by Annie | Game Design
Most people who know me well are privy to my love of math and logic puzzles. I do sudoku puzzles in my spare time and take huge books of logic puzzles with me on long flights. So when it was time to design a board game, what did I do? You guessed it – a math game. Math was by far my favorite subject to teach during my years in the classroom. Math is built on a framework of simple rules that anyone can grasp. Throw in a little practice, and you’ll be a math whiz in no time. I had students who started the year barely able to multiply 2×2. By the end, most were able to recite the times tables through 9 and complete fairly complicated long division problems. Now, one thing you should know is that I didn’t set out to create an educational board game. Sure, I came to VFS to study game design in an effort to eventually create educational games, but I didn’t feel the need to combine gaming and education right away. However, it caught up with me anyway. I started out with an idea involving dice. You roll the dice, then mark a multiple of that number on a grid in an effort to get five numbers in a row. That got boring pretty fast. Next, I went a completely different route. I tried to come up with a spider web game in which players build webs and then set traps for each other while trying to capture prey. That one was a little too complicated to get just right. After...
by Annie | Game Design
It’s official, folks. Term one is officially over. A lot of things have happened in these past 8 weeks, some joyous, some tragic, some never to be mentioned again. Here are a few things I’ve learned about along the way: 1. Boobs and explosions Making games is all about boobs and explosions. Not. These were both hot topics of game design conversations early on, sometimes jokingly, other times not. But as we soon learned, solid game mechanics top eye candy. Every time. 2. Persistence Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither are great games. The best games take lots of planning, critical thinking, problem solving, and patience. 3. Teamwork You can’t go through an experience like this without solid support. Eight weeks ago, GD18 was just a group of 30 strangers who shared a love of video games. Several long days and all-nighters later, we’ve become fast friends. The list of inside jokes is growing, and nicknames are popping up. With the countless all-nighters ahead of us, these friendships will surely become increasingly important. 4. Passion Huge projects, little time, a whole lot of pressure. You know things are getting crazy when everyone has either a large coffee or a Red Bull on their desk. And sometimes both. Dollar pizza slices start to become the norm, and showers become a thing of the past. It’s rare to find something you’re truly passionate about, so when you do, give it all you’ve...
by Annie | Illustration Station
Some ideas just have a way of sticking in your head after conception. Heading into a weekend of storyboarding, all I could think about were the balloon animals from my visual target project. The result: Bodybuilders. Balloon animals everywhere have been counting down to this moment. Tonight, Helium Stadium is packed to the brim, as it is host to the bodybuilding event of the Balloon Animal Olympics. Two contestants, one from the U.S. and one from Canada, will compete for the honor of world’s best balloon animal bodybuilder. Contestants will have 30 seconds to contort themselves into any form, and three judges will vote for the winner. Below are the panels from the storyboard....
by Annie | Game Design
With all the illicit acts available to players within the realm of Grand Theft Auto, one young man has found a way to use the game to perform good deeds. If you have a second, this article is definitely worth reading: My Four-Year-Old Son Plays Grand Theft...
by Annie | Game Design, Illustration Station
Have you ever wanted to shoot balloon animals? Well, in my latest game idea, that’s exactly what you get to do! Balloon animals have gotten loose, and you must shoot as many as you can before time runs out so they don’t take over the city. Take a...
by Annie | Other
Here’s the final version of my visual storytelling project, a short film created to tell a story through images. It’s quite a bit different from the original preview I posted two weeks ago. I’ll let the images speak for...
by Annie | Game Design
Not only is it hard to design a game, it’s hard to describe how to play it once it’s done. No one likes to read a novel when sitting down to play a game, so the rules have to be short yet comprehensive. I spent a good chunk of the weekend refining my board game and writing out the rules. Now, I may be able to spit out a blog post in a matter of minutes, but this was an entirely different beast. Organization is key in writing effective game rules. You have to lead players through the rules, objective, and examples in a logical order so they don’t have to read and reread the rules over and over. Recently, one of my classmates and I tried out a pirates game in which you steer ships through a grid to get to the treasure and return it to your home dock. Sounds pretty simple, right? We skimmed through the rules, set up the board, and started playing. Soon, we ran into a barrage of questions. Can we move diagonally? How many spaces do you have to move in one direction? How do you capture another ship? In the twenty or so minutes that we attempted to play the game, at least 15 were spent flipping through the pages of the rule book. Lots of text, lots of pictures, not much clarity. Ending the game prematurely was an easy choice. With that non-example in mind, I set out to write my game rules, making sure that important information like objective and board set-up was front and center, followed by concise...
