Exercise 1.3 : Your Life as a Game
List five areas of your life that could be games. Then briefly describe a possible underlying game structure for each.
Since the following are areas from my life and the ideas are from real-life scenarios so a dominant theme of these games will be simulations of real life.
The player has to plan a trip based on various scenarios and the goal is to keep the plan within the budget and everyone on that trip happy. The other characters in the game will all have profiles so the players know how to cater the to their preference.
- Different Phases
- – Planning
- – En-route
- – During the Trip (Activities)
- – After the trip
- Different Budgets
- Members
- – Travel by yourself
- – Travel as a family
- – Travel with friends
- – Travel for work
The player has to pick out the outfit according to the scenarios, however, I do want to leave a certain amount of freedom so that the player can have fun with the combination and see what happens when the outfits weren’t appropriate.
Example scenarios:
- Going to work
- Going outdoor
- Exercises
- Party
- Staying at home
- Work dinner
- Extreme weather
The user will have the opportunities to buy the ingredients you need to cook the dishes you want or make food with whatever you have. The player will encounter situations like overcooking, wrong/over seasoning, set the kitchen on fire etc. and learn to deal with them.
A list of various dishes and a list of various ingredients along with different seasoning and spicy supplies.
The goal for this one is simple, which is to keep your pet alive and healthy (physically and, ideally, mentally). Players will have:
- A list of the needs of pets. The player will have to figure out how to take care of the pet, how frequent they need to do certain stuff to maintain the pet’s needs.
- When the player’s pets are not being satisfied, they will make trouble, and the play will have to clean up the trouble
- Take care any concerning symptoms/ abnormal behaviours (requires special attention from the care-taker)
- The player do have the opportunity to learn more about their pets in the game
- Different choices of pets
To maintain a healthy relationship with different people in your life. You can make your digital life story with this. Choose different responses and make decisions. The player needs to interact with different characters in different scenarios. The reaction from the other characters are generated by AI.
Examples of possible scenarios:
- Plan a date with your significant other
- Dealing with your partners bad living habits
- Interacting with each other’s family members/ friends
- Going out with your boss to a business dinner
Exercise 2.3: Objectives
List five games, and in one sentence per game, describe the objective in each game.
1. Machi Koro (Board Game)
The first player to construct all of their landmarks wins.
2. 羊了个羊 Yang Le Ge Yang (similar to Bejeweled)
Matching cancellation.
3. Overcooked!
Try to make and serve the orders to get as many points as possible, and when you earn a certain score and number of stars you will be unlock hidden levels.
4. Mario Karts
To be the N0.1 to pass the finishing line and ideally with more coins.
5. Nuclear Throne
Use your character’s mutation advantage and the weapons you collected along the way to stay alive and get to the throne or find secret way to loop the game as many times as you can survive.
Exercise 2.8: Story
Have any stories within a game ever gripped you,
moved you emotionally, or sparked your imagination? If so, why? If not, why not?
The story in the game “The Last of Us” (both parts) is the most gripping game I have played based on the story. The best way I can describe it is that it is like a TV show/Movie where I get to control some of the characters. A lot of time was spent on character development, with a vast array of unique characters that are shown in a mostly realistic light. The story is engaging and you care about the characters. Especially in the second game, you play most of the game as Ellie and she is portrayed as a very flawed person and sometimes you really don’t like her. The story has a massive world where you engage with multiple secondary antagonists including zombies, government soldiers and rouge elements while you are kind of on an island by yourself. You are also forced to play elements as the main antagonist of the story, Abby, and while I never sympathized with her character, it made me understand the motivations of her character better. Both the protagonist and antagonist were portrayed as having their good and their bad sides with both players engaging in actions that are equally understandable and maddening. The only frustrating part of the story is that I did wish at points that I could have made different decisions than the character actually did but that was not an element of the game available to the player.
There were also some simple elements of the game that made it more engaging and realistic. All of the NPC’s had names so after you killed someone you would often here another NPC yell their name in despair. NPCs were much more interactive with each other and dialogue between them was more natural even at moments where it did not advance the narrative but was just designed to give a more lifelike feel. Your own characters were also designed to respond more realistically as after certain scenes of intense action, characters would express relief, pain, fatigue and other emotions more like you would expect if you were in the same situation in real life. All in all, the efforts put into the game not only to humanize the protagonist and their allies, but also antagonists and NPCs created a game that was much more engaging than anything I had previously experienced.
Exercise 3.3: Interaction Patterns
For each of the interaction patterns, create a list of your favorite games in each pattern. If you can’t think of any games in a particular pattern, research games in that area and play several of them.
- Single player versus Game:
- Assassin’s Creed
- The Last of Us
- Batman: Arkham Series
- Halo
- Splinter Cell
- Warcraft
- Multiple Individual players versus game:
- Clue
- Catan
- Player versus player
- League of Legends: Mobile
- 猜码 Cai Ma (Chinese 1v1 hand guessing and counting game)
- 十五二十 Shi Wu Er shi (15/20 Chinese hand guessing and counting games)
- Beer Pong
- Unilateral Competition
- 斗地主Fight the landlord card game
- Some mini-games in Mario Party (3v1)
- Brawl Stars 5 v 1 mode
- Multilateral competition
- PUBG
- Age of Empires
- Liar’s Dice
- Cooperative play
- Overcooked
- Halo
- Splinter Cell
- Pandemic Board Game
- Team Competition
- NHL
- Brawlstars
- PUBG
- League of Legends
- World of Warcraft
Exercise 3.9: Resource Types
For each of the resources types just described, create a list of your favourite games that use resources of that type. If you can’t think of any games that use a particular type of resource, research games that do and play several of them.
- Lives
- Donkey Kong
- Metal Slug
- Contra
- Nuclear Throne
- Units
- Risk
- Worms
- Catan
- Health
- The Last of Us
- Batman
- Don’t starve together
- Currency
- Catan
- Monopoly
- Machi Korro
- Actions
- Dungeons and Dragons
- Risk
- Pandemic
- Catan
- Machi Korro
- Assassin’s Creed
- Power-ups
- Brawlstars
- Super Mario Kart
- Inventory
- Batman:Arkham Series
- PUBG
- Tomb Raider
- Special Terrain
- Catan
- Monopoly
- Time
- Splinter Cell (Select missions)
- Brawlstars
- Grand theft auto (select missions)