This week’s assignment was to track players moving through a level and then display the paths they took. To that end, I’ve tweaked a previous game of mine to record player movements to a text file and allow me to display them all together later. Here’s a screenshot of a few people’s different paths through Spatial Fling:
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Team Name: Vanishing Act
Team Members: Jeremy Diamond
Game Analyzed: Shadow of the Colossus
Shadow of the Colossus is a game released for the Playstation 2 in 2005 by Team Ico, the creators of Ico. On the play matrix, this game falls slightly farther into the Strategy side than the Luck side, and is about evenly balanced between Physical and Mental. There is plenty of coordination required, but you also have to be able to analyze your opponents and figure out the puzzles to defeating them. The game is mostly strategy, but you can get lucky (or unlucky) every once in a while. The game’s gameplay is analogous to real life exploration, mountain climbing, and parkour. The fun of the experience comes from facing a gigantic enemy 20 times your size and taking it down with nothing but your bare hands, a bow, and a pathetic little sword. The difficulty comes from trying to take down an enemy significantly larger than you, and from trying to keep your grip while it tries to shake you off.
Shadow of the Colossus’ interface is interesting in that there is very little HUD. Instead of using an on-screen minimap, you hold your sword up to the sun and the reflection of light shines in the direction you need to go to find your next colossus. Instead of having immediate blatantly out-of-place weak points on the colossus, you need to shine the light off of your sword to illuminate where they are. The interface as a whole, however, is extremely difficult to use. The camera will often position itself at extremely inconvenient angles that make it difficult to control your character or see what you’re doing. The game, like many other 3D games, allows you to reposition the camera with the right control stick, but the camera will just snap back into its previous position the moment you take your thumb off the stick in order to use the other controls. This aspect of the game has caused many to cite the camera as an even bigger enemy than the colossi themselves.
The game’s core mechanic is that the main character, Wanda, has a finite ability to maintain a grip on something. As you try to scale obstacles or colossi themselves, Wanda’s grip rating goes down, and if it reaches zero, he lets go of whatever he’s holding, possibly falling to his death. Unlike most other video games, Shadow of the Colossus has no “mooks” or just general bad guys. The game’s fights consists of the 16 titular colossi. By other games’ standards, this is a game of only 16 “boss fights” and no regular enemies. Wanda isn’t a roving killing machine. He’s just a very determined young man with a sword.
The game’s story is that the main character, Wanda, is in love with a girl, Mono. Mono, however, is dead. He takes Mono to a shrine in the “Forbidden Land” where an entity called Dormin resides. Dormin has the ability to restore life to Mono, but will only do it in exchange for Wanda slaying the 16 colossi that exist in the Forbidden Land. Not much backstory is given outside of what you need to know: There are 16 colossi and you need to kill them.
The platform of the game is the Playstation 2, the genre is Action-Adventure, and the audience is teens and up. Shadow of the Colossus is a very beautiful game and appeals to many who like more artistic games.
If I could change one core aspect of the game, I’d fix the damned camera. The game’s difficulty is largely skewed by the poorly implemented interface instead of the actual gameplay itself.
Team Name: Cotton Candy
Team Members: Jeremy Diamond, Tabitha De La Cruz
Game Analyzed: Go
Go is an ancient board game originating in China 2500 years ago, but is played all over Asia and even in the rest of the world today. If the game were plotted on the play matrix, it would land purely in the strategy and mental area. There is no luck or physical coordination required other than the bare minimum required to lift up a piece and place it without knocking the board over. The fun of the experience comes from coming up with strategies and seeing whether they work or not. The difficulty of the experience comes from trying to counter your opponent’s moves while still expanding your territory. The interface is very easy to use since all it involves is a wooden board and some colored stones. The core mechanic of the game is that each stone or chain of stones must have an adjacent empty space in order to remain on the board. Players keep this in mind when placing stones in order to remove their opponents’ pieces. Go has only two rules. The first being that each stone or chain requires an adjacent empty space. The second being that no move can recreate the previous state of the board, in order to prevent repitition. These rules work together just fine to create a cohesive gameplay that is deceptively simple to learn, but difficult to master. Go has no story. It’s an abstract strategy board game. After playing, I developed a strategy to surround my opponents larger territories to capture them at once while my opponent tried to chip away at my pieces one by one. This ended up being much more effective at capturing more pieces. The gameplay is innovative because all you have to remember is that you want to surround your opponent to stop them. The game’s difficulty depends entirely on your opponent.
