Introduction: Whilst at Automaton I worked as a Level Designer, where I iterated and developed world content for Mavericks a next-gen Open-World MMO FPS developed in CryEngine using SpatialOS.
Platform: PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4 | Time: 2 months | Role: Level Designer | Team Size: ~40
Design Goal: Deliver a 1.8km battle royale play space for the alpha release of Automaton Games’s original IP‘Mavericks’, a next-gen Open-World MMO FPS developed in CryEngine using SpatialOS.
Paper Maps
Papers map concepts.
Natural World/Minor Points of Interest (POI’s)
Iterated and developed the natural world whilst distributing minor points of interest for further iteration by art. Major tasks for this included:
Reference gathering.
Terrain sculpting.
Texture painting.
Foliage placement.
Blockout, and iteration of POI’s.
Mid Size POI’s
Blocked out, and iterated a number of mid sized points of interest.
River VIllage
Sawmill Deforestation Iteration 1
Sawmill Deforestation Iteration 2
Iterated on flow, and cover of existing mid sized points of interest.
Large POI’s
Sawmill POI
Trainyard POI
Biomass POI
Enhanced existing major points of interest, as well as blocking out significant areas of the Sawmill, and Biomass POI.
Lately I’ve been itching to practice my level design skills. I’ve found such an opportunity with Total War Warhammer 2 where Creative Assembly has made their battle map editor Terry available for public use.
Therefore to practice my level design skills I’ve decided to take my love of Total War, my design skills, and support from the existing map making community to try my hand at creating maps for Warhammer 2.
Paper Mapping
First I tried some paper mapping for an existing Warhammer map called Atldorf.
In-Game Top Down
Paper Map Copy
Map Remake
Next I thought it would be good to remake a map. The map I chose to copy was a tutorial map from the map community. My intent was to make a bare bones version so I can focus on practicing using the tool. I began with studying the tutorial map.
For me the development process was loosely:
First pass at terrain, textures, and water.
Setup of deployment zones & playable area.
Test.
Second pass at terrain and textures (more detail work).
Test.
Rinse and repeat steps 4-5.
Some In-Editor Shots
Tutorial Map by Frodo45127
Replication Exercise Result by me!
Perspective from Terry.
Some In-game Shots
Next I plan to practice creating a map, this time with an imported height map!
We encounter a door that can be opened with a shiv. This in my mind established an accordance that doors that looked like this could be opened.
Openable Door
Later on we may encounter another door that looks like that same shiv door from before, but this one doesn’t open (affordance confusion)!
Non-openable Door
3 – Drawing Attention to Areas of Interest
Like the contrast on the left side, draws my eye to the area where the safe is located.
Sign as well as red car.
Like the depth on the right side, draws my eye.
Depth and blue police car.
Areas of Interest
4 – Lock Before The Key
In this section the player finds a safer that requires a numerical combination to be opened.
The Lock
Further down the street the player sees the glint of a note against a dark junk wall, and finds the combination to the safe written on the note. I have an issue with this!
The player does need to do backtracking which isn’t ideal, but it isn’t much, my issue relates to getting the combination. When the player gets the combination it would be an additional plus to underscore receiving this important information with a touch of VO that hinted the relationship between the safe and note e.g “hmm wasn’t there a safe back there?”.
In an effort to continue building on my 2D Layouts, and 3D blockouts skills I thought I’d try a short exercise of creating an area in a game that I am playing. The subject of this exercise was ground floor of the Briar Patch diner in Mafia 3.
2D Top Down
I began with a very rough to scale-ish 2D top down to get a general shape.
3D Blockouts
Next I began 3d work which involved taking in game pictures as reference from various, and areas of the ground floor. Using these ‘references’ I created approximate blockouts. The following is the results of this exercise.
Introduction: I once again had the opportunity to work for DICE LA. This time round I was given additional ownership, and made contributions in Battlefield 5’s content Chapter’s 3 and 4.
