My first game design challenges

A couple of months or so ago I decided to stop lurking, and then I began submitting my own entries for Game Career Guide’s Game Design Challenges. In case you don’t know, Game Career Guide is one of Gamasutra’s sister sites, specifically oriented to students. It features some interesting articles on game development by prominent people in the industry, and it also holds a game design competition every few weeks. For these challenges, that are quite useful as a way to exercise one’s skills at designing and, mainly, communicating your idea as concisely as you can, they suggest a topic from which to devise a game, and then anyone may submit their own design in 500 words or less, including a maximum of three images. The most relevant ones are listed on the site. When I first learned about it, I instantly got interested and thought that I would take part on it as soon as I came up with a half decent idea. Inspiration, though, is a bit reluctant to assist me half of the time, so I have only participated three times so far. I got an honorable mention and a second place (the results for the third one haven’t been posted yet), so I guess I can’t complain. However, I’m still aiming for the first place. From now on, I’ll devote a whole post to future challenges, which I’ll update when the results are out...or maybe I should create a specific page to list the challenges, whatever. For today’s post, however, I was planning to share my first two entries.

My first time: Romance (No pun intended)

On the challenge’s wording they dealt with the romancing genre (for instance, the Tokimeki Memorial series), which is quite popular in Japan. Attempts to carry over those titles to Europe and the United States have kind of failed though. Our ‘mission’ was to design a game with romance as its main theme that could be more appealing to occidental mindsets.

To provide a bit of context, as the game will be heavily story-driven, I had the main idea while recalling 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind', one of my favourite films ever.

The goal consists of gathering the pieces of a perplexing puzzle: the memories of your girlfriend/boyfriend and the relationship you had/have, which apparently you have completely forgotten. Solving the riddle doesn't mean you both get to live happily ever after: as you regain new memories and get closer to your goal, your decisions throughout the game and your interactions with other characters may significantly affect the outcome.

You won't be alone in your journey: Together with a partially controllable NPC who's going through the same, you'll have to cooperate to find out why your respective significant others seem to have been erased from your memories...if they ever existed.

At the beginning, you'll get to choose your gender and sexual orientation: they'll determine your partner's identity. Then you can pick a career (such as a scientist, a painter, a PR or a stripper) with benefits and disadvantages to your skills. There will also be some traits to choose which will set some background story-wise and grant you with further bonuses and handicaps. Your character's appearance will be customizable, for the eye candy.

Your companion will start with some skills of her own. As you progress through the game and get to know her better, you'll be able to 'discover' her own traits (not necessarily the same set you were offered in the beginning) and further refine her skills.

The plot will advance by completing certain sub-goals: - Get some reaction from an NPC, through conversational trees or performing in-game actions. - Reach some particular location. - Cooperative missions. Say, your partner uses her persuasion skill to distract some guy while you sneak past and then use your amazing ability to find information to...find some information. - Mini-game solving, related to whatever you're doing. Oblivion is useful as a bad and a good example: While I found the persuasion wheel totally unimmersive, the lock picking mini-game was, in contrast, reasonably well done.

Solving a sub-goal will trigger some hint about your relationship (which will contribute to get you attached to him/her, lest you might end up always romancing a secondary or even more unimportant character) and may give some clues for the next mission.

If you end up romancing other people (you cheater!), you'll have to talk to them, give them gifts or help them out. Your choices during the game may also modify the approval of one potential lover (where that option makes sense: no clairvoyance!). I'm afraid I won't be spoiling much if I say beforehand your companion will be a love interest, but there'll be more, some of which you might not get to meet on a single playthrough.

Last, there will be a variety of optional areas where you can get some benefits: insight about missions or the game world, shops, secondary quests, workplaces, motels, etcetera.