Solo Analysis of Minecraft
Minecraft is a sandbox game by Mojang based on the game Infiniminer by Zachtronic industries.
Minecraft falls more into the Chance and Mental side of the play matrix. While there IS strategy involved in the game, a big portion of obtaining resources is determined by the terrain generation, which is done randomly. Hand-eye coordination helps greatly in combat, but is not as important as crafting better equipment for yourself and building shelter to avoid combat in.
The game is analogous to a real life box of legos. It’s a tiny little world of blocks that you are free to arrange at your whim. The fun of the experience comes from the freedom. There is no “wrong” way to play. You make your own fun. For some, fun is building an epic masterpiece of architecture and showing it off or just exploring it. For others, fun is exploring a vast, endless world. For others, fun is trying to survive against a harsh world that’s trying to kill you. For others, fun is building a community of other players and building an ideal world together.
The difficulty in Minecraft comes from monsters which are constantly trying to kill you and destroy everything you’ve built and ever loved. The difficulty also comes from trying to obtain resources to keep yourself fed and sheltered. You are free to make whatever you want, but you have to find the resources first.
Minecraft’s interface is generally very easy. You smack blocks around until they break so you can pick them up. You build things out of those blocks. Crafting items is done by placing ingredients into a grid in certain combinations. Some combinations are very intuitive. Some aren’t so intuitive.
The core mechanic of Minecraft is that the world is fully malleable because it is made out of individual blocks. Blocks can be removed or placed at will. Some blocks require special tools to obtain while others require certain ingredients to be created, but the world as a whole is like a lump of clay waiting to be molded.
Minecraft has no story. At all. There is no opening cutscene. There is no backstory. You are a guy dropped on the beach in the wilderness and all you need to know is that it’s going to get dark and you won’t like it when it’s dark. The closest thing the game has to a story is an added epilogue screen that implies that the game itself is some sort of window into another reality. The epilogue itself has absolutely no effect on the game itself aside from annoying people who try to exit The End dimension.
Minecraft being an open sandbox game, players on multiplayer servers sometimes like to make up their own stories and themes for their roleplay servers. Some servers are undergoing a “zombie apocalypse.” Players are survivors trying to escape the zombies, and the server gameplay is tweaked to make zombies more numerous. Other servers are “prison servers” where players take the roles of prison inmates or wardens and try to eke out existence in the bleak, violent atmosphere. Some servers try to simulate life in popular TV shows or books, where players take the role of characters in the story and the world is shaped to resemble locations from the source material. Just as the simple open-ended gameplay offer infinite possibilities, so does it offer the chance for infinite stories.
After playing the game enough times, I came up with a starting strategy of burning trees for charcoal instead of attempting to mine for coal. Trees are renewable and almost always in plentiful supply at the beginning of the game, while finding coal before your first nightfall is pure luck. Either coal or charcoal can be used to create torches, which are completely necessary in order to keep your home lit so that monsters don’t spawn inside. Most people overlook the ability to cook logs into charcoal and instead try to find coal, so my strategy cuts a lot of luck out of the start of the game.
The platform of the game is computers. The game is written in Java and can be run in Windows, Linux, or iOS. The only fitting genre for the game is “Sandbox.” The audience of the game is anybody and the game is marketed for all ages. This is definitely the right strategy and it has definitely worked for the game. Minecraft has sold over six million copies as of May of 2012.
The gameplay is innovative because it provides a wide open world with a lot to do with next to no restrictions. Unlike most sandbox games, there are no constraints. There is no “Edge of the World” keeping you from going wherever you want. There are no story missions requiring you to jump through hoops. There’s just a great wide world waiting for you to do whatever you want.
Minecraft’s distribution method is considered unique. It’s digitally distributed. You pay a single fee once to buy the game and you can download it as many times as you want on any computer to play. What’s different about Minecraft’s distribution is that the game was made available for free in its earliest stages of development. After a certain point, the game was then made available as an “Alpha version” and then later a “Beta version” for a fraction of the full price with the stipulation that whoever bought the Alpha or Beta would fully own the game and be entitled to the complete game when it was fully released. Considering that Mojang, the company that makes Minecraft, is now worth several million dollars, I’d say this was a good business decision. The game’s development basically funded itself by allowing people to purchase the game early.
