MIC 305

1
MIC 305

• Game Design and Development

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Introduction and historical overview

• The Games market
• Motivations that influence design
• The concept document

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Motivations that influence design

• Why build a computer game?
• Its fun
• To sell for money

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Genre considerations

• Decide in which genre your game will exist
• Identify the gameplay components and challenges
  that you have in your game that identifies its
  genre
• Do your research and study the very best of the
  genre you have placed your game into.

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Market-driven games

• Definition When a company chooses to build a
  game specifically for a particular market and to
  include certain elements within that market, that
  game is said to be market-driven (Rollings and
  Adams, 2004)
• Cannot always get it right-The Sims is an
  unexpected hit and proves conventional wisdom
  wrong (Rollings and Adams, 2004)
• Designed to appeal to a stereotypical gamer so
  dont appeal to people who dont fit the
  stereotype

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Designer-driven games

• The designer retains all creative control
• Few games are developed this way-major publishers
  are reluctant to grant a designer this much
  control

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Technology-driven games

• E.g. the original Quake was a technology-driven
  game, designed to show off a particular
  technological achievement.

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Happy 8th Birthday Quakehttp//www.ampednews.com/
?pagearticlesid1157

• June 22nd, 1996, which is the day that the the
  shareware version of Quake was released.
• What people saw after downloading the 14meg (huge
  at the time) program was something to
  behold, people were amazed at the giant leap
  forward in technology.
• Quake was not the first 3D "first person shooter"
  style game, that title goes to a game called
  Terminator Futureshock. However, it was the
  first "true" 3D game that let you have full
  control over everything you did.

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Quake

• Quake is a first-person shooter (FPS) game that
  was published by id Software on 31 May 1996. It
  introduced several major advances in the 3D game
  genre it uses 3-dimensional models for players
  and monsters instead of 2-dimensional sprites
  and the world in which play takes place is
  created as a true 3-dimensional space, rather
  than a 2-dimensional map with height information
  which is then rendered to 3D.
• It also incorporated the use of lightmaps and
  real-time light sources, as opposed to the
  sector-based static lighting used in games of the
  past. Many believe that it kick-started the
  independent 3D graphics card revolution,
  "GLQuake" being the first application to truly
  demonstrate the capabilities of the 3DFX "Voodoo"
  chipset at the time. The impact of the Quake
  engine is still being felt to this day.

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Role playing game (RPG)

• These have evolved from the MUDs (Multi-user
  Dungeon) and text-based MMORPGs
  (Massive-Multiplayer On-line Role Playing Games)
• E.g Everquest

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Video technology

• John Carmack had the wonderful task of making the
  heavy 3D graphics work with 1meg non-accelerated
  video cards. Unlike today where video cards have
  64 megs of ram that gives programmers ample room
  for sloppy programming, Carmack did not have this
  option and was forced to make the graphics coding
  as tight as possible. It wasn't until months
  later that the first 3D accelerated video drivers
  started appearing (Creative Labs Verite was the
  first, followed by the popular Monster 3D cards).

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Online networking code

• Still considered by many to be the biggest step
  forward in gaming, id Software was able to crunch
  the heavy 3D graphics and make them playable on a
  28.8 dial-up modem using the client/server tcp/ip
  connection that had only been used for
  application purposes prior to Quake being
  released.
• Let's look at some of the ways that Quake changed
  the gaming world and especially on-line gaming.
  Here are just a few of the changes caused by
  Quake...

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Internet Gaming

• Does anybody remember what it was like playing
  games over the internet prior to Quake? In most
  games, up to a maximum of 8 players would join a
  server between 800 and 805 (most times, all 8
  slots were filled in 10 seconds and you would
  wait for the game to start 5 minutes later), then
  at 805, the game would start.
• People would play until the game ended at 830
  and all the players would be kicked so that new
  players could join during the next 5 minutes.
• Repeat this for the rest of the day. Quake was
  the first on-line code that let you join in the
  middle of a game, players could come and go and
  the games would never end. Quake also let servers
  handle more than 8 players at a time.

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Internet Playing

• Unless you were lucky enough to be at university
  and using their Internet connection, chances are
  you were using a modem (28.8 had just come out)
  or possibly ISDN if you could afford it. When you
  played Quake with a modem, and although it was
  slow, it was very playable. Keeping in mind the
  type of game Quake was, this was pretty amazing
  over a modem.

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Disadvantages of games such as Quake

• Lots of kids dropping out of school because Quake
  was such an addiction.- Lots of people losing
  their jobs because they would stay up til the
  morning hours playing Quake and arriving late to
  work or sometimes, not at all.- In countries
  where you have to pay for local phone calls
  (England etc) and players would have huge phone
  bills until they were forced to stop playing
  Quake- People being fired for playing Quake at
  work. There was an infamous interoffice memo from
  Intel Corporation that specifically stated that
  anybody caught putting Doom or Quake files on
  their workstation or any company network would be
  fired, no matter what the reason. - Cheating.
  Lots of bots and people cheating over the years.
  Id did their best to keep one step ahead of this
  but, they could never keep cheating completely
  out of the game. 

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Other genres of games

• Sports
• Adventure
• Action
• Simulation
• Strategy
• Puzzle
• Role-play
• Management
• Uncategorised

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The concept document

• Title
• Format
• Genre
• Market realignment document
• Game (name) Platform eg all consoles
• Age Core audience Secondary audience
• 11 Male and female Older fans of this
  genre casual gamer who enjoys
• Playing action adventure games

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Real-time strategy

• War is a persistent theme
• When they first appeared they were turn-based
• Console game called Herzog Zwei on the Sega
  Genesis that put real-time into strategy games

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Adventure games

• Puzzle-solving challenges
• Great deal of thought required from player
• An interactive story
• Multi-threaded plot
• A journey from one location to another
• A mcentral protagonist