Platform: PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4 | Time: 1 year | Role: Multiplayer Designer | Team Size: ~100
Design Goal: Support Battlefield 5’s live service pipeline with high quality content for players.
My Contributions
Chapter 3: Trial by Fire
Firestorm
Augmented EA Criterion’s design of Lake Village a major point of interest in Battlefield 5’sFirestorm game mode.
Using Confluence I created level design notes for implementation by level artists of natural areas, major and minor POI’s in a several 1km areas of the Firestorm launch map.
The note format prepared in confluence was set by EA Criterion as a standard for level designers on the project.
Mercury
Initial fortification design, then iteration with a senior designer.
Introduction: Over the summer of 2017 I interned at DICE LA, a studio of Electronic Arts. My time was spent working with DICE LA to ship the downloadable content In the Name of The Tsar for Battlefield 1.
Platform: PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4 | Time: 12 weeks | Role: Game Designer | Team Size: ~90
Design Goal:
Deliver high quality level content through iteration.
Develop my ability to analyze and critique level design in a professional environment.
Practice supporting the efforts and vision of senior designers on the team.
My Contributions:
Bolstered Battlefield 1’sDLC content with map analysis. This took the form of:
Collecting, processing, and documenting Battlefield 1 level data for use by senior level designers.
Offering map feedback on flow, map features, cover, spawn placement, and play space volumes.
Used Frostbite’s visual scripting language to implement:
Content bug fixes from JIRA tickets.
Then iterate based on feedback of game modes such as Supply Drop, Team Death Match, War Pigeons, and Domination for multiple levels in the DLC pack.
Throughout the conference I took the following notes which I thought to share!
Day 1 – 3/19/2018
My first day at GDC involved visiting a number of sponsored talks as well as a great talk on the game Mortician’s Tale.
Google Dev Day
In this event Google was presenting a number of new features. One in particular was Google Instant. The concept is that developers would create partial builds that would act as a lite version of the experience used to give a demo of the experience. One interesting concept they proposed was that as speed increases, consumption increases.
Amazon – Gameon
This session was a demo for introducing Amazons Gameon feature. In the talk the speaker went through how to implement the Gameon system providing diagrams and code samples.
Gameon, as I understood it, is a service that allows deliveries leveraging the Amazon delivery service. The example the speaker spoke at length about was integrating real world prizes into a game system using Amazon’s delivery service e.g. a player wins a game and a real prize is delivered to them by Amazon.
Amazon – Future of E-Sports
In this panel hosted by Amazon the speakers gave their opinion on the future of E-Sports and made a number of interesting points including:
What was driving the increase in size of esport was not something in mobile applications, but the increase in the number of devices, and increase in speed of infrastructure.
The best e-sport is easy to pickup but hard to master.
The perceived skill gap of mobile vs PC is good for the e-sports as its about accessibility having mobile in the e-sports scene.
When you have a hit one challenge is to sustain the momentum. There are several ways to do so. Two ways are building a brand or building a community.
Games that are good for broadcasting are surprising, unpredictable, and easy to watch.
E-Sports has a structure like that of regular sports. Blizzard for example has franchises all over the world, and the owners of E-Sports teams are like the owners of traditional sports teams.
Mortician’s Tale – A Different View on How Games Treat Death
This talk was about the concept of death in a game called Mortician’s Tale. As described by the creator Morticians Tale is ‘a job simulator game’ about being a Mortician.
During the talk the speaker made a number of interesting points including:
Death systems in games have endured. In Mortician’s tale they wanted to explore ways of displaying it.
It was important that death in the game should relate to narrative and mechanics of game.
One book that was influential to the development was ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ by Caitlin Doughty.
The purple color in the game was used to hide the ugliness of death and reflects melancholy.
The game removes the ability to fail during preparation of the body as the creators felt it would disrespect the bodies.
The protagonist of the game was made silent as a silent protagonist can act as a vessel for players.
