Throughout the development process of creating our KS1 education game; Animal Frenzy, we have faced various design issues which have caused us to make iterations to it in order improve it’s gameplay and educational quality. Using the various articles and lectures that I’ve attended alongside this development process I will be matching up this issues to relevant references to better explain the obstacles we have encountered.
I think logically it would be best to start with the research stages of the project, where we also began establishing our objectives. Initially we were trying to create a set of tasks for ourselves, around which the concept of the game would be based. This lead us to settle on ideas linking to care for the environment, improving geographical and biological knowledge. I attended a Sculpture workshop last October, lead by Lord Roger Cunliffe, about design and how communication is one of a designers key tools. There was also a segment in the session that talked about research and investigating the roots of a subject in order to improve ones understanding of it. This I think was a developmental aspect of our design process that we could have improved. We studied a few KS1 games however we never really took note of any of the ideas, mechanics or strategies they used in order to communicate their message. We essentially started on a completely blank canvas, using no previous found references as foundations for our concepts. With regards to the communication aspect of Roger’s session, I feel that we have achieved a decent standard of conveying our message. The ‘improve biological knowledge’ section of our specification was achieved in a few ways. Using the ‘drag and drop’ mechanic as a means of allowing the player to try and match up animals to their environments was one way we did this. Players would have to decide and select the three correct animals from a panel of eight and place them on the environment. We thought by using this simple control mechanic players could begin going through the learning process a lot quicker, ‘casualising’ the intensity of the gameplay. This is something that Marcos Venturelli testifies to in his article on Casual Game Design, stating that casual games are “games that generally involve less complicated game controls and overall complexity in terms of gameplay or investment required to get through the game”. The casual game aspect for us was an important aspect as it allowed us to better begin achieving our objectives and also cater for the ability level of our KS1 demographic.
The ‘care for the environment’ aspect of our specification was actually implemented into the game a lot later as it was something we initially overlooked. This was achieved by introducing an extra mechanic that ran alongside the main ‘drag and drop’ mechanic within our game. We decided to include three bits of rubbish that players would have to find on each level. If players found each piece of rubbish per level then that would grant them a bonus to the final bonus level in the game. This element of Animal Frenzy, although a fairly minor iteration was something that we now realize is fairly important. On top of emphasizing the care for the environment it also began to create vague arches of pacing, an aspect of games that Venturelli also covers in his Casual games article. He mentions that “the lower and upper arches of pacing are related to the long-term relation between the player and the game, and how much time he is willing to invest before becoming frustrated or bored and abandoning play”. By introducing this long-term objective that would contribute to something more enjoyable, we hope to help prevent the player from losing interest too quickly.
The concept of the bonus level, in which players would have to catch animals in a net, was born from the idea of segmentation of challenges and mechanics. We decided that by having a differing mechanic(s) at points during the game we can hope to engage the player for longer, which again relates back to Venturelli’s points on pacing. Even though the bonus level was at the end of the game we thought that this would act as a form of reward for completing the game. This form of segmentation, according to José P. Zagal, Clara Fernández-Vara and Michael Mateas, in their article ‘Games and Culture’ would be spatial/puzzle and also perhaps temporal segmentation. They also mention the concept of ‘Boss Battles’ in which “…the difficulty may increase significantly, the player might have to resort to new tactics, or there might be additional conditions or restrictions on the player’s actions”. We followed suit with this idea, players are taken to a completely new game space to what they have seen previously and introduced to a new mechanic. After playing about with the idea of segmentation we decided that attempting to interweave this into the game more frequently would be a wise decision. We decided that creating ‘Specific Objective Events’ as we used to name them would not only help hold the players’ interest but also perhaps improve the quality of learning simultaneously as well. For example, we would have a level where players simply place the animals on screen, then the next level would involve achieving an objective specific for that level, like helping to put out the bushfires in the Australia level or helping to open an underwater clam in the Ocean level. Zagal states, “Games that use puzzle segmentation present a series of puzzles that must be solved before the next is available.” this would have been the case with our specific objective event levels, however we encountered a few problems with this idea. The main issue with it was creating an objective that would synergize with our main aim of educating children on animals and their habitats. By having an objective like ‘Help the animals build and igloo’ on the Antarctica level would dilute that message, is the player now picking animals that belong in the Antarctica or are they now choosing animals that may be best at building?
