Game Studies // Journal

 

29/8-12/12/22 Week 1- Week 15

Chan Siew Ni #0352518
Bachelor of Design in Creative Media

Game Studies // Exercises

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INSTRUCTION 

<iframe src="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mzzCFRVkD8yV7AO-ZCEiXOfDUCSUHzZa/preview" width="640" height="480" allow="autoplay"></iframe>

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LECTURES 

Week 1: Today is Malaysia Independence Day so it will be no class.

Week 2: Today, Dr Charles has brief us about the module overview and also explained to us that there's a game in any culture. He also briefs us on what we going to do and what to expect in next week. And for today, we formed a group for our further work as we had to work in a team to propose the game.

Week 3: Dr Charles introduce us to some types of games

Week 4:

Three-dimensionality

Component of Gameplay Immersion:

1. Sensory immersion

2. Challenge-based immersion

3. Imaginative immersion

Week 5:

Multisensory:

1. Motivation

2. Engaging

3. Appealing

4. Replayable

5. Social- brings people together

"Every experience you had in a game is DATA"

Prototype:

1. Design a prototype

2. Playtest your prototype (Embrace failure, be critical, and more experiential)

3. Analyze what happened

4. Back to step 1, keep developing the prototype

Iterative Design VS Design Thinking

- The user is always the centre of the design

Figure 1: Design Thinking Process

Figure 1.1: Iterative Design Thinking Process

Figure 1.2: Prototyping process

Week 6: From this week onwards, there will be no more physical class and we have to focus on completing our game development. We must manage our time and every week should make a schedule with Dr Charles for consultation.

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GAME STUDIES // EXERCISES

Exercises 1: Personal Game History

Task: We have been required to mind map the games that we played before since we are young until now. We shall have a less than 3 mins presentation for the following week. 

Exercises 2 // Group Work: Games Proposal 

Task: Find out the current issues or problems that come from our daily life or from an existing game so that we could design or redesign a tabletop game. We are required to show our ideas next week.

Figure 2: Work progress on proposal idea (inspiration)

Figure 2.1: Work progress on proposal idea (Problem statement)

Figure 2.2: Work progress on proposal idea (idea)

Week 3 Task: We were required to do the suggestion feedback from Dr Charles and show him by the following week. We have to design the storyline of our game and it needs some dialogue.

Figure 2: Process of making the storyline

Week 4 Task: We are required to think about the storyline again due to the story is too typical.

Week 5 Task: We are required to elaborate and complete the whole storyline. Then, we are required to draw out our map on physical paper and also bring some characters to play with for the following week.

Week 6 Task: Finalize the storyline and start developing the game

Figure 3: Work progress on the story script

Week 7- 12 Task: Developing the game

Figure 4: Work progress on creating the map

Figure 4.1: Work progress on compositing the action

Figure 4.2: Work progress on compositing the action

Figure 4.3: Work progress on designing the map

Figure 4.4: Work progress on the expression of NPC

Figure 4.5: Testing out the game

Week 13-15 Task: Find out the bugs and improvised the game

After Sim and Hazeem have done the game, we then download the executable file and test out the game. Then, we found that there are many bugs and problems occurring so we listed them down and asked them to fix them. After several versions, finally we got our refining version of the game that we were all satisfied with.

Figure 5: a different versions of Hatred

Week 16 Task: Finalize the Game 

For this week, We focus on documenting everything including our progression and process. We compile documents in our group sites. 

Figure 6: Work progress on writing Google Sites

Figure 6.1: Work progress on writing Google Sites

SUBMISSION OF GAME STUDIES

Exercise 1// Personal Game History 

Individual Exercise

Exercise 2 - 5 // Group Project 

Our Group Sites link: LINK

Final Project (Game "Hatred")

<iframe frameborder="0" src="https://itch.io/embed-upload/6989122?color=333333" allowfullscreen="" width="640" height="380"><a href="https://hatredd.itch.io/hatred">Play Hatred on itch.io</a></iframe>

Group Sites: https://sites.google.com/view/errrma/home?authuser=0

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FEEDBACK 

Week 3: Dr Charles said that overall our idea is workable, we just had to think about our storyline since our game is a story-based game. For the following week, we should have a complete storyline with some simple dialogue so that we can act it out. 

Week 4: Dr Charles said that currently our story is quite typical and he can predict the ending so he suggest we make a story that is more interesting as we can add some fantasy elements to enhance the game.

Week 5: Dr Charles had approved our storyline and he suggested we make a physical map for the following week so that we could play around with the physical map and make some changes.

Week 6: Dr Charles said that right now the story is too linear and silly because we don't give the players a stronger feeling of the reason the girl would choose the ring from the coke can instead of choosing the diamond necklace.

Week 14: Dr Charles said that our story narrative is good it's just the mechanics of the game should be improvised as now he doesn't know which to press and which to not press and he said our game should have a feeling of 'guiding the player by not guiding it' means that by giving the player some hidden clues to guide them goes smoothly to the right path.

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REFLECTIONS

Throughout the whole process of this module, I felt satisfied and happy because I think that the game that we design is quite good. Although the story narrative part is so overwhelming because we change too many times and the details of every story part are complex. I am glad that the final result of this game was to my expectation and I think it's meaningful. The only problem will be there's not very sufficient time as we know that developing a game is not easy to progress and we had lots of other assignments and some of our groupmates have got exams. But end up, we managed to develop a game!