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Dear Prospective GDD Freshmen,
This is the time of your life to get lost and find yourself. College is when you get a taste of being away from home, being a responsible human being, and exploring what you would like to do with the rest of your life. The time I spent at Quinnipiac felt more like a hit and run. My story might not be nearly as relatable to anyone reading this, but my experience hopefully will leave you with something to ponder. I’m 27 years old, and firmly in the quarter century club. This was my second run through at a university, the first one being a history degree. I’m finishing up this Game Design degree a bit late compared to the average college student. Why am I telling you this? Because I was overconfident. Going into Quinnipiac with a degree and being older than everyone else by at least 5 or 6 years made me subtly think I was better off than everyone else. I looked at this as a means to get in, get a degree in two years and get out. After a semester in, I began to realize how much of an idiot I sounded. Being around so many like minded individuals who live and breath video games was such a breath of fresh air. Everyone wants to help each other flourish, regardless if they are following in the same path. It’s very much a positive environment where people who might have felt like social outcasts at their own high schools feel like it’s their second home. The students in your class and upperclassmen will always be willing to lend a helping hand. Because of this, and knowing I had so much more to learn, I ended up staying an additional year to help boost my abilities. One last thing I want you to try your best to do is work on a project with EVERYONE. Each person you attend classes with will have different ideas, work ethic, creative processes that could contribute to your success in personal growth. On top of that, those that you graduate with are potential connections in the workforce. You need to network in this industry, and besides, you would miss out on so much if you go it alone. The Game Design and Development track will teach everything you need to know about being the best at what you want to be. Have an idea that could lead to something bigger? Speak up. See a person you would like to work with that seems way more talented than you? Ask questions and listen. Programmer, level designer, artist: the work titles are vastly different but you’re all here to make something you’re proud of. Don’t squander this chance and be the future of game design. Your friendly neighborhood game developer, Steven Bischoff
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I started off with the questing for equipment an idea that went nowhere fast. The idea sounded rather concrete but after weeks of feedback from family, friends, and classmates I found that there were far more flaws than not. Early on I began testing my quest system only because I felt that would be the most important and pivotal piece to what I had planned. I wrote out a sample quest, which is where things took a turn. The set up seemed more of a narrative game than an actual board game with competing against other players. Feedback from the quest made me realize how far off the tracks I went from what I originally foresaw. It was halfway done with the semester at that point so I thought, this should be the time if any, to switch gears. From then on out, I began to work on the current game which is currently called, “Spell It Out!”.
“Spell It Out!” came to fruition after numerous iterations. During this game’s design process, I listened far more carefully to what my friends, classmates and professor had to say. I was constantly changing numbers and rules based on the brief play tests and discussions I had over the course of the last month. Sometimes I would ask people I knew in passing what they thought of this idea or that idea, and would carefully listen to what they had to say. Other times, I sat down with Matt or another classmate and pitched them a new thought that popped into my head. Based on the talks and tests, I have tried to think further outside the box or experiment with ideas that people have said to me to see if they would actually fit within my game. See, it was more than just the play testing that really helped me through the tail end of the semester to create a game that I am genuinely proud of putting together.
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Bringing a game to a larger scale convention is an extremely intimidating task. There is an insurmountable pressure that makes you feel like your game is never polished enough right up until the first day of the event. When you take a break from your booth and begin walking around the hall, you see some unique and creative examples on how to properly showcase a game with a fixed budget. I will discuss three games that stood out to me on the weekend that my team and I were with our game at PAX East 2018.
