4-week milestone
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I hit the 4-week “milestone” in the studies of game design. What did we do in the four weeks’ time? Below’s a summary. Swedish communication course: * compose a popular science article about a topic related to your studies (in Swedish) * discuss the article in a group of 5, make the suggested changes; provide a brief summary of what you changed (in Swedish) * compose an essay about a topic related to your studies (in Swedish) * read an essay about an author’s personal relationship to writing and reading and discuss it (~20-30 pages).
Intro to Game Analysis and Design: * play through Dungeons and Dragons to get the feel of how a complex board game plays * play through SissyFight (another board game) * change the setting of SissyFight from little school girls bullying each other in a schoolyard to something different. The underlying SissyFight mechanics must not be changed yet the new setting must come through when played * compose an essay about a Creeping Doom game design (in English) * Ernest W. Adams himself gave a lecture on game design and assigned each group of students to create a game design around a given idea (a ‘dream’ of the player that the game serves to fulfill). My group’s dream was ‘I want to be a great doctor’. * choose a digital game (my group chose Warcraft III). Select an aspect of the game (exploring/fighting/resource managing…) and build a paper game which imitates that selected aspect. It’s all board games so far. That’s probably because underlying design principles in both board games and video games are the same and until you have the right skills at hand (I mean programming/drawing/3D modelling), it’s easier to do board games before you start with the actual video games. Game programming – and that’s the reason I came to Gotland in the first place – starts in November.  |
