Game Design Essentials

Briar Lee Mitchell

• Publisher: Sybex
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118239339
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Graphics
• Index: Computer Science

An easy-to-follow primer on the fundamentals of digital game design

The quickly evolving mobile market is spurring digital game creation into the stratosphere, with revenue from games exceeding that of the film industry. With this guide to the basics, you'll get in on the game of digital game design while you learn the skills required for storyboarding, character creation, environment creation, level design, programming, and testing.

• Teaches basic skill sets in the context of current systems, genres, and game-play styles
• Demonstrates how to design for different sectors within gaming including console, PC, handheld, and mobile
• Explores low-poly modeling for game play
• Addresses character and prop animation, lighting and rendering, and environment design
• Discusses the path from concept to product, including pre- and post-production
• Includes real-world scenarios and interviews with key studio and industry professionals

With Game Design Essentials, you'll benefit from a general-but-thorough overview of the core art and technology fundamentals of digital game design for the 21st century.

Chapter 1

Game Design Origins

In order to understand how game design has evolved, let’s take a look back at their origins, to get some insight into how games today are planned and executed. Looking beyond your own knowledge base is the core of learning, and that is what this book is aimed at doing—helping you learn how games are designed and made.

There is no doubt that human beings enjoy games. According to Hudson Square Research, game-sale revenue surpassed that of films in the United States in 2005 and became a global phenomenon in 2008, exceeding film sales. Game revenue in 2011 reached $48.9 billion. You can read more at http://www.videogamesblogger.com/2008/04/09/global-videogame-sales-surpass-movie-industry-in-2008.htm. Literally thousands of games have been developed and played for millennia, with the oldest known one, The Royal Game of Ur (2500 BC), chronicling the start of it all in recorded history. We play games for fun, we play them to learn, and we play them to be competitive.

In this chapter, we’ll take a look at how gaming evolved and how many of the core principles are still applicable in today’s games.

• What is a game?
• History: going way back
• Going electronic
• And now we are digital

What Is a Game?

If we define a game as an activity that brings pleasure, that definition is too broad. Many things can bring pleasure, like reading, cooking, or engaging in conversation with a good friend. However, if you combine an activity with a challenge and a set of rules, then you have the basics of what makes a game. The challenge is to reach the end goal—to win—using the game components and the rules for using them.

Some games require elaborate playing pieces and richly constructed environments, either virtual or practical; however, some games can be played verbally or by thinking through the demands of the game to achieve the win. Rhyming games, for example, don’t need tangible elements. When I was a child, taking long road trips with my family, my mother sought to distract us from getting bored and unruly by having us play the I Spy game. The rules were simple: watch the other cars on the road and try to “spy” as many different license plates as possible, or color or make of car, or just convertibles or motorcycles, and so on.

One of my favorite games that can be played without pieces, The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, is a trivia game based on the philosophical concept of six degrees of separation. This concept, proposed by Frigyes Karinthy, holds that everyone is linked to everyone one else in the world through a chain of no more than six people. In February 1994, during an interview with Premiere Magazine, Bacon commented that he had worked with everyone in Hollywood. The movie Six Degrees of Separation, based on Karinthy’s premise and the play written by John Guare, debuted around the same time, prompting people to associate Bacon with that phenomenon.

Games can be played individually, one on one, or in groups. Our fascination with games has grown to be a global phenomenon extending beyond traditional board and card games to small and efficient handheld units, personal computers, powerful home-entertainment systems, and the Internet, where millions of gamers can log in with high-speed connections to play everything from simple games of solitaire to massive multiple-player competitions in real time. Figure 1-1 shows one type of competition where gamers come from all over the world to compete with one another in online games that are broadcast on enormous Jumbotrons to fans who come just to watch them play. What is fascinating about this image is that the majority of people at the event are so intrigued with the gameplay that they come just to watch others battle it out. Gaming has become so large in some instances that, as you see in the picture, it has become a spectator sport.

Figure 1-1: World Cyber Games

Games are designed to entertain, to teach, and to spark the spirit of competition. As far as entertaining games go, several top sellers vie for the crown of being the most popular, including Mario Bros., Halo, The Legend of Zelda, Grand Theft Auto, and Metroid Prime. The reigning champ for entertaining games, according to GamePro, is Windows Solitaire—the single-player version. This casual game has been played by millions of people.

