Cloud Project

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March 16, 2005

Game Design Decisions and GDC After Effects

The value of this year's GDC is enormous. I believe it brought all of us wider views and fresh ideas in game design, programming, art and music. I'll summarize the sparks from GDC and demonstrate what we will change in the game design. Again, change is not a bad thing:

1) Project Scope Narrows
According to production schedule on Feb 20th, by May 1st we will have multiple playable levels (though it is in the same map) which requires us to tweak not only the level X but also the other follow ups. This plan is hard to accomplish due to the limited resources of art content, engine integration and level design iteration lifespan. However we should not feel panic.

Takahashi’s presentation about Katamari Damacy is very encouraging. His story proves that a good prototype does not require multiple levels or loads of contents. Fun factors can come from very simple rules. Takahashi brought his experience about teenage’s love to the game with a simple mechanics. I believe we can deliver our experience in limited scope too.

In the rest of the production, we should narrow down the design to only one level and really iterate and polish it to a convincing state. The core design challenge for CLOUD is to bring player the familiar experience from their childhood, the feeling they had when they imagine and guess the clouds. This is our design goal for the level.

2) Level Editing is part of the game play
Will Wright and his SPORE really broke my confidence. I was not a SIMs player. After listen to his speak and thoughts about game design for multiple times, I did realized some fun I had never paid attention to: The fun of editing, his original inspiration for SIMCITY is actually from his joyful experience of editing islands for a helicopter game.

Interesting enough, when I saw John playing with his new prototype by adding clouds on the screen during the game, I suddenly realized the feeling Will Wright talked about. As SPORE emphasize player to create content, CLOUD offers the same potential for player to create their own skyline and map to share with the others. “Welcome to my sky.” Additionally, it is also a perfect level design training sample for the other students.

As I discussed this idea with John today, the level editing will happen when the game runs. Level editing and gaming languages are shared, so that once the player knows how to play the game, they can edit the game too. I hope all the team members can contribute their own creativity when we have our editor done.

3) We are all designers
Toru Iwatani, the creator of PAC-MAN and RIDGE RACER mentioned the importance of a design team. Ideas need to be bounced back and forth. I started noticing CLOUD is lack of debating and new ideas like DYADIN. Once we have our first iteration ready, please feel free to shout out your ideas.

4) Let the first iteration start ASAP
We have nearly one and a half months left for the deadline. Rick and Glenn, I was very strict about the looking and asked all kinds of visual features before. However, I think we won't have enough time to do game design iteration which is the most important aspect for this project. If you are still not satisfied with your cloud rendering and camera, feel free to throw a temporary version. Let the big snow ball start rolling. We can iterate them later. We need to have our game running ASAP.

Posted by Jenova at March 16, 2005 11:05 PM

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Posted by: SEDinehart at March 17, 2005 11:16 PM

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