If I could change one core gameplay mechanic of the game, I would make it easier to protect homes from explosions. Right now, there’s just a flat “Explosion Resistance” stat for each kind of block, and blocks are either explosion-proof or they aren’t. Since there are only a handful of explosion-proof blocks, houses can either be safe or they can be good looking.
Minecraft is generally considered “easy,” but it’s hard to gauge difficulty in a game with mutable gameplay and no concrete goals. The game can be as difficult or as easy as you make it.
Team Name: Keyboard Smashers
Team Members: Jeremy Diamond, Tabitha De La Cruz, Alberto Hernandez
Game Analyzed: Dungeons & Dragons
Dungeons and Dragons is a pen and paper roleplaying game and generally the most archetypal, or probably just infamous, example of one. If D&D were to be mapped on the play matrix, it would be directly in the middle of chance and strategy, and completely into the mental side of gameplay. Dungeons and Dragons has a very large chance element due to relying on dice rolls, but there is a lot of strategy involved in statting your character in ways that will bend the dice rolls in your favor and making choices that will avoid unfavorable odds.
Dungeons and Dragons is analogous to real life in that neither have a set hard and fast script they adhere to. Everyone has free will and can make any choices. Just like real life, people are unpredictable.
The fun of Dungeons & Dragons comes from the interaction between players and dungeon master. Having a human element in the game makes it very surprising and fun.
The difficulty in Dungeons & Dragons comes from the element of chance. Even with the best odds, the dice can still roll poorly and put you in bad situations. Also, more clever dungeon masters can challenge players with more complex puzzles or clever enemies. Overcoming such challenges requires thinking outside the box and clever strategies.
The game’s interface can be confusing for new players and requires a bit of learning to get the hang of. The game features many new terms and concepts that can be intimidating at first.
The core gameplay of D&D is just pure decision making. A player decides what stats their character will have, which influences what die rolls they’ll have an advantage at, and decides what actions they will take to take advantage of their characters’ strengths.
The gameplay mechanics all work together just fine and create a cohesive experience. Earlier editions of the game were prone to being smashed together hodge podges of rules, but the later editions such as 3rd or 4th are more cohesive.
The “story” of Dungeons & Dragons is whatever the dungeon master says it is. There is a “canon” setting and backstory for Dungeons and Dragons, but Dungeon Masters are free to use or ignore it. Even with the dungeon master deciding what a plot will be about, the full “story” is ultimately decided by how the characters react to it. The story does not affect interactive play. Interactive play affects the story.
The strategy of Dungeons & Dragons is to minimize weaknesses and exploit strengths. A character could be designed to be an unstoppable physical force, but have terrible speaking skills. That player would try to emphasize his strengths by smashing everything in sight, while try to minimize his weakness by leaving social situations to other party members. Someone extensively familiar with the rules of Dungeons & Dragons could “hack” the game in unexpected ways by exploiting the rules in ways that are not expected. The most infamous of such cases is this creature/character called “The Pun-Pun” that was a kobold that a player found a way to elevate to godhood. Fortunately, even the most deviant of players are still kept in check by a vigilant Dungeon Master.
Dungeons & Dragons is a pen & paper game. The genre is Roleplaying Game. Audience of the game is young adults and above. The game is targeted towards more mature players. Later editions of the game are marketed towards younger players, but this may not be the best choice.
The gameplay is innovative because it was one of the first roleplaying games ever created. Roleplaying games as a genre did not exist before. The first RPGs for video games were based on Dungeons & Dragons. D&D is the first instance of a game having classes and levels and XP and “Hit Points”.
Dungeons & Dragons in the past had rulebooks sold in bookstores and specialty game stores. With the advent of the internet, book sales have gone down and most roleplaying game companies are switching from physical books to a digital distribution system. Physical books are in the $30 -$60 range, but digital PDF files are available for $1-$10.
If I were to change the core mechanic of the game, I’d switch the dice with a deck of cards. Draw a card to determine a die roll instead of rolling a die.
The game’s difficulty is largely dependent on what kind of dungeon master is presiding over the game.