Our first thought was to emphasize the former by having instructions at the beginning of each level reminding “Remember to pick animals that can cope in this environment!”. However after a fairly long thought process we thought it may be best to get rid of this idea for clarity, despite the great benefits that it would have probably had on our game in terms of enjoyment.
Once we had established our main mechanic/objectives we then had to decide on how to enforce them. In Venturelli’s previously mentioned article, he mentions the idea of ‘Visible Feedback’, this is something that currently we have not addressed to the best of our ability. In his article he says, “…The key is that when the plan doesn't succeed, players understand why. The world is so consistent that it's immediately obvious why a plan didn't work.”. As it stands, to notify to players that what they did was a ‘wrong move’ is a simple popup stating “Oops! Try again!”. I think that this is far from what Church means when he talks about a player knowing ‘why’ a plan didn’t work. Given more time we could have implemented a popup with a statement for each wrong animal in each wrong environment explaining to the player why that animal couldn’t survive in that environment, which would also improve the educational value of Animal Frenzy. However, we are using popups that explain what was correct about the correct moves, so we’ve almost met Venturelli half-way with regards to visible feedback.
I feel that whilst on the topic of visible feedback, now is a good time to talk about the perceivable consequence factor of the game, something that I feel has some relation to visible feedback. In Doug Church’s article ‘Formal Abstract Design Tools’, Church uses the analogy “Because of X, Y has happened." This is clearly a fairly pure form of perceived consequence.”, an understandably important aspect of game design. Thinking about how this could be translated into the case of Animal Frenzy, we have only just included a consequence to perceive. This would be the “move counter’, which indicates to the player how many turns or ‘goes’ they have left before they fail the level and must start again. Failing to complete the level in the specified moves allowed would forfeit the players chance of receiving certain medals awarded for completing a level in minimum attempts.
This leads me neatly onto to explain another feature of Animal Frenzy that we again have only just implemented, the reward system. This could also double as the implementation of a goal system, giving a more significant purpose to the objectives of the game. However that said, this is the case only if the players “agree to behave as if the goal is important to them…” as Costikyan states in his article ‘I have No Words & I Must Design: Toward A Critical Vocabulary for Games’. This was our attempt at creating more “explicit goals” as Costikyan puts it in Animal Frenzy. Players who make no wrong moves can get a medal exclusive to that condition, each wrong move/couple of moves are rewarded with less glamorous medals. A small blog post I read a while ago, ‘Rewards, Doing Chores and Social Games’ by Micheal Fergusson used the term “ the emotional trigger” when referring to rewards, which means gaining personal satisfaction through accomplishing an objective. This is omething that we hoped to capture by creating these bronze, silver, gold and platinum medals.
I’m going to conclude this development analysis by assessing Animal Frenzy against Costikyan’s definition of a game, one that I’m yet to hear defined better. In Costikyan’s article he explains a game as “An interactive structure of endogenous meaning that requires players to struggle toward a goal”. Animal Frenzy is most definitely interactive. It has a basic structure. As opposed to endogenous meaning, its meaning its exogenous, the soul purpose of the game, and other educational games, is to educate the player to benefit them in the real world. And finally there is a struggle, however weak it is, and there are also goals. So in it’s simplest form we’ve succeeded in making Animal Frenzy into a game, the educational richness however I think is something that given a lot more time we could improve dramatically.
Bibliography
Venturelli, M. , (2009) Space of Possibility and Pacing in Casual Game Design – A PopCap Case Study, Gamasutra. [online] Available at: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/MarkVenturelli/20091107/3497/Space_of_Possibility_and_Pacing_in_Casual_Game_Design__A_PopCap_Case_Study.php
Costikyan, G. , I Have No Words & I Must Design: Toward a Critical Vocabulary for Games. Costik.com [online] Available at: http://costik.com/
Church, D. , (1999) Formal Abstract Design Tools, Gamasutra [online] Available at:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3357/formal_abstract_design_tools.php
Zagal, P., Fernández-Vara, C., Mateas, M. Gameplay Segmentation in Vintage Arcade Games, Games and Culture (Vol 3 No 2 April 2008 175 – 198)
http://facsrv.cs.depaul.edu/~jzagal/Papers/Zagal_et_al_Gameplaysegmentation.pdf
Fergusson, M. , (2011) Rewards, Doing Chores and Social Games, Gamasutra. [online] Available at: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/MichaelFergusson/20110130/6911/Rewards_Doing_Chores_and_Social_Games.php
Note
If that's wholey OK, then I wanted to add just a small paragraph on Story and link in the Costikyan article.
