Tune Project Update #1
“Game Design With the Boring Parts Removed”
Making games is my favorite game to play. For me, it’s more fun, more challenging, and ultimately more rewarding to create games than it is to play them. For quite some time I have had a powerful desire to give this experience – the joy of creating levels, designing and balancing systems, and tuning game mechanics – to as many people as possible. I do a reasonable job in my various game design classes at the Art Institute of Phoenix, but the audience is necessarily limited. I want to reach out, to provide these rewarding experiences on a larger scale.
So, what I really want to do is test the assumption that tuning game mechanics is fun, hot, and compelling to everyone. If the sloggy tedium of game development and massive learning curve are removed, is what’s left super fun? My Jumper Exercise seems to indicate as much. As soon as a goal is provided, this simple little mechanic test has a great deal of capture. I tell my class to “make this mechanic fun” and turn them loose. The students have a blast playing with it and often continue fiddling for an hour or more before completing the write-up portion of the assignment. Last week I took this exercise to Gavalin Peak middle school to show at their career day, having some of the 7th and 8th graders play with it; it seemed to have some awesome traction there as well. Providing ‘game design with the boring parts taken out’ as a focused, encapsulated experience should be hot, innovative, and fun.
I can’t help but wonder what would happen if the goals were a part of the system. Can I make a satisfying progression out of tuning a bunch of different game mechanics? Tuning the same mechanic differently to accomplish different tasks? What kinds of tasks and objectives would require different tunings to be successful and would players be able to figure that out? Would it be fun to figure that out, to discover tunings that allow them to optimize results for different assigned tasks? How about level design elements? Could I include spatial manipulation, iteration, and other fun elements of level design in this progression? What if the whole game were a level editor as well?
So, that’s what “Tune” is all about; does game design with the boring parts removed make a compelling game? I think it does, and I want to explore that question fully. Another interesting question is ‘could a game teach game design?’ That’s sort of a secondary goal, to teach the nuts and bolts of game design in a simplified, interactive, easy to understand way, to perhaps help capture and educate future game designers or to contribute to a better understanding of what game design is. So, like the underlying question behind Guitar Hero, “does it rock?”, my question boils down to “is it game design with the boring parts removed?” If ever I get stuck or am unsure about a design decision, I can refer to that. In fact, I’m printing it out and putting it on the wall next to my desk 
.
Next Steps
So, milestones.
By the end of today, I’ll have completed the brainstorming portion of the project: brainstorming different mechanics that might be fun to tune, what elements of level design I can bring in to the overall game progression and how they might fit in, how the overall system design will work – collection, resources, how everything will fit together and such, UI design and how to present all this stuff in a logical, simple manner, and art treatment.
After that, I’m going to create a master list of questions to be answered from which I’ll generate a prototype map, a short list of the kinds of experiences I want the player to have (and references from game, film, music that create those kinds of experiences), and a series of art and gameplay mockups. Then it’s time to prototype like a maniac. Once I know what I’m creating I should have a better idea how to schedule it – I hope to do a prototype every Monday once I get all the concepts complete.
So I’ll be updating the site each Monday with progress reports and new stuff to show. I’d love feedback; feel free to contribute!
Swink
6 Comments
I watched that Japanese Rube Goldberg movie. Whatever liquid the people of the Far East partake of, I guarantee that it is not water.
Your “game design game” has me a-tingle with antici…pation. I think the basic gateway to success with this project (whatever that means), is to provide the designer with simple, open-ended tools that have the potential for creative results. A basic “goal” system is an obvious choice (i.e. the designer creates an area via a click-and-drag interface that triggers whatever event follows), but what I’m most curious to know is how you plan to make the game design open-ended when including pre-made tools is inherently limiting (at least to some degree) without asking the player to try their hands at programming.
My guess is that once a designer/player sees an example of Tune at work, their first statement is going to go something like “Wow! That’s so cool! But can I make it do THIS?”
