In this Blog I will reflecting upon my design goals, talking about how at the beginning of the tri I had completely separated 2 passions of mine and over time, with it being the overarching goal of the this unit I begun to employ both my artistic background and my games design ethics into expressing myself within a games environment
My Aim
Looking back thru my blog posts it become very clear that I had not yet developed any real sense of a design goal, no real plan of attack on how I would ultimately make a game, the sort of game I wanted to create or even acknowledged games as an expressive medium entirely.
Influenced by largely competitive grind style games such as Lol and Wow it was clear that any research I put towards games development was solely in learning how to recreate these different instances. This meant that I never really came to terms with the fact that games design was a medium of expression and expression at the time for me was in the form of visual arts.
About halfway thru the Trimester, seeing games such as journey, Never alone, brothers : a Tale of Two Sons, Shadow of the Colossus and Ico had completely reshaped my Idea of a games development process and what they mean to people. This however is not an easy process, learning to create games that create states of emotion, creates points that people learn from or deep themes that people can reflect upon is concept I only recently grasped.
This also came about with research into the culmination of artistic integrity and how these games employ artist fundamentals, physiological states and a strong design ethic to create these games that are regarded as works of art.
The largest lesson I would take from when I begun this tri to how it ended would be the the solidification of an actual design aim, incorporating my once visual arts goal to invoking emotion threw concept and fusing that into a games design rubric that I follow, creating what I hope one day to something regarded as a work of art much the same as Shadow of the Colossus or Ico and many other Games.
Enormous Learning Curve
With my Design goals pointing the right way, the process in which I reached this came at the price of making many mistakes before I acknowledged what I had learnt. This came at the price of 1-2 of my games missing the goal to which I set out, still having evidence of past influences without fully absorbing and expressing my new design intents.
It was during the development of Lights Out that my aim begun to actually become clearer, however certain elements still lingered that I would not have implemented now. Large, Epic and Grand was still present within lights out, but elements such as player paths, visual aesthetics, and theme began to show signs of this new design aim and lights Old concept showed evidence of my aim slowly changing.
Lights Out was a milestone in learning the process's in creating a game with an emotional background and a milestone in my evaluation in creating games as a whole and as dragon Ball Z has taught us, fusion is not an easy task and takes many attempts before you get it right.
In its current state, after looking at my first design, lights out didn't fit the design goal I had intended and as part of applying what I have learnt I decided to redesign lights out, learning from my mistakes and aiming to create an environment composed of fear that will slowly evolve into a sense of triumph.
It was during the production of Mamaro, my end of trimester project, that I felt my design began to lead in the right direction. During the conceptual stage of Mamaro constant design interactions caused me to be conscious about my design decisions and eventually lead to researching into different mechanics present within other games. It was during mamaro that I begun to critically evaluate my design ethics and really think about how I would go about communicating this design to the player.
Mamaro's production, although had proper iteration, conceptual structure, and prompted me to dynamically evaluate the games design even after delivering still lacked forethought into certain production steps that I had overlooked. But in terms of designing and goals that i wish to reach I felt Mamaro was another milestone in games design aim.
Back to Basics : Flow
Bringing Up games with highly regarded reputations Such as Journey for instance brings with it a lot of amazing design influences but at the same time brings with it expectations we try and reach for (In my Experience) without regard for the time spans involved. Being influenced by these games definitely gave me huge design based aim and inspiration, fusing artistic background with my game design principles with the end term goal of creating more artist like games that shy away from more competitive or violent like natures.
To better understand how these games become what they are today, I begun to look at early iterations of games created by these companies or designers, understanding their structures and applying what I learnt. ThatgameCompany's first game flow is a perfect example of how design structure resonates through later projects and was a big influence on how I reached the overly aim that i have today. Taking away journeys 3d aspects, models, lights and focusing solely on mechanics and feel you would quickly find that the two games share the same overly feel.
Although I don't wish to shy away from 3D based game designs I feel its important to focus my intention on the overall feel of my games first. As an artist would continuously sketch to understand how to draw I feel I need to apply the same in a games design environment, creating games using different concepts and aim to hone in on my design aim until I gain the same resonant game design structure that Jenova Chen uses or follow on the same path.
Redesigning
Lights Out
Looking over my thought processes from the beginning of this trimester and typing this blog in the end, I find from Mamaro I developed a sense of dynamic design evaluation. Looking at my older projects I felt that did not meet design brief I had intended, I had overlooked complexities and felt the content still incorporated a lot of my older more, aimless design approaches and as part of proactively evaluating my projects I have decided to redesign lights out entirely.
My focus at the beginning seemed to involve large scale exploration, dungeon like adventure themes and epic scale boss battles, something that sounds very familiar to older influences and something I wish to address. The largest design change would ofcourse be the the scale and the interaction, I wish for players to feel like the monster is present, causing a sense of unease and base the entirety of the game on personal experience where in most cases people would try for a mad dash to the lights.