bros. I quite liked the latter idea and may consider naming it that. Question 2: What did you think about the platform levels? They all agreed that it was a good platform with different opinions. One said it was too not challenging but still looked fun and anothe...

I have now designed a fully functioning retro game. It's based on Super Mario Bros but with ordinary citizens - your girlfriend has been kidnapped by someone and you have to fight them to rescue them. When you play it, it looks like it was a piece of cake to make, but it wasn't. Here are some of the challenges I faced when making the game. The first challenge I faced was the health bar. Rather than just displaying it as simple text, I wanted to use the circle design with the 4 colours to represent whereabouts your health is that was used in Super Mario 64. Firstly, I had trouble trying to get it to follow the player on the screen and not appear as part of the level. Eventually, I realised that to do this, I had to go to the HUD layer and set the parallax to 0,0, and move the health bar to the margin. This means that regardless of how high or low the main character is on the screen (I thought I had to place it above him for it to work), it will always appear in the top left ...

My first proper gaming console was the Wii and now I am on the Xbox One. There's a gap of 7 years between release dates, the Wii was released on November 19, 2006 while the Xbox One was released on November 22, 2013. As a result, the Xbox One is more advanced than the Wii. I got my Wii for Christmas in 2008. Games that came with it included Cars, Mario Kart, Wii Sports and Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games. Over time, I got more and more games for it. I got my favourite game for it after wanting it for just over 2 years for my 11th birthday in 2013, Mario Kart: Double Dash (as you could put GameCube discs into it and play them as normal provided you had a GameCube controller (which was still wired) and a memory card). The Wii was Nintendo's first home console to have game memory stored on the system instead of on a memory card and the first one to have wireless controllers. My favourite proper Wii game was Cars: Race O'Rama, which was so good when it was released ...

For this assignment, I will be looking at a general sound problem as well as a music problem. My sound problem comes from Grand Theft Auto V. Graphics-wise, it is meant to be one of the most realistic games in history, but when you hear some of the sounds that male NPCs make when you kill them with one punch, it really isn't. If you've followed my blog for a little while, you already know how much I've criticized the 3rd sound in the video below. It's meant to be made when the guy gets murdered. I scrolled down to use some qualitative research and see what people thought about these sounds but the comments were just full of people saying which one was their favourite because of how hilariously bad it is. However, I did get an answer at home. When I asked a family member what they thought of the 3rd sound, they said it sounded more like the guy had got his finger trapped in a door. Other than that, I knew it was down to me because this appears to be one of those prob...

Research Techniques Primary research is when you go out to collect people's feedback about something you've come up with. Ways to conduct this include conducting surveys both online and in the street. Sometimes just observing can get you the results you need. For example, you can check to see what types of games people are buying so you know what type of game to make. Secondary research is looking at existing examples of work from previous projects to get inspiration from your own. Examples of secondary research include looking on search engines like Google and Bing or looking through books and encyclopedias. You could use primary research to analyse a problem in a game by holding a survey to ask what people think about the problem to see how much of a problem it's viewed as. If you have an idea of how to resolve the problem (for example a sound problem) from better examples in other games, you could view them using secondary research to compare the good example with ...

In this blog, we will find examples in video games where sound could be improved. One of my favourite things about video games is the music choices. Usually game developers are very good at using music to set the scene or situation. Usually to tell people it's the same situation, they'll re-use music. For example, in Super Mario 64, they used the racing and sky theme for the clock stage to set in players' minds that you can still expect the same chaos as in the sky stages or racing. As a result of that I wasn't particularly impressed when in Mario Kart 64, they used the same music for Wario Stadium as they did for the Raceway tracks. This means that a quarter of the stages in that game use the Raceway music. I get the similarities that like the Raceways, Wario Stadium is somewhere you'd actually have a race but they're basic kart racing whereas the stadium's more of a dirt bike track. Personally, I think that Nintendo could have looked at inspiration from ...

Exercise 1 The three games I will be analyzing for sound are Super Mario Bros., Bully and Grand Theft Auto V. Most Super Mario games are really good at using sound as information. In the original platform games, the music that plays when you get a star changes from the normal steady level theme to a more rapid theme. This tells the player that they are invincible and that nothing can kill them (apart from falling through a gap), and the increase of speed adds to the player's determination to complete the level quicker now touching Goombas and Koopa Troopas kills them instead of the player. It's such an iconic theme that if it plays in public, people will probably think they're invincible themselves. Also, when you've been dawdling in a level and you're in the last 100 seconds before time's up, a dramatic piece will play to tell you to hurry up and then the level music will play at a faster rate, to try to increase determination to finish the level. In Bull...

The game I have chosen to prove meets all 4 areas is Grand Theft Auto Online. The game involves players roaming around the city of Los Santos (based on Los Angeles). It was released in October 2013 simply to cause chaos with your friends online and complete missions to earn money and set a life up like you would in single player. Just under 5 years later, you can now rob banks, run your own criminal enterprise, motorcycle club and even own a nightclub. This was the only trailer I could find. It's for the nightclub update that came out earlier this year, and although it doesn't show the franchise as a whole that well, it does show that this game specifically tries to show players that it's more than running around killing people and stealing cars like it was at the start. Here is a demonstration of how the game starts. Lamar will welcome you to Los Santos and first, you have to race him around the streets of Los Santos. There are two things I really enjoy abo...

Hi everyone. I'm here to talk about designing games. I'm studying Games Design at college in the hope to create the first modern open-world set in the UK (something along the lines of Grand Theft Auto V or Sleeping Dogs). If you have any information, please share as I'd really like to know.