We find ourselves at the final culminating weeks of this course. For the next 4-weeks you will be completing a full design and basic development of a game from start to finish. Across the next 4 modules we will be revisiting the concepts we have covered throughout the semester and putting them to full application. Specifically each week will have a sub-part of your full final project encapsulating the 4 main stages of the iterative process we covered in module 6.

This week we are going to deep dive into the conceptualization phase of the iterative process. We will look at some of the stages of this part of the process a little closer and broader and you will put these new skills and process to full work.

One of the best way to generate ideas is with brainstorming. Brainstorming is a technique meant to fully explore all of the possible answers to a design question, coming up with as many ideas as possible.

• Quantity over quality: The golden rule of brainstorming is to come up with as many ideas as possible—no matter if you think they’re good, bad, or ugly.
• Defer judgment: Don’t judge your ideas, or if you’re in a team, the ideas of others. The point of brainstorming is to come up with lots of ideas—not to limit them through judgment.
• No buts (just ands): Add on to each others’ ideas (or your own). So instead of saying, “but there are no tubes to another dimension on a hike in the woods” say, “...and what if they lead to rooms full of coins and other goodies?”
• Go wild: Let your ideas be as wild and improbable as possible. It’s easier to rein in a far-out idea than it is to try to breathe some fun and creativity into conservative ideas after the fact.
• Get visual: Drawing something can sometimes capture an idea better than words. Combine ideas: Once you have some ideas written down and drawn, mix them up, and look at how they combine. You could come up with something unique from the combination of different ideas.

The goal of brainstorming isn’t just generating lots of ideas. It is to help get the creative juices flowing, to get team members thinking and riffing off one another and to value everyone’s ideas, no matter the role they might play in the design. It’s also a great way to come to agreement as a team about what’s important.

Here are some methods of brainstorming to consider:

• Idea Speed-Dating: Google this one. There is a lot out there on this process.
• How might we... questions:
  • We already covered this one some a bit in a previous module. This question (How might we) is going to be the seed for the brainstorm. For example, “how might we model the fast food industry so that players learn about sustainability, obesity, and capitalism while still having fun?” Or, “how might we create a journey that generates a sense of awe and camaraderie?” The “how might we...” question opens up the brainstorm to all kinds of possibilities.
  • In some cases, a “how might we...” question can leave more up in the air in terms of the gameplay and content. For example, “how might we create a game to help educate children about healthy eating habits?” Here we might brainstorm a game that is based around different kinds of gameplay, different themes, and stories, but all focused on the goal of educating young people about proper nutrition.
• Noun-Verb-Adjective Brainstorming:
  • A final way to brainstorm is to develop nouns, verbs, and adjectives to brainstorm around. This form of brainstorming is a way to take a concept, break it apart, and make something new out of it. Or take a more complex concept and break it down into components that can form the basis for a game. What you end up with at the end of the exercise is a much better understanding of the potential objects (nouns), actions (verbs), and emotions (adjectives) in your game. We often use this kind of brainstorming to break down a real-world system and come up with ways to represent it in a game. For example, if we’re designing a game to help children make good eating choices, we can take a moment to write down on separate index cards as many nouns, verbs, and adjectives that come to mind. For nouns, we might have broccoli, snack, parents, teachers, friends, grocery store, farm, candy bar.... For verbs, eating, jumping, talking, playing, craving...and adjectives, salty, sweet, hilarious, fuzzy, gigantic, sleepy.... We can then shuffle the cards and form combinations to create a “how might we...” question for a brainstorm: “how might we create a game to promote healthy eating with gigantic jumping broccoli?” We often add a few unexpected verbs and adjectives in there to keep things interesting. You can also spend a few minutes brainstorming a variety of noun-verb-adjective combinations or have more than one of each. The key to a noun-verb-adjective brainstorm is to help you come up with unexpected solutions to a game design problem.

Macklin, Colleen; Sharp, John. Games, Design and Play (Game Design) (pp. 165-169). Pearson Education. Kindle Edition.