I enjoyed a lot imagining how the story would unfold. My weak point was, however, that I lacked a bit of focus on the gameplay. As a result, it isn’t totally clear if the game will be more of an RPG, vastly focused on conversations and character development, than a sandbox.
This is something that I have tried to solve for the subsequent entries. I still like the idea very much, and I intend to further develop it as soon as I can think of a set of suitable mechanics.

The results of the challenge, as well as the entries on the following pages, are listed right below, so you can read what other people did. My entry, that you’ve already read, is on page 8. http://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/835/results_from_game_design_.php

Second entry, second place :D: Inappropriate title

The second challenge I participated in asked contestants to take the title of a game that has nothing to do with the game itself and make another one that is better suited to that title. Examples included were Vagrant Story or Guilty Gear.

This time I opted for a more casual approach. I was playing Braid at that time (amazing game, by the way), and I couldn’t see how braids had anything to do with a time-controlling platformer (aside from a really brief mention on the plot introductory texts for one level). I then remembered Ratatouille and suddenly everything made sense: what about a hairdresser louse?

Don’t tell me it isn’t cute

As Louse Sassoon, a hairdresser-wannabe louse (Ratatouille anyone?), your dream is to make your human host wear the best-looking braids in the neighbourhood. To do so, you'll get to tame a set of rebel hair locks, forming the links that will shape the braid(s). However, humans and even your fellow lice will be around, decided to crush your dreams.

At the beginning of the level you'll get explained the type of braid you must do, as well as the possible new features you may encounter in it.

Then the game will star with Louse swinging from one of the locks (There will be some wind, blowing with varying strengths depending on the level). From there, it can jump to another lock either on its own, or carrying around the lock Louse was previously hanging from. If the jump is done while carrying around a lock of hair, one of the "links" of the braid will be made. After that, Louse will keep making links by repeating this process until time runs out. You must decide carefully when to jump so Louse can reach the desired lock avoiding to fall down. In addition to jumping and swinging, Louse can also use some items that may help it defeat its enemies, get some power-ups or score additional points. All the levels have a set duration. The area of interest where Louse will be able to put its skills to use will remain fixed for some seconds, and then the braid will go up (think of Puzzle Bobble, but in reverse order). If no links were done, the braid's appearance will look messy and you'll get less points.

Once the time has run out, Louse will move on to the next level if it managed to achieve a minimum score. There will be more than one scoring levels to provide an additional challenge and reward your skill with some bonuses.

Obstacles/Enemies:

• Lice shampoo cloud. Be careful and avoid them at all costs, as these clouds may kill you.
• Enemy lice. They despise Louse because they think it brings shame to the family. To defeat them, throw them some nits and make them fall.
• Hairspray cloud. This ozone-layer-destroying cloud will also paralyse Louse for a few seconds, leaving it vulnerable against enemies, and making it lose some precious time.
• Hair drier. Strong wind gusts will blow for a while, making swinging and jumping from lock to lock more complicated.
• Others.

Items:

• Hair gel: It stops a lock from swinging around due to the wind.
• Nits: Keep them to fight the enemy lice.
• Beads and ribbons: Use them to increase your score, as the braids Louse will make will look prettier <3
• Blood bubble: It'll cover Louse, making it invulnerable for a few seconds.
• Extra lives: Well, I bet all of us know these ones already, don't we?
• End-of-level bonus: After finishing certain levels Louse will have a chance to make some cool hairstyle by combining the braids it has been making during the level. If successful, it'll earn a huge score bonus

A fellow programmer colleague from my Master’s final project, Aniol Alcaraz, ranked in third place. UPC seems to be hitting hard design-wise, doesn’t it? :)

Check the full list of winning entries here: http://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/855/results_from_game_design_.php

Third design: Michael Jackson

For the latest design challenge, our objective was to imagine a game centered about the late singer.

I’ve always thought that his videoclips were really original and elaborated -starting, of course, with Thriller, responsible for my irrational fear of zombies, so when I read about the challenge I thought that I could use that as an obvious theme. I was at a risk of ending up like on my first challenge, where I kind of left the essential gameplay aside, so I began plotting possible interesting mechanics.