by Annie | Game Design
Creating a game is hard work. Video games combine the flashiness of graphics with the strength of innovative game mechanics. For now, I’m just working on creating a board game. No scripting, no graphics. Just a board, some pieces, and a few rules. Game design is an iterative process, meaning that you create, assess, modify, and repeat. Over and over again. My board game idea started as two separate concepts, one involving the infinite factor connections between numbers, and the other involving building spider webs. After several hours of staring at the wall and gnawing on my pencil, I had a eureka moment: combine the two! Thus, I’ve arrived at my current iteration of Web, a game in which you control the movement of a king and two guards across a chess board in an attempt to get your king to the opposite side first. In order to move your pieces, you must create factor connections between numbers. Each factor connection opens a pathway for your pieces. For example, say you have the numbers 12 and 18 in your hand. You can form a connection between them because they share the factors of 2, 3, and 6. You could then move a piece across the line between the two numbers. If your opponent has the numbers 3 and 9 in their hand, they could add to your numbers through other factor connections. But be careful! You can only move across pathways fully or partially created by numbers of your color, so your opponent might be planning blocks along the way to thwart your progress. In addition, watch out for...
by Annie | Game Design
Imagine that you live on a space station. Alone. Tonight, you have a date. The first in a long time. You plan on cleaning up the space station and getting yourself ready, but you discover that alien slugs have taken over. What do you do? Pelt them with salt, of course. This is exactly what my Google SketchUp white-box level is about. Take a...
by Annie | Game Design
Make a game. Any game. No limitations. Go. That’s exactly what our class has been working on for the past couple of weeks. In small teams, we’ve been tossing around ideas for games that push the boundaries and bring something new to players. Since we only need to pitch the game idea rather than create it, anything is possible. Some teams went with space games, others with fantasy games or epic journeys. As it turns out, school is the perfect place to come up with crazy and innovative game ideas. In school, there are no budget constraints or pressure from the higher-ups. Just pure design. Thus, despite the stresses of the day-to-day projects and general craziness, I’m reveling in this moment, as I know that this broad scope of creative license is not easy to come...
by Annie | Game Design
Technology is great, but nothing can top the power of the human mind. Given the proper conditions, humans can learn just about anything and tackle just about any problem. Take proteins, for example. Proteins are made up of extremely complex configurations of amino acids that fold in many different ways. Given a large amount of processing power, computers can figure out how protein folding works. Given a game like Foldit and a dedicated following of players, humans can outperform the computers, which begs the question – what else is possible through games? Imagine an arsenal of science, math, literature, history, and psychology games that leverage the power of the human mind to tackle the world’s biggest problems. The cure for cancer could be lurking in the next great game. The possibilities, my friend, are...
by Annie | Game Design, Illustration Station
Believe it or not, it’s been raining here all weekend, and it’s still coming down. Summer rain in Vancouver is rare, so this is quite an aberration. However, I barely had time to notice. I was indoors all weekend, and I had planned it that way. There seems to be no end to the amount of projects I have on my plate, from simple drawings to complex level designs, and everything in between. Thus, my weekend was spent staring at the many windows open on my computer screen, glancing over occasionally to see the rain falling outside the real windows. Most of my projects are currently rough drafts in progress, but here’s one of the smaller projects, a health bar for an in-game interface. Of course, this isn’t a traditional health bar that shows the main character’s health. Instead, it shows the status of the environment, say, for a game in which you have to stay cold. You’ll have to create your own game idea to go along with...
