Game GDD

Reading Week 5

One article I read was Only a Game Roger Caillois Patterns of Play. In this article the author talks about how Roger Caillois broke games and he said there are 4 patterns of play. Competitive, Chance, Simulation or Vertigo, I think this is an interesting concept and cool to think about different games and see where they fit in.

A second article I read was called Conversation, this article talks about how you should go about having conversations with NPCs. I liked this as it got me thinking what kind of conversations I'd like to have in my game, I think as it is an adventure game I will like for the NPCs to give out helpful information so it will be heavily scripted.

The final article I read was The In-Game economics of Ultima Online, I liked the article, it breaks down the basic concept of the game but one bit that made me think was,

 Game designers are therefore frequently confronted with the following dilemma:

1. All elements of the game need to be fun.
2. Much of the real world is not fun.
3. Elements which are unrealistic are often counterintuitive.
4. Counterintuitive rules are difficult to learn and not fun, at least at first

This is good to keep in mind when designing my own game.

For the main reading I think there was a lot of useful information on good design consideration, but I feel like there is also a good amount of information that isn't really transferable from board game to computer game such as include spare parts. Nevertheless I actually think having to root around a lot of information helps you retain the good information more. I will definitely be looking back on this when designing my game as there are a lot of useful tips such as using different colours and shapes to help people who are colour blind differentiate between things easier. 

Image taken from Pixabay, showing some board game pieces