Once a game idea is formed, attention should shift to the game’s focus. Is it all about the play experience and the main actions players get to use? Or is it more about exploring a narrative world? Is it a game meant to convey a feeling or idea? Or a game meant to simulate something in the real world? Journalists use the term angle to describe the perspective from which they are telling a story and their intention in researching and writing the piece. Similarly, understanding the angle you will take to craft your game will help you identify important questions to answer. A motivation is just that—the angle you are taking in the game’s design. Motivations link the basic game design tools discussed in Module 3, "Game Design Tools” with the kinds of play covered in Module 4, "Kinds of Play” and help set the stage for your design values described in Module 7, “Design Document.”

Designing Around the Main Thing the Player Gets to Do

• What does the player get to do?
• What is going on in the game?
• What are some adjectives that describe the play experience?

Designing Around Constraints

We talked extensively about constraints in design tools. Review that material for a good review there. Here is a little more.

Constraint, both in terms of constraining what players can do and providing interesting limits on our game’s design, can generate creativity in overcoming them. Following are a few considerations we like to keep in mind when designing around constraints:

• What does the game keep the player from doing? How is the player’s ability to overcome challenges limited? What do these limitations open up for players?
• Where does the challenge come from? What is pushing back against the player’s ability to achieve their goals?
• How do players make decisions—real time or turn based? Limiting the player’s time and ability to evaluate their options and make their next action is a great form of constraint.
• Is the game competitive, cooperative, or both? The goals and to what end players are interacting are forms of constraint.
• What is the mix of strategy, skill, chance, and uncertainty?Are there unpredictable elements in the game? What interesting choices can the player make? How skilled must the player become to achieve the goals of the game?
• How does the player see, feel, and hear the game? What constraints come through the player’s ability to perceive the game? Is any information hidden?
• How can we use constraint in our design process? What are some ways we can constrain our choices as designers? How can we use limitations to our advantage?

Designing Around a Story

Another core consideration for a game might be telling an interesting story, or perhaps to be more precise in how games tell stories: developing a storyworld. Perhaps you are interested in developing a character through your game, or maybe you have an idea for a setting or historic moment to situate your game in.

Questions to ask if you are interested in designing around a story include these:

• What is the game’s theme? What is the game about? Is there a point of view or moral to the story? In what kind of world does it take place? Is it inspired by a historic period?
• What is the player’s role in telling the story? Is the player watching a story unfold, or are they an active participant? How do their actions advance the plot?
• How many different outcomes or paths will there be through the story? Do players progress through a predetermined set of story elements? Does the story branch? Are there optional moments in the game?
• What are some adjectives that describe how the story will make players feel? What emotional state will your story bring about in your players?
• What are the important verbs in the story? What are the important nouns? Can the story be abstracted down to key actions, or verbs, and key people and things, or nouns? Can these in turn be used to develop the game’s structure?
• What will the player be left thinking about after their play experience? Are the ideas you hope to explore in the game coming through the story? If so, what will it lead the player to think about?

Designing around Personal Experience

Personal experiences can be a big inspiration for creating games, although interestingly enough, the personal story is not as prevalent in games as it is in mediums like writing and film. This may be because we are early in videogames’ history and still developing a language and set of techniques to express ideas with games.

Questions to ask if you are developing a game around personal experience include these:

• How autobiographical will the game be? Is this game a memoir of a particular experience you had? Will you include actual dialogue, places, and people? Images from your life?
• Will the game be a more abstract representation of your experience? Is the game meant to express a feeling or experience you had but displace it from the particular details of your own? What kind of representations, settings, and characters would help express the experience?
• What are some of the verbs or actions you can include to help the player understand the experience and feel it for themself? What physical activities are involved in the experience? What actions can express the conflicts or challenges in the experience? How will the player unfold the experience through their interactions with it?