A silent protagonist also underscores the importance of listening in the grieving process.
Post release the feedback was positive and the creator believed there was some evidence of a transformative effect due to the design decisions made while making the game.
At the end of the conference the speaker made recommendations of a number of other games to look at that explore the topic of death:
Introduction: Of Blood and Water is a five-act RPG adventure written for the Dragon Age tabletop RPG system. It was created as a semester-long project for the RPG Writing Workshop course at Carnegie Mellon University. This involved creating character descriptions, step-outlines, and five acts that each include a dramatic scene written in script format.
In this article I will chronicle the design process and lessons learned in creating Trash Traders a multiplayer iPad game aiming to empower a sustainability mindset.
Introduction
At Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) multi-disciplinary teams work on projects over a semester to create an artifact. While attending I was the primary designer on the project which created Trash Traders.
Dice that determine a persona in a social situation
Team based game where there are fixed resource which each collects
Game has a number of chips, and a dice is thrown that has on it a number of concepts e.g fruit, country. Whatever comes up the first person to name something in that category wins that chip.
Game where two players roll together to score points, matching dice score a point mismatching lose points, single winner to 6 points win – problem is that probabilities are ⅙ of scoring so losing happens a lot more.
Game where players throw dice and winner takes chips
What about a game that you roll and everyone but you can see your dice
From these ideas I developed some candidates.
Candidates
Candidate 1
Taking idea two and the game LCR I developed a prototype. In this prototype players would hold three cards they kept hidden. Each would initially be one of each color card R,G, or B. The mechanic was two dice were rolled and based on the number you had to pass one card to the person opposite, left or right to you. The goal of the game was to collect all of a certain color.
Playtest
Date: February 1 – 14:00
Playtesters: Me
Time: 10 minutes
The game felt too random, and didn’t feel good having three cards and having to hand away two every turn. It destroyed a player’s strategy of trying to collect all of them.
I tried a team version of this game, and had trouble at end when judging if you had won or not. This was because players had no good way of guessing whether their team mate had the last card that they didn’t have. Finally I moved on to another candidate.
Candidate 2
Considering idea 5 I found a dice game called Mexican. I liked the idea of dice battling against each other for lives. I modified this idea to instead use numerically increasing value gains with chips.
Initial Rules
Each player has two dice and 10 chips
Players throw 1 chip on the first turn and one more every turn
Each turn a player trolls two of their dice and the winning player takes double what they bet
In the case of draws players reroll till a winner emerges
Playtesting
Playtest 1
In this playtest I did not have any prepared materials and so used a mish mash of dice and tokens.
Date: February 1 – 20:00
Playtesters:
Male, 24, semi novice dice player
Female, 22, novice dice player,
Me
Time: 5-6 minutes
Playtester Comments:
Token added a lot, nice glass smooth
Didn’t like how dice were different in any other way than color, felt like some dice were better than others
Would make for a nice drinking game
Enjoyed it, and didn’t bet extra at all
Intense, short experience with very little strategy, but fun
Playtesters thought 6-6 should be a special case
Draw cases not well defined
Observations:
Playtesters had trouble counting tokens
Revisions
#
Description
Purpose
1
Changed rule set now when a round of players have been completed only then is the minimum amount increased
Slow down the game to try encourage strategic thinking.