“Mowin’ & Thrown’”, I’ll just get this one out of the way. I was such a fanboy of it the entire weekend and you would rather not hear me ramble about it for an eternity. Anyways, this game stood out right off the bat. It was an exciting game that has the potential to be a really fun relationship ruining experience, and I mean that in the best of ways. Being able to yell at your teammate and opponents for throwing a rock at you or launching balls of grass sabotaging your lawn brought back memories of Mario Kart 64. What really made this whole setup special was we managed to get three rounds of the game in despite having a line of people waiting to play. After my turn was up, I managed to get into a conversation with the Producer of the game and he told me about the changes they made. At PAX South that took place a few months prior, they had a booth set up right near the entrance to the exhibition hall. Tons of people poured in and they wanted to get as many people to play their game as possible. So they would sit a group of four down, have them play a round, and then made room for the next group. At PAX East, they decided to let the players play two or three rounds instead so people have more chances to get a feel for the game. It was the small difference in play testing and spreading the love that allowed for onlookers to understand and enjoy the game more. It definitely helped build their fanbase. “Deathgarden” was a game of the all versus one variety. Five people need to work together to complete objectives so they may leave the area without being taken out by the hunter. Players have three lives to work with and no time limit, so they can be as cautious and slow as possible. The only thing is they can’t kill the hunter, only stun for a short period of time. A lot of stealth play is needed to win or else a skilled hunter will easily take everyone out. The way the developers had it set up was to have this giant booth look and feel like the arena the players were fighting in. The walls were gray and sleek while the ground was implanted with grass and some foliage. The way they conducted play tests was putting the team of five players on their computers inside the booth. On the outside separated by a wall was the hunter. They made the player who was fighting on their own, feel isolated. It felt really immersive being in the same physical proximity as the other players and working together. The image Deathgarden was portraying was fantastic and showed by doing that, they care about the players and their experience in the game. Other booths should strive to achieve what they did that weekend. “Witch It” was another personal favorite of mine. It’s a prop hunt game where it’s witches who can change into pretty much any object to blend in and fly around versus villagers who want nothing more than to eliminate them with rocks and chickens. The witches have powers that can distract the villagers to get themselves out of tight situations. It’s a different take on the prop games but stands on its own two legs. This booth was the same size as ours, 10 by 10, and they utilized every inch of it wonderfully. Just like a typical lan set-up, they had two long tables next to each other with two computers on each. One side were the witches and the other side were the villagers. To set the booth like that was smart and allowed the developers to walk around the tables with ease to observe the carnage of witches getting hunted down. What was a really nice touch was they brought headphones for the players. Just a quick side note, these conventions and exhibitions are almost always high in volume because of the people and all the games. Once I sat down and put these headphones on, I was able to hear everything in the game perfectly. I consider this a perfect example of image and spreading the love. The way they set the booth up with limited space was very smart and showed how organized they were, while bringing the headphones provided the player with a more immersed experience and felt like a break from the conventions madness. It’s the small things and attention to detail that really make all the difference when designing a booth for your game. Take notes, if you are ever interested in showcasing a game at a larger conference, these three games set the tone for three different levels of budget.
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Abuse of Well-intentioned Features5/9/2018 Competitive games have historically always drawn in more intense players. Regardless of skill level, people of all ranks can have volatile personalities. It is unavoidable and frustrating. However, the real problem with this stems from many different things, and not all of it is because of the competitive experience.
Overwatch originally had a feature in the beta stages called “Avoid This Player”. Basically by pressing this button under the player in your match, you will place them all the way down on the priority list of people who could possibly match up with. While this feature was a means to try and contain and put toxicity out of the door, it brought about a way to manipulate and more bad vibes. This one highly skilled player in the game suffered because of how much people abused it. “We looked into it and found that hundreds of other players had avoided him {he’s a nice guy - they avoided him because they did not want to play against him, not because of misbehavior)” (Rock Paper Shotgun). The company Blizzard wanted it so people could avoid those who promote negative behavior in games and take away from the fun, but in this case, these players blocked out this one guy just because of his skill level. Another hot topic that contributes to negativity are smurfs. Not in anyway related to the blue creatures from the movies or television shows, ‘Smurf’ is a term used to describe a player’s alternate account. There are a multitude of reasons that people use these, none of which are, in my opinion, great. They could be used for a means to play with lower level friends, against lesser skilled players, or to just mess around and practice on so it does not ruin the main accounts statistics. Some of the reasons, like playing against lesser skilled players so they can easily win, are really bad and ruin the experience. From experience on Xbox, there is a program that if the primary account attached to the console is a Gold Member (access to online features), any future account created on the console will automatically be a Gold Member as long as the primary one is logged in at the same time. With this, players can create as many ‘Smurf’ accounts as they want. I have personally spoken with multiple people who have claimed to have over six different accounts. It makes players at all skill levels frustrated when they go into a game and lose because it was obvious that the skill gap between them and these alternate accounts were massive. Fairplay and toxicity go hand in hand, and features such as ones mentioned when abused, begets more negative behavior. |
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