Drop a player into just about any platformer, and they’ll assume that their objective is to go forward and kill stuff. Because many other games give them such easily recognized pre-designed goals, they accept that the base game design is simple and repetitive without even thinking about it, ignoring the game’s (and thus their own) obvious limitations. However, by making a “game design game”, you are requesting that players stretch their imaginations, and the limitations which formally kept them shackled fall away. As soon freedom is introduced, players will immediately become aware of other constraints placed upon them by whatever tools you have included, and, ironically, will probably judge the more lenient rules of Tune harsher than the platformer game they happily played five minutes ago.
[/rant]
Well, take a look at the Jumper exercise and imagine it with a goal like ‘collect all the coins’ or even a simple ‘get to the top of the moutain.’ As soon as you have context, the tuning of the mechanic takes on some kind of meaning, which is the space in which I think the game has a great potential to succeed.
I’m going to limit the amount of tuning you can do on any one variable with some kind of system design, “tune” points you can earn and spend or something like that. Where it gets really cool is when you can, say, hook a gravity parameter into a slider which allows you to ‘fly’ in a way. And a logical (to me at least) step from there is to then allow access to an engine powerup of some kind. If you have an engine attached to the ship, setting gravity to zero makes an Asteroids-like tuning possible, and so on. Then maybe you can fly up into the sky and play a totally different game with a different set of goals. I’m brainstorming as many of these different little mechanic mini-progressions as possible, with the aim of hooking them all into one another somehow.
I remember that one of things that I wanted whilst playing said game was just random objects that gave the parameters random #s. My idea would be to set numbers from say 1-10 and have the numbers strewn through that limited environment, and the goal would be to get all of the numbers in numerical order, but have each number give a random parameter. Radness would ensue.
Hey, that’s a cool idea…so instead of having full control of the parameters you would, at first, ‘collect’ new numbers for the parameter? I dig that – could be a great way to teach new mechanics/parameters.
A wise man once said to me “Sleep is a poor substitute for caffeine.” Then he apparently got sick and wussed out, disillusioning the bright-eyed young lad who looked up to him, causing said lad’s downward spiral into madness and self-destruction.
So, from your previous response I find that your “game design game” is more of a game than I had originally thought. My first notion of it was a Virtools-based game-creator, like http://www.gamemaker.nl/ or the programs at http://www.garagegames.com/, but now it looks like I’ll have to play some sort of game to earn the tools/parameters that I want to use in my own games. This could definitely be an interesting way to walk someone through tool uses before giving them the access to all of whatever mystical items of power await them, but what about the folks who want to hop right in, or have played it before and already know the steps? Will there be an “advanced” mode or some such with unlimited access to the tools (or, at least, access to the tools but not the maximum parameters available to those tools)?
Right now I’m assuming that players will earn new tools or parameters for their existing tools by completing tutorial-like mini-games while using the Tune tools that they want to unlock/improve. Is this far from the truth?
Also, when whatever goal you set for the player/designer is accomplished, can the earned Tune points be distributed over multiple tools, or will their allocation by limited to the tools that they used to earn them?
Will the player be able to choose to learn and earn points towards tools of their choices, or are you going to have the tutorial-games laid out in a linear fashion? I say this because some players might be more eager to experiment with the “Gravity Warp” tool than the “Inclined Plane” tool, and will want to hop right into the tool of their choice, fleshing out the other ones later.
Hey Swink how is everything going. I just finished playing your prototype of Tune and it looks like a fun game
.
To me it seems like a platformer where you perform tricks as well as dodge enemey using the physics in the game. I am not sure if this was said in the other comments but why not set up a point system determining how high you can keep the controlled object (i.e. the box) in the air as it goes through certain obsticles like ramps, springs etc. This may sound kind of funny but I this idea out the name of your project “Tune”, I was thinking whenever the object jump through multiple obticles in sucession or a chain it emits a sound each time a jump is made, resulting in a combo. Also what about altering the physics in the stages, for instance something like a ice Stage where you have less traction and it will make more of a challege to move the object but it will heavily increase the force to be launched in the air if timed correctly. I don’t know if this will be of any help but it just some ideas.
Later Swink
Ernest