Since leaving music and dance out of the picture is a no-no, I came up with a not-too-original rhythm game, borrowing lots from the Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! and Elite Beat Agents games. To prevent my idea from being a total rip-off, I thought of an issue concerning these two games: The player can forget about the DS’s upper screen when playing. In fact, if she wants to achieve a nice score, she should forget about it, as it may be distracting. Storywise isn’t particularly meaningful either (except for the comic-book-like cutscenes that are played on the level’s play pauses), so iNiS might have done without the upper screen and nobody would have noticed the difference. I decided to solve that by adding an enemy to fight on the upper screen. Square’s The World Ends With You manages to do a two-screen combat system using both the stylus and the buttons that works reasonably well, and I thought it could be applied to my game, hence the 9 Michael Jackson’s evil impersonators he must defeat. (Oh, the number isn’t final...it could be 9, it could be 13,...)

Adding this ‘pay attention to both screens’ feature involves an additional complexity layer, which means the difficulty of the classic rhythm game on the lower screen must be decreased a bit so that the combined challenge is not unbearably difficult.

This is my original entry:
Michael Jackson vs the nine.
Nine die-hard fans who've taken their obsession way too far and now believe to have become him, have got rid of Michael's most famous video clips and replaced the originals with their own, utterly crappy versions. Michael will have to redo the videos performing the same moves that made him famous again while at the same time he defeats his evil impersonators to prevent his legend from being stained with shame.

Mechanics:
This is a rhythm game intended for the Nintendo DS. The main source of inspiration is Elite Beat Agents, but I’ve added a twist inspired on the battle system used in The World Ends with You to make the upper screen a bit more meaningful gameplay-wise than it was on EBA.



During a stage you’ll have to take care of two things:
Performing the dance moves as accurately as possible on the lower screen using the stylus. You’ll have to click and/or follow certain symbols at the right time to make Michael dance, and also increase the power meter (the better he performs, the more energy he’ll gain).
At the same time Michael dances, he’ll have to dodge, counter and attack the evil impersonator for the current stage (remember those fans have lost touch with reality and think the authentic Michael is actually an imitator himself). Michael’s fan will be displayed on the upper screen, and every now and then he’ll throw some spotlights, rocks, etc (dependant on the setting of the stage). The directional pad+L trigger (or ABXY buttons+ R trigger for left-handed people) will allow you to avoid the items, deflect them or attack your foe, pressing the buttons when appropriate. The damage you cause to him will be proportional to the “style meter”.

As the focus is on rhythm, the attack and dance sequences will have to be balanced so that Michael’s attacks blend in nicely with the music. In addition, the dance moves part should be a bit easier than it is on EBA so that when incorporating the upper-screen-focused gameplay the combined challenge level does not get impossibly difficult.

The stage ends either when the whole video has finished, or when the player loses, which will happen when the style level goes below a minimum (either by repeatedly failing at dancing, or by getting hit by the crazy fan). There is a middle-ground situation: if by the end of the stage the style level is above the minimum threshold but the player hasn’t beaten the enemy, the score will be computed and the experience will accumulate to the total experience counter, but the stage will not be considered as cleared till the enemy has been defeated..

Last, the game is structured on several tiers of two or three stages of increasing difficulty. The player may choose between the available stages freely, but all of them will have to be cleared before advancing to the next tier.

The time limit to submit entries ended yesterday, and they’ll be posting the results next week.

If I happen to have a good idea from which to code a simple game on XNA, C++ plus [OpenGL|DirectX] or Pygame for learning purposes (What should I do? A scrolling shooter? A platformer? A tower defense? I’m open to any suggestions), my next post might deal with it; otherwise, I may have to recycle a couple of incomplete designs that I have in mind. For now, I’ll just spoil the titles: Psyche, and The Path is The Goal (this one is probably temporary, though).