Game Design Document

What is up fellow people, so our next task was to create something called a Game Design Document or a "GDD" for our game idea. Opened the template for the thing and didn't understand half of it, but after some Googling I figured out what most of it meant. It was pretty confusing since we haven't been told what game architecture or abstract classes are, so just kinda filled out what I could. It was actually pretty helpful filling out the document though. Not only is it a good place to store your ideas but when you go through the document section by section you start to put some thought into sections that you might have forgotten about or haven't got to yet regarding your game e.g. when the document tells you to write about level design you put a lot more thought into what your level design will actually be. Through this process I actually elaborated on some aspects of my game a bit, so it was actually pretty beneficial.

Heres the link to my GDD:
https://www.dundoc.com/project/5855/2ux012sybu

(Possible example of how one of my levels will look, probably like this but made of 10 pixels)

Game: No Mans Sky

Source

Unity Tutorial 5

This week we returned to the teachings of Jimmy Vegas, we watched his tutorial videos number 6, 7 and 8. The first video covered how to use a dynamic hud, this involves creating a special cursor that only appears when the option to interact with something (e.g a collectible) is available. This process also took us over how to add action text to the scene such as "Press E to take gem" and also how to actually trigger the action itself.

The second video talked about how to create a weapon that your character can use in the game. This included creating/importing the weapon (in this case an axe) and then also properly positioning the axe so that it looks correct on the screen. The final video went over how to actually make the axe swing and make the animation look legitimate. Overall I thought this batch of tutorials were a little easier to follow than some of the previous ones and I think I can actually implement this into my final
project, since its such a versatile tool that can be used for pretty much anything, from using it action games as a combat weapon to using it as a tool to collect items, there's plenty of mechanics we can add using this feature.

(Thumbnail for Jimmy Vegas's tutorial video)

Source

Game GDD

This week I read up on some material about tips on how to improve on the user experience (UI) and rule writing for board games. User experience is how the player interacts with the game, for example the pieces in a game of chess. The research material goes into great detail about this aspect of board games, specifically how it affects the players overall experience of the game. A component of this mentioned in the article was making the pieces of a board game as identifiable as possible. This can be done by altering their color, their shape or in the case of card games, their suits. It was stated that many people suffer from some form of color blindness, so these mechanics can be vital to include these people and since the pieces in games such as card games cant be reshaped, suits over a solution for people who are visually impaired.

The article also talks about using legible font because it can be really annoying to the player if they cant read the cards/rules. One aspect it mentions to include is to differentiate the 9's from the 6's so that they aren't identical when viewed upside down. The material even talks about how different regions write their numbers differently, so for example in some regions a 1 may be mistaken for a 7 in other regions. So its important to put the effort into differentiating these kinds of things. One more thing that is mentioned in the material is the box that the game comes in. While this has no influence on how the game actually plays and how enjoyable it is it must be considered for a view reasons. Mainly for marketing purposes, for example putting the name of the game on both the horizontal and vertical sides of the box in big clear writing, this way the game can catch the viewers attention and the name/logo will be visible regardless of if the store staff stock it vertically or horizontally, this is something that is an aspect that is often overlooked by a lot of board games surprisingly.

("Monopoly", a game widely known for its diversely shaped playing pieces)

Source

Additional Research

"Game UI By Example"

An article by Desi Quintans that outlines the fundamentals of user interface and delves into some examples of the best and worst user interfaces in games from recent history.

"Common Mistakes In Video Game User Interfaces"

An article by Alexander Yordanov that discusses the pitfalls of user interface that countless games have fallen into, particularly picking on aspects such as slow UI that plague video games containing them.

"Learning From Board Games"

An article by Jim Ross that talks about how board games incorporate aspects of user design (specifically monopoly) and what kind of user interface he as a player and customer likes to see in games.