Just fire up the Zoopnium app, put your device in your pocket, and get moving. Every step you take helps you collect Zoopnium. Collect enough, and you can create your own custom Zoops and even trade them with friends. Try it out now!

UPDATE: Zoopnium is now one of the top ten kids’ games in Canada with thousands of downloads and playthroughs. What are you waiting for? Download it, play it, rate it.

What many fail to realize is that game design is in the details. After the overall concept is nailed down and a prototype has been hammered out, the game designer spends countless hours fine tuning a game, making sure that every action, level, and challenge feels good and increases the amount of fun in the game.

When the topic of gameplay tuning comes up, many people say that it comes down to a feeling you get when you play the game. When the feeling is right, the game is well balanced. And I agree, to a certain degree. While a big part of tuning is intangible and abstract, there are definite advantages in tying those abstractions to concrete measures. Here’s how.

Set Specific Goals

The most important part of tuning is to create a goal. Often, you can change a game so drastically through tuning that it can cater to completely different audiences. Thus, you must first decide on your target market and target experience. Is this a hardcore shooter for 20-year-old guys? A mind-bending puzzle game for tween girls? A social game for middle-aged folks?

Setting a specific goal will help guide your tuning. As you tune, put yourself in the shoes of your target audience and see if the game has the targeted effect on you. Should the game put you on the edge of your seat? Allow you to play mindlessly? Continue over multiple days? By figuring out the intended effect of your game on the player, you’ll have a better idea of when the game has been balanced to create those effects.

Measure Your Goals

After setting specific goals, figure out ways to measure those goals concretely through tuning. If the game is intended to be played in spurts by a casual market, time each play-through. How many games could you play during your bus ride home?

Create spreadsheets to track your numbers, notes, and observations. As much as possible, think like your target player. What type of experience would they want? Where would they play your game? How would they play? The answers to these questions should guide your tuning.

Playtest

Once you think the game is fairly well balanced, have people within your target market play the game. Watch them play, and use the same measures you used when tuning to gauge whether the game is having the intended effect on them.

Since September of last year, Digido and ESG have occupied a common office space, so I’ve had plenty of opportunities to eavesdrop on ESG meetings and grab coffees with ESG folks. My desk literally moved about 20 feet over.

But even given all that, a first day is still a first day. And all first days are long. I remember my first day of teaching like it was yesterday. I was so busy trying to keep up with 20+ kids and simultaneously trying to teach them a thing or two that I lost over a dozen pens. I would put a pen down, then have no recollection of where it could be.

By 10am, my voice was hoarse, my feet were sore, and I was planning a career change. When the end of that first day finally came, I spent the rest of the evening prepping for day two. Talk about a trial by fire.

Thankfully, my first day at ESG was much less painful. Right away, I was given responsibility, creative freedom, and support. And now, at the end of my second day, I’m happy to report that this transition has gone quite smoothly so far. And I still have all the pens I started with.

Psychology is a major component of building intuitive interfaces. When we interact with a new interface, we bring with us cognitive baggage – all our previous cultural knowledge and expectations about how the interface should work.

When we see something that looks like a button, we expect to be able to press it to instigate an action. However, if that image turns out to be unclickable, or if the action that follows is unexpected, we’re taken aback.

In game design, this can sometimes be a good thing. After all, in order to create innovative products, you have to change users’ preconceived notions and expectations. However, if the experience is so foreign that it becomes frustrating, this can easily turn a user away.

One of the best ways to find the hiccups in your interface design is to watch users try it out. They will naturally bring their cognitive baggage to the product, and if they’re able to use your product without having to focus on the interface, you’re well on your way to a solid design.

Interested? Here are a couple of additional resources:

The Design of Everyday Things

Intuition, Expectations and Culture: Learning from Psychology to Build Better Game Interfaces

Every child exercises throughout the day, whether through walking to school, attending soccer practice, or playing with the dog. Until now, all of that activity has been lost in the hustle and bustle of the day. That’s where the Kinetic Academy comes in. Through this system, kids get to unleash their inner superhero, training to increase their superpowers.

As kids input their physical activity into the system, they earn points that can be exchanged for rewards. Play soccer for two hours –> 500 points –> stay up 15 minutes past bedtime. Kids get motivation to do and track exercise. Parents get an easy way to help their kids adopt healthy habits. Everyone wins.

So why am I telling you about this? I would like you to be involved in the beta-testing of this website. We are in the process of making this website awesome, but now we need your help to make it better.

If you’re a parent, please consider participating. Here’s how the Kinetic Academy works:

Step 1: Sign up for a parent account and create a separate child account for each of your children

Step 2: Add custom rewards that your child can redeem when he/she participates in physical activity (ex: have a sleepover, stay up late, etc.)