One remarkable example of an educational game is Oregon Trail, dreamed up over 40 years ago by three student teachers in Minnesota. Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger created the landmark game that traces the 2,000-mile path traveled by pioneers in the old West from Independence, Missouri to Willamette Valley, Oregon.

For many players, Oregon Trail was their introduction to the world of digital games, and it still holds the record for the most sales for an educational game. Fans of the game watched it grow from a small game designed to help students learn history in the Minnesota school system to a game played on multiple platforms today including Windows, iPhone, iPod Touch, and Facebook. Players travel the route, and along the way they must keep track of their resources and deal with many hazards such as bad weather, rough terrain, and poor health. The last of these spawned one of the most popular catch phrases of the game: “You have died of dysentery.”

Prestige or financial gain can be associated with how well you do at playing games. People who play online games where scores are tracked compete not only at playing the game but also with each other to see who can achieve the highest score. Gamblers playing games of chance like poker, roulette, and craps can achieve both notoriety and tremendous financial gain—or, in some cases, devastating losses.

In order to understand how and why games came about, it’s critical to grasp some of their core principles, such as rules, chance, and the elements used to design them. Understanding some of this background will also shed light on the broad range of game types. Simply trotting out names of games and a brief description of the products won’t help you understand why certain games or trends in gaming developed the way they did.

Why Are There Rules?

To say that a game has rules is another way of saying there is a structure to adhere to in order to understand how the player can compete and win. The term rules sounds stifling, but in the world of gaming, it’s the very framework that allows the player to master the gameplay.

This isn’t to say that every single game has rules; however, some people would argue that having rules is one of the definitions of what a game is. Other gamers prefer to design and/or play more freeform games that don’t rely on rules. All games must have some sort of game mechanic in order to be created, so if you eliminate that as a definition of rules, then technically there are games without rules, and there are games that can be played differently from the intended set of goals laid out by the developers.

Game mechanics are basically the building blocks of the game design. For example, in World of Warcraft, mana for spells is a game mechanic. The game uses the concept of mana to define how many spells a player can cast. Combine that with the game mechanic of “spirit” to define how fast a player replenishes their mana. Mechanics and rules are pretty closely entwined. Mechanics tend to be more subtle, behind-the-scenes rules, though they can also be pretty large and noticeable, like games that are turn-based—a turn is a game mechanic to control the amount of action a player can do in a given situation. Games without rules are primarily sandbox games, where you’re typically given a world and some direction and then set free to do as you will. To allow you to act freely, a lot of variety in game mechanics is built into these games. A term for that is emergent gameplay: basically, making the world interactive enough that the player can do things the designers hadn’t originally intended.

Designer Will Wright creates games that fall into this sandbox category. Take a look at his creation, The Sims, which is essentially an ecology god game. You’re given all the tools to affect the makeup of a planet, and you watch how it evolves and what sorts of life forms thrive. Figure 1.2 shows us a screenshot from the game SimWorld. Everything in the world, from the buildings to the weather to the beings that inhabit it, is decided on by the player.

Will Wright commented on the way he played Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, explaining that he didn’t play the game as the designers intended, which would have involved stealing cars and doing missions to build a criminal empire. He instead played as though his character was a homeless guy wandering around the city and trying to survive.

Figure 1-2: This screenshot from the sandbox game The Sims 2 shows elements designed and placed by the player into the game world.

You can basically do the same in a game like Fable or Fallout 3. Rather than play the main story quest lines and go out and fight, you can focus on being ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Publisher's Note
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Game Design Origins
• Chapter 2: Gameplay Styles
• Chapter 3: Core Game Design Concepts
• Chapter 4: Visual Design
• Chapter 5: Detailed Development of Visuals
• Chapter 6: Navigation and Interfaces
• Chapter 7: Designing Levels and the Game Design Document
• Chapter 8: Sound
• Chapter 9: Job Descriptions, Game Tracking, and Legal Issues
• Chapter 10: Distribution and Marketing
• Appendix A: Answers to Review Questions
• Appendix B: Education, Training, and Working in Games
• Appendix C: Game Design Document
• Index