Week Eight Class Critiques

The following is feedback for the teams that presented in Week Eight:

ANTLION

Mechanics

It appears that your mechanics are very clear for the player. The purpose of the game is to prevent yourself from being hunted by the ever threatening ant lion. As an ant your only true defense is your cunning and your speed. This is a very simple, appropriate, and fun mechanic to implement. Many other games that meant for a more well rounded user use a similar approach, namely for racing games. It is important to keep this your fundamental mechanic and avoid creating power ups that would disrupt this, such as by creating an easy to attain weapon that would damage or even kill the ant lion.

Dynamics

To make the dynamics of the game the most interesting to the player, a sense of suspense should be created over minutes rather than hours. It seems that the game you are trying to create is one meant to last for short durations of simple game play and because of this, it is important to have a more intense sense of possible doom to the player as they are playing this game. My suggestion is to have an ant lion that is not completely seen to the player and have it so no matter how fast the players go, there is some way for the ant lion to disrupt or interfere with the players strategy. This will help meet the need for a challenge to the player while not making it impossible to meet or see the ant lion.

Aesthetics

To me, the types of fun that you are using for your game are challenge, discovery, and submission and with this comes several considerations for your game. To create the challenge of the game, you have decided to create a basically invincible opponent that stalks you over time and is always looming over your shoulder, which is a significant but important design choice. You have a small sense of discovery if you choose to implement some kind of power up system. This will allow players to interact within their ecosystem in different ways. Finally, based on the description that was given and as already touched upon in dynamics, this would make a very good short duration game. Because of this, the view, art, and special effects so match a sense of urgency with the ant needing to escape.

FINS OF FURY

Mechanics

You have two important mechanics to consider for this game: point and click combat and three dimensional movement. Make sure for your point and click combat that you may close detail to your close combat collision detection. Many games have run into trouble, like Superman 64, because it was too difficult to attack an enemy up close.

There are a few design considerations that you will have to make for your movement. Because you are planning on having this being a third person real time combat game, like Resident Evil 4, and because you are making this underwater, it does not make sense to me to give your players the ability to strafe from side to side (or at least as a tadpole). However, to maintain continuity and because players are use to being able to strafe in a first person and third person environment, are you going to give it to them anyways?

Dynamics

The biggest concern that I have about the dynamics of this game is making it too easy for the players to win because of the AI of the NPCs. I think that you can be really creative and you can define your opponents personalities and have it compare to some measure of your user (number of kills over duration of time for example). If you have three different mind sets for an opponent, such as easy, medium, and hard or passive, normal, and aggressive, you can have the game be easy at some times (when you need healing) and difficult during other times (when the player is killing things left, right and center).

Aesthetics

You have many types of fun for your game: Fantasy, Narrative, Challenge, Discovery, and Expression. With these many types of fun comes an expectation from the user. To be able to help support the sense of fantasy, have outrageous looking characters, both opponents and friendly NPCs. Have dangers that exist to tadpoles in the real world and within the magic circle your are trying to develop (for instance, have polluted zones deal damage to the tadpole over time). You can also make special quests that help immerse the player into the fantasy and the narrative more.

The game itself can only be challenging if the dynamics allow for it (refer to dynamics sections for suggestions). As far as Discovery and Expression, it was mentioned that the tadpole will upgrade itself by growing legs, arms, and a body. It would be really interesting if you could choose which part of your body you can add first, arms versus legs, because this will allow the player to customize their frog based on their playing style, power versus speed. This will also allow the player to explore the environment from two different perspectives allowing for two different modes of play, a slower but more high powered mode or a faster less powered mode.

MIZU

Mechanics

The main mechanic you are going to need to focus on is your cannon firing mechanic. By having the effect of it dynamic with the ability to charge you leave it open to the player as to how they should use it. Should they conserve water and to small individual shots or should they over kill with a single charged shot. Make sure that the power ups that you have help support the types of shots the player can do or how accurately they can do it.

A secondary mechanic you have is movement. Because you are having a 2D side scrolling game, your movement is fairly simple, up, down left and right. If you have power ups or another system of improving this can all add to the game.

Dynamics

I like how you are adding the negative feedback twist with the weapon. By having it so the player can not have the weapon readied at full power all the time forces the player to properly conserve their resources. Even though this does add an extra challenge to the game, be aware that it also makes the game forces the player to conform more to a more conservative playing style rather than a readied power playing style, like in Megaman.

I think it would be important to find a way to limit and enhance the players movement. Having a fast or slow player can make the difference between victory and defeat. Also, temporarily limiting or even disabling someones ability to jump changes the way a player interacts in their environment. This can add to the challenge to the game without having to scale some of the enemy NPCs.

Aesthetics

The strongest types of fun that you are appealing to are as follows: Challenge, Discovery, Expression, and Submission. I believe that you have all four of these well thought out. With challenge, you can limit the players ability by giving them curses them or enhancing them by giving them power ups. The players can find their best combinations of power ups and how they can most optimally interact in the environment, which appeals to the sense of discovery and expression. Submission is the only form of fun that I am unsure how you are going about. To me, like with team AntLion, if you manipulate the environment to help create a sense of urgency and making multiple and different power ups, you can make this a quick game that is enjoyable for multiple iterations, even after the player has completed the game.

TESTING 1... 2... 3

Mechanics

There are two fundamental game mechanics for this game: combat system and 2D movement. The combat system I am actually unsure how you are going about it. Is it single click combat (click onces to swipe a sword) or is it pattern combat (type in a pattern to get a combination of attacks). Both of which come with different benefits and problems. Single click will allow you to have simple combat but can have a problem with making the game challenging without compromising collision detection or the power of the players. Combo attacks allows for more aesthetics but makes the learning curve higher.

The second mechanic you have is 2D movement. Make sure that you have items that enhance this mechanic as well. I remember you saying that this is inspired by Dungeons and Dragons. Keep in mind they too have ways of both enhancing and disrupting movement with everything from potions of expeditious retreat to tangle foot bags.

Dynamics

The easiest way to help balance out the dynamics of the game are to give your opponents and the players access to similar abilities. For instance if the players have a way to stop enemy movement, then the enemies should have a way slow the players.

You had mentioned that you wanted to have a party based game but were considering making this a single player game. The best way to have the best of both worlds is to have the player select their character from your selection of characters and then have the computer select 3 other characters that will play with the character, similar to Guildwars. This will allow you to make the game more challenging to the player and still have the feel of dungeon crawling with a group.

Aesthetics

There are four types of fun that you are appealing to in this: Fantasy, Challenge, Discover, and Expression. To appeal to fantasy, going for the medieval look is good choice. It is easy to make stereotypes out of the genre, such as the wizard, fighter, thief, priest and what not. You already recognize that the game needs to have more balance both in enemy and player abilities.

The players are going to be looking for someway to enhance they character. By giving someway to internally enhancing their characters (skill trees or ability selection) and power ups. By having a diverse set of power ups and character enhancement players can enjoy playing the game in multiple iterations with different outcomes and strategies for each character, power ups, and ability selection.