| Games are fun to play. Maybe the only thing more fun than playing a game is designing a game. Game design is hard fun; it takes years to truly build a game. It takes a team of talented designers in many areas such as art, sound and music, interactive script writing, usability engineers, highly creative programming and business folks to 'play a game into existence' as a team. But, all games begin with a simple idea, which drives and focuses the teams' energy toward a common, understandable goal. All media, whether a game or a novel or an opera or film or television begins with the idea. Finding this idea is not always easy. Developing the idea is never easy. This is where the hard fun comes in. Is the game a first person shooter? Is it an adventure game? Is it a puzzle game? Is it a role-playing game? Does it completely bend genres? What is the heartbeat of the game? What audience are we aiming at? Are we designing a game for a console? For a PC? For the web? Is the game episodic? What do the levels look like? How many levels are there? Who are our characters? What is their motivation? How are our characters related to other characters? To the player? Where does the game take place? What is in the place? How does the game player interact with the game space? What technology will we use? Will we use an engine? Will we build our own? Who does what and when; what is our timeline; what are our milestones? How are we going to get this funded? This class will be a boot camp for game design where we get into shape, get our training down and get going on design. This is a class where you will come up with ideas and you will work as a team to complete a design document which can be taken to a variety of next levels such as programming, 3D modeling and sound design. We will look at a lot of games? We will play some of them? We will understand how and why they work well or really don't work at all but most of all we will have a lot of very hard fun. So what do you think? Are you game? |
's Principles of Game Design
Workshop MONDAY |
TUESDAY |
WEDNESDAY |
THURSDAY |
FRIDAY |
 |
|
| 8:00 AM | ||||||
| 8:30AM | Review & Questions | Review & Questions | Review & Questions | Review & Questions | ||
| 9:00AM | What is a game? What makes it good, and/or successful? | Running the IDEAS activity: finding the gold in the mud |
Running the IDEAS activity: finding the gold in the mud | Team presentations: what has been accomplished, what has to be accomplished, who does what. | Team presentations: what has been accomplished, what has to be accomplished, who does what. | |
| 9:30AM | ||||||
| 10:15AM | BREAK |
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| 10:30AM | Flash as a prototyping tool:
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Game deliver: console, platform or PC Game engines: how they work: |
Finding 4 good ideas and forming teams |
Audience, play testing, usability and on-going evaluation | Continue working toward final presentation |
|
| 11:00AM | ||||||
| 11:30AM | ||||||
| Noon | LUNCH | LUNCH | LUNCH & SPECIAL EVENT | LUNCH | LUNCH | |
| 1:00PM | Flash as a prototyping tool:
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The art of level design: writing for games SketchUp.com, very fast 3D modeling for level design |
Story & play
development Research: source visuals, source sounds, background information interactivity |
Develop an evaluation and feedback plan which monitors play and usability through out the design process. | Continue working toward final presentation. | |
| 1:30PM | ||||||
| 2:00PM | ||||||
| 2:30PM | ||||||
| 3:00PM | BREAK |
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| 3:15PM | Great
Design Doc
|
Music
& sound for emotional design Rapid prototyping real fast: Flash, the web, story boarding, scenario design Playing a game into existence: improvisation and designing paper board game to test Homework: 5 50 word concept ideas; each idea on a single white index card; no names on the index card. Due first thing in the morning |
Students present games they thing are really cool and explain why they
have cool design Begin rapid prototyping of team ideas |
Continue working on design document and rapid prototyping for final presentation | Final
public presentation of the design concept and rapid prototype. |
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| 4:00PM | ||||||
| 4:30PM | ||||||
