Game workshop with Ernest Adams
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During Thursday afternoon and Friday morning we had a workshop with Ernest Adams, who has written one of the books in our course literature (Fundamentals of Game Design). First, he had a lecture that was very interesting. Ernest said he made the lecture before the MDA concept was even a thing, but you could still hear bits and pieces of it during the lecture, although it might’ve been under other names. For the workshop we were divided into groups of five and each group was given a ”dream” that we were supposed to fullfill through designing a game. The dream we got was ”It is my dream to save whales by confronting whaling ships”. We got together in our group and discussed different approaches to our design. We thought about a RTS game where you control a small boat trying to stop much larger whaling ships, or possibly a very similar game but from a third person perspective (your boat being the focus). Finally, we decided to make a stealth game were you are tasked to sneak aboard a whaling ship and sabotage it. Since you want to save whales, it didn’t make sense to us that you would kill people in the game. Each person in the group was then given a task; lead designer, art designer, level designer, mechanics designer and user interface designer. I was the art designer in our group and made the drawings at the top, among others. I watched some Whale Wars on Animal Planet for inspiration and looked at arctic gear, whaling ships and harpoons to get everything right. Even though I only made 5-6 sketches, I like how they turned out. During Friday afternoon we had presentations in front of the entire class, which was a bit nerve-wrecking. But it went alright. It was very interesting to see what all the other teams had done. All the ”dream” were very different and a bit unusual. I had a lot of fun with this workshop and Ernest was very interesting to listen to. I would love to do something like this again.  |