2
Draws split the pot evenly
Handling of draw cases
3
Bought chips
Made counting easier
4
Made 6-6 a special case as an automatic win
Reward for special case
Playtest 2 - 1
Date: February 2 – 21:00
Playtesters:
Male, 24, semi novice dice player
Male, 30, advanced player
Me
Time: 15 minutes
Playtester Comments:
Casual players enjoyed it less because of slow down of pace
More experienced players played the strategy of making slightly bigger bets at the beginning, but still lost and felt frustrated because the game requires little skill
Observations:
Special case of 6-6 never occurred
Increasing the bet by one per round added a lot of tension quickly, might make it after a whole round of players to encourage strategic thinking
Revisions
#
Description
Purpose
1
Added 1-1 special case
Increase the probability of a special roll
Playtest 2 - 2
Date: February 3 – 21:00
Playtesters:
Male, 24, semi novice dice player
Female, 22, novice dice player
Male, 25, experienced player
Me
Time: 8 minutes
Playtester Comments:
Casual players still had fun
Hardcore player still didn’t have fun at all because they interpreted the game to have little or no strategy which did not appeal to him
I played with the casual players from Playtest 2-1 who preferred that version
Observations:
Game snowballed if player initially won, because they would continually bet minimum and people initially lost tended to keep losing chips.
Game became a more fun for remaining players who started betting all in or big bets to end quickly but was boring for people who got out early.
Revision
I wanted to add an element of skill so I overhauled the rule set and added a thematic element to the game.
Thematically I imagined a king setting a standard somewhere on a bell curve and a bunch of jesters trying to out do each other with displays to Please The King!
#
Description
Purpose
1
Made each dice the same size
Eliminate 'feeling; of difference between dices
2
Added a public non player controlled dice to control probability calculations
Added more strategy to the betting system with a fixed value judgement
3
Added a mechanic called King's favor
A method to addressing stalemates. First consideration of numeric difference to consider many cases of non matching rolls. Next is consideration of matching rolls based on numerical matching. Design moves towards kings exact preference
4
Rethemed game to call it Please the King!
Wanted to create a motivation and story around the game to add to experience
Wanted to start working on a written rule sheet so I didn’t have to explain it every time
Playtest 3
Date: February 4 – 17:30
Playtesters:
Female, 22, average player
Male, 33, experienced
Me
Time: 15 minutes
Playtester Comments:
One play tester didn’t like the idea of being able to go all in
Needed more clearly defined value judgement, maybe a card with rules on how to interpret the values
Wondered what it would be like if the reroll could involve, re rolling meant ability to choose either to re roll one or two
Wondered if king had more than two dice if it would be more interesting
Liked the idea of pleasing the king, gave a motivation, said it made sense thematically
Observations:
Playtesters understood game pretty fast
Three players, one got out early, who got bored
Winner and second place came close, leading to a climax where losing meant sudden death
No complaints about increasing of 1 tax per turn
Playtesters said only one minimum bet reroll is better
Revision
#
Description
Purpose
1
Added rule for only one reroll per turn
Stop the person with the most money winning by rerolling a lot
2
Created a physical board for the game
Reinforce thematic element
3
Used a royal seal in the king's box to signify royalty
Reinforce thematic element
4
Used a raised platform to show king is above all others
Reinforce thematic element
5
Made the Jester money boxes to remind Jesters that their death is at the bottom of the box
Reinforce thematic element
6
Changed pay theme to instead of all in instead have it so that Jesters must collect money to pay by the end of the season or be beheaded!
Added a survival motivation
7
Made a railing on the platform to help with dice from falling off the platform
Dice fell off the table
8
Reduced the number of chips
Shorten the experience so a player who got out early is less likely to be bored
Playtest 4
Date: February 6 – 20:00
Playtesters:
Female, 22, novice player
Female 23, noice player
Male, 33, experienced
Me
Time: 15 – 20 minutes
Playtester Comments:
Playtesters liked the theming
Started to feel tedious at end
Felt great till end
First person to get out felt helpless and frustrating cause they got out early
Felt long
Losing playtester liked Last Chance feature (roll without paying tax, winning didn’t so much)
Observations:
First player out at round 5
Second at round 9
Third at round 12
Average score: 3 – 3.5
#
Description
Purpose
1
Changed to 10 chips
Shorten the game
Playtest 5
Date: February 7 – 13:30
Playtesters:
Male, 50, super hardcore player
Me
Male, 23, novice player
Male 21, experienced player
Time: 15 minutes
Playtester Comments:
Playtesters