Abstracting the Real World

Games are a medium defined by systems. As Donella Meadows states, “A system is a set of things—people, cells, molecules, or whatever—interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time.”9 Meadows’ definition is used to describe the systems that underlay much of how the world works. Games are systems too and are well suited to modeling systems that exist in the real world. They are also abstractions. The world itself is a pretty complicated place—games take that complexity and boil it down into simple rules. When abstracting a system in the real world, we need to choose a player point of view, a core set of actions, and a way to provide feedback to the player about the impact of their actions. Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer, 2008.

Questions to ask when designing games that abstract the real world include these:

• How does the system in the real world work? What are the elements in the system? How are they connected? What are the dynamics of those connections? What are the inputs and outputs of the system?
• What does the game say about this system? How changeable is the system? What kinds of actions does the system reward? Is the system a reflection on a societal or a human problem?
• How can player point of view and feedback help players understand how the system works? Is the player an element in the system, or are they above it, in a bird’s eye view? Do they have any control over how the system works, or are they subjected to the rules of the system? How does the game reward or penalize actions within the system?
• What does the abstraction leave out? Just as important is considering the things removed from the real-world phenomenon to create a simplified representation for the game.

Designing Around the Player

For many games, players are among the most important considerations. Who do you imagine as the audience for your game? What are they like? A great tool for fleshing out your player is personas. Personas, a tool developed initially by Alan Cooper in his book The Inmates Are Running the Asylum,10 are fictional players that are based on the attributes we think our players will have. A persona has a name, age, job, education history, and other details, such as the kinds of games and other media they might like (or dislike, for that matter). Often, teams will create two or three personas to guide their design process. The first persona will be the primary one—the main player the team wants to design for. The second and third personas will be other players the team wants to keep in mind and who the team thinks will enjoy playing the game. Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity. New York: Sams-Pearson Education, 2004.

Whether you create personas or not, these questions are really helpful in understanding your players:

• Who is playing? This might be specific people, but it may also be a particular community or culture or most any other grouping of individuals.
• Where are they playing? Having a particular setting in mind is helpful, particularly if designing for installation, arcade, or other known space like a subway, a bus, at an event, and so on.
• When are they playing? Having a handle on a time period (such as daytime or evening) is helpful, but more important is what else players might be doing at that time—socializing, being alone at home, and so on.
• What else do they play? Having a sense of what kinds of games the ideal player engages with is helpful, too.
• What else do they like? Beyond games, what else does the player enjoy? Camping, cooking, or knitting? Films, comics, or music? Thinking about the other activities and mediums the player engages with will help think more broadly about the game.

Macklin, Colleen; Sharp, John. Games, Design and Play (Game Design) (p. 170-178). Pearson Education. Kindle Edition.

We covered design values extensively in:

Module 7 - Design Document

Head on over there for a quick refresher before you move on to this weeks assignment

The Final Project has begun! Dun, Dun, Duuuuunnnn!

For the next 4 weeks you are going to be working on a single project that will span 4 assignments that will culminate in not only having a game, but also the documentation to control the process, the play-testing to provide you feedback, and the evaluation to prove out the effectivity of your product. This is where you will take everything we've covered and will put it into practice!

IMPORTAINT!

This week you are going to produce the design document for your game.

1 Work through as much brainstorming exercises as you can in a reasonable time.

2 Once you have an idea selected, Create a word document and setup the main sections we covered in module 7. flesh out the contents of this document utilizing the language, tools, skills, and techniques we have learned this semester to fully develop out your concept for your game. Remember to keep the idea bounded to your ability to develop in a given development tool (Scratch, GameMaker, Unity, Unreal, etc.)

3 Submission: Once complete please save the Word Document with a file name matching this format. Replace 'Lastname-Firstname' with your actual name.
'Lastname-Firstname'_FinalDesignDocument.docx
(Example: Swardson-Brad_FinalDesignDocument.docx)

4 Click on Final Project - Design Document in the UNM Learn Assignments Listing.

5 Scroll down to Assignment Files and Browse Local file to select the file you created and attach it to your submission for this assignment.

Please make sure you also complete the other requirements in your todo list like quiz. Don't forget those.