How did I create my first game (not true)
Hello, everybody!
I’m Mikhail Kuznetsov, the student of Apple Developer Academy. There is the story of development the game prototype from scratch.
The task
Okay, here we are. I have three weeks for creating something on my Game Design path. I need to represent my result in the article and add a poster for it. I prefer to do it by myself, because it’s almost my first steps in this direction. Last time I have been creating the game was on the second form of university. It was game on Unity where the bulldozer was smashing houses. The result wasn’t something fascinating because I had only three days for programming part, which was my fault.
So, I wanna to restart my game experience using my new knowledge and current skills level.
My starting point
So, you have already seen my first experience. My starting position: I had some skills in Front End development, especially in SwiftUI. I was already on half on the “GameDesign” book written by Jessie Shell (which I’d finished it in a week after). I played a lot in strategy games like Minimetro, card games like Exploding kittens and had a lot of experience in almost twenty other games. I like thinking about general logic, studied game theory and theory of probability.
My weakest points is BackEnd. I’m still really jealous for people who can manage with several levels of abstraction in code. Also, I’m not so strong in drawing, it’s not subjectively, my Mum also thought like this.
Well, as you can see I had some boundaries and I wanted to hide them using my skills. Quite challenging, isn’t it?
Choosing the direction
Before you start doing game, you need to deconstruct it. For this you can use the principles of three lenses: Game development, Game Design and Visual art. Here I will try to explain each of them and include my suggestions about it. Game Design
It’s all about logical thing. Its about the players, the rules, the player turns, the conditions for winning or losing. For me, it’s the most interesting part and the most convenient.
Game Development
Game Development is the core of your game. In video and mobile games it would be the code part. I don’t wanna concentrate only on this because my goal is to show my best in it.
Visual Art
As for me Visual art is about gamer feelings during game. The picture which players will see, all what players are hearing and feeling during the game process, the appearance which will be reminded in their memories after playing. I’m not a good drawer, I’ve not any experience in music producing.
To conclude, I’ve decided to concentrate on Game design and doing other parts only when I need them. According to my experience and preferences, I chose doing a mobile board game with cards.
Concept
The game is Century. The idea is make 100 steps game according to 100 years in twentieth century. Players will choose avatars — famous people from this period. The main idea which make this game different from others is the concept of staying on board as long as you can. You should push others to finish the century.
The rules were changing through the time and I used the paper prototype to polish them. My first concept was like this:
Each turn players should throw two dices to move on field. After each turn they get the card with special action which can be used against other players or to enhance their positions. To win players should stay on the field as much as they can.
My first game mechanics. (ok, its not the first one)
First of all, I did model of playtest in Excel with using formulas to understand the gameflow.
Avatars
As I’ve read in very cool book for game designers “GameDesign” written by Jessie Shell, I’ve decided to use famous people from the 20th century as avatars of my game. Using this kind of characters in the future can implement a lot of new specification features according to which character the player choose.
Fork
According to my Excel model I understood that cards will play significant role in the game. After that I started to analyze other games which using cards, such as Exploding kittens or Conquist TNT. They had two different mechanics of collecting cards.
First one, you should collect several cards to activate the combination. In general, three cards is enough for each combination.
This option makes you think more about your strategy and continue collecting cards until you receive the last one for your combination.
Second option was action cards. Each card has its own strength and players can use them separately. It’s more faster and tactic kind of game.
Paper play tests
To choose the most exciting way I’ve decided to make a paper copy of my game with both types of cards. This technique is usually used to fast prototyping of the game. I used the piece of paper to write positions of each player, online dices and paper cards for collecting.
Doing a beta-paper play test is very thrilling experience. The whole process I was analysing the reaction of other people trying to understand is my game awful or not.
After doing several different play tests with both of options I’ve decided to use second option because it was more exciting to my testers. Also, I’ve decided to make cards less strong so players will use them more during the game and collecting them to the end of field in “80s-90s”.
Game Design Document
Game Design Document or GDD is the technical specification for your game. It’s the general document for game designer because it’s the main document which explained the whole game mechanics.
The GDD is usually like the declaration of future implementation. It also can be the Minimal Viable Product or MVP. Some of game designers don’t change it after finishing it and put all future implementations in other lists.
Fin
According to my knowledge GDD is the final stage for prototyping for game designer. Next steps is connected with working together with artist and developer to specify the development process and visual assets. I don’t state that I do everything correct, so, please share with me all suggestions about my work and enhancing it.
I’m going to implement better visual appearance and soon I will push link to my test flight.