by Annie | Game Design
As part of the VFS admissions process for game design, I had to come up with a single game idea and create a one-page pitch. Since classes have started, however, it’s been a completely different ballgame. As musicians know, it takes countless hours of practice to become a great musician. Likewise, in order to become a great game designer, you must constantly create new game ideas. Over the past five weeks, I’ve been tasked with creating so many game ideas that I’ve lost count. Some I created on my own, most were created with partners or teams, and all came with certain purposes and restrictions. Some ideas have taken weeks to develop, while others had to be crafted within mere minutes. According to Malcolm Gladwell, it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become a master at something. At our current pace, we’ll likely surpass the creation of 10,000 game ideas before the year comes to an end. Whether or not that makes us great game designers, time will have to tell. Now, on to that next game...
by Annie | Other
As term 1 is starting to come to a close, we have several projects out on the table, from presentations and exams to level designs and drawings. One project we have coming up in less than two weeks is for our visual storytelling class. The name of the class gives away the main focus: telling stories through images. Our visual storytelling final project involves a short movie using anywhere from 50 to 300 images, preferably set to music. After an initial storyboard and lots of time spent crafting pieces from construction paper and pipe cleaners, I finally snapped the necessary photos and have moved into the editing stage. Here’s a preview of the first minute (a very rough cut in low quality) for your viewing...
by Annie | Illustration Station
People are hard. Hard to read and hard to draw. As far back as I can remember, I’ve had trouble drawing people. One minor line askew, and everything goes awry. In our storyboarding class, we got a quick 101 on figure drawing, which instantly demystified the whole process. Drawing people is just like simple sculpture. Start with a basic frame, then build arms, legs, muscles, and clothes on top. I still need tons of practice, but here’s a quick peek into my sketchbook from the few figures I sketched this...
by Annie | Game Design
Since the field of game design is still in its infancy stage, things change fast and often. Games were once created by small teams of people with a passion for gaming but no formal training. Now, more and more, game designers, programmers, and artists are entering the field with years of schooling and experience. Soon, students will have access to game design training as early as middle school. Baltimore County Public Schools (BCPS) just announced plans to incorporate video game development education into its curriculum. To prepare teachers for the program, BCPS will implement a series of “gamification boot camps” to educate teachers on the technology behind video games. This technique of incorporating game technology with STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) is quickly catching on, increasing student engagement and interest in core subject areas. Be The Game, a game design training curriculum for high school students, was developed by the Institute of Urban Game Design in 2005 and has rapidly spread from its original school in Washington, DC, to six schools across the US. This new trend may be yet another game changer for the field of game design. As access to training becomes more prevalent, more indie games created by younger designers will soon hit the market. We may not have highly effective educational games just yet, but we do have highly motivated students ready to create them. Let the games...
by Annie | Game Design
As a teacher, I wore many hats every day. Teaching aside, I regularly took on the roles of nurse, psychologist, event planner, secretary, statistician, and fellow kid. Being able to wear many hats is also one of the reasons I love studying game design. As a game designer, I must juggle the demands of budget and schedule with the creative elements of cinematography, storyline, and character and level design. I am by no means an expert, but as you may well know, I always welcome a challenge. This past Friday, I finally went to see the movie Inception. Though it was the third Friday since the movie’s release, the theater was still packed. I won’t spoil the movie for those of you who haven’t yet experienced its intense storyline, but suffice it to say that the movie has a lot in common with game design. Inception explores the possibilities of the human mind, and, in particular, of its dreams. Like game environments, dream worlds must be carefully architected. Though pieces of the dream or game may come from real life inspiration, the ultimate dream or game world is a conglomeration of the best parts of the real world. This weekend, I took on the role of a level designer. Well, kind of. My assignment was to analyze an existing game level and create a level map detailing the environment and obstacles. Sounds simple enough, right? Well, keep in mind that you have to know the level well enough to draw the map (i.e. you have to play the level over and over again). Then, you have to draw the level...
by Annie | Illustration Station
The best part of life is without a doubt the people who are there with you along the journey. And that’s definitely true for my experience thus far at VFS. Every class at VFS is given a number, based on the iteration of that program. Our class is Game Design 18, or GD18. Immediately, we took to the brand, creating a Facebook page to share experiences and inside jokes. We haven’t ordered any GD18 t-shirts just yet, but I’m sure we’ll be designing those shortly. This tight-knit group of like-minded individuals was definitely on my mind as I brainstormed ideas for my 2-point vehicle design assignment. The result: Dumb and Dumber meets...