Step 3: Have your child fill in the activities he/she has completed

Step 4: Approve/edit the activities your child has added

Step 5: Have your child redeem the points they have earned for specific rewards

Try it out now!

Design is arguably one of the most interesting and creative industries out there. As a game designer, I get to make things up out of my head and then have other people play through my ideas.

The downside of this creative freedom is that it’s easy to get sucked into the depths of designer myopia (i.e., nearsightedness), in which you start designing things for yourself rather than for the end user. It’s quite a common phenomenon, and we’ve all been there.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve replaced text instructions with what I thought were much cleaner illustrated instructions or the times I’ve made a puzzle easier or harder to suit my personal play style. Failure to explain what I perceived to be obvious parts of my designs have often resulted in confused or frustrated users.

As this Smashing Magazine article writes of web designers, “[designers] see typography and rounded corners where normal people just see websites to get stuff done on.” In other words, there’s a fine line between design and function. When designing, we need to take into account the end user’s experience, rather than focusing purely on our own design wishlists.

So what do we do about it? Unfortunately, there’s no quick and easy prescription for design myopia. However, the easiest way to alleviate the issue is to continually playtest. The best way to polish the user experience is to observe people actually using your product. You’ll often find holes in your instructions or lulls in your gameplay that you might otherwise miss.

When working with a product day after day, it’s extremely easy to lose sight of how a new user might approach your product. Designing in your head is a great way to start, but as soon as possible, get the idea out of your head and into people’s hands. They’ll poke holes in your idea and sometimes make crazy suggestions, but ultimately, your product will be stronger for it and more in tune with what all those “normal people” want.

Most people are starting to come to terms with the effectiveness of games in teaching. However, educators often overlook popular titles in favor of “educational games.” Though these educational games are certainly a step up from textbooks, they often fail to create a truly captivating experience.

Thus, the dilemma. Educators know that games can engage students, but even the best educational games out there can’t compare to Angry Birds and Call of Duty. Oh dear, what to do?

The answer is closer than you think. In fact, it’s staring you in the face. Instead of trying to create educational games like Angry Birds, why not just use Angry Birds itself?

Every game has the potential to be a powerful educational tool. Don’t believe me? Here are some examples:

Fruit Ninja: Line Graphs
Have students use line graphs to determine the value of different combos in the game.

Angry Birds: Perspective
Have students think about the conflict between the birds and the pigs from the pigs’ perspective.

Paper Toss: Wind Speed
Have students analyze the trajectory of the ball and build an apparatus to measure wind speed.

Doodle Jump: Ratios and Scale
Have students put themselves in the game by measuring jump height and designing a level to scale.

Canabalt: Parallax Effect
Have students analyze the parallax effect in the background of the game, the principles of which are used by astronomers to measure far away stars.

I’ve created full length lessons out of each of these concepts, and in the coming weeks, I will start to create an online hub to share these lessons and other ideas. If you’re interested, please read more about my big idea here.

And if you have any ideas or suggestions, please let me know!

At the core of every well designed game is a carefully balanced spreadsheet. Numbers and stats can govern everything from a character’s jump height to the number of resources available. To create an experience that’s both fun and engaging, these numbers need to be tweaked, again and again.

One of the things most people fail to realize is just how many tweakable variables there can be within even the simplest gameplay experiences. Creating a spreadsheet is a great exercise for challenging you to think critically about all the different components in your game.

Start with the obvious ones, like levels, points, and time. Then, move on to more nitty gritty variables like the number of jumps a character needs to make to get to a certain goal. Think about what you want to teach your player and when to teach different skills.

Using this theoretical framework as a guide, plug your best guesses into your spreadsheet, and then start playtesting. If a playable prototype isn’t yet available, conduct theoretical playtests. You’d be surprised how much balancing you can accomplish through imagination alone. (If Einstein could develop the theory of relativity through theoretical physics, you can balance a game through theoretical design.)

The resulting numbers are one of the most critical parts of your design and will be invaluable for communicating gameplay elements to other members on your team. They will inform everything from the design of your levels to the difficulty ramp for the entire game. A look across a well fleshed out spreadsheet should give you a good idea of the flow of a level, pace of play, and the spread of challenges and achievements.

With every playtest, take notes on what went right, what seemed too easy/boring, and what seemed too difficult/frustrating. Rinse and repeat. Once you get to a point at which new players can play with a limited amount of boredom and frustration, you’re probably pretty close to a well balanced game.

I didn’t say it would be easy. In fact, it’ll probably be quite annoying and tedious at times. But then again, we didn’t get into game design because we thought it would be a cakewalk, now did we?

Also, a heads up for anyone in the Vancouver area who might be interested in the VFS game design program – don’t forget to drop by the Open House this Sunday, 10:30am-5pm. See you there!