Response to Rise of the Videogame Zinesters by Anna Anthropy (Chpt. 7)
This chapter in this book is integral to what we are currently attempting in our class. Right out of the gate Anna Anthropy puts your mind at rest about what a daunting task creating a video game can seem. Anthropy begins by introducing us to the many and differing software available to game development. For anyone that has not even thought about a project like this, this is a great way to start. If you don’t have any idea about what you want to create, or if you never thought you’d want to create a game at all, this introductory section may offer you inspiration on both fronts.
Once the preliminaries are out of the way, Anthropy sets you on a path of further inspiration. The simple act of deciding what type of game you want to create can prove difficult. For instance, there is a whole world of different types of games out there and narrowing your decision can be elusive. So, she just starts with the basics. Introduce a character. Figure out how you want this character represented through either exposition or graphically. Once you have made this decision, the type of game you want to create may become more apparent. She then provides a plethora of examples of how you may want to go about this representation.
She then moves on to basic movement in which she chooses the appropriate phrase of “verb”. Obviously, your character must do something, if there is no interaction, we are no longer playing a game. Now we need an object to interact with. This can be a protagonist, a second player, or a wall. The opportunities are infinite and hopefully, the prior prompts will lead to a satisfying inspiration.
As we move onto music and sound effects, Anthropy again gives us ample resources and ideas. It is quite obvious that she has done a huge amount of research and the information is quite valuable. The audio interaction of a game is often overlooked, but you would find it difficult to find anyone under the age of 50 that can’t sing along to the theme from Super Mario Brothers. If those people exist, I probably don’t want to know them.
She then asks us to broaden our characters vocabulary. This reads like your writing a story, which you are. Once you have a broader vocabulary you are able to write a more detailed and interesting story. Levels in a game are like a chapter in a book, they separate the story into memorable sections so that we can take greater satisfaction in the overall story arch.
Once we have finished our story, it’s off to our copy editors a.k.a. other gamers. Anthropy tells us how integral this step is because as a developer you are playing the game with the rules you have created. It is incredibly important that you let people play that do not know the rules initially, this will ensure that your story is being told the way you intended it. Get all the feedback you can and start hammering on those shortcomings that may develop.
The chapter concludes with a section on distribution which, frankly, should probably be in its own chapter. As an artist, I find it an incredible hindrance to my creativity to start worrying about who is going to like my work. I find the best art is the kind that satisfies the artist and in this fashion, that art seems to speak the creators' mind the most accurately. Regardless, this section of the book was incredibly informative and I think that it will help me immensely with my work on game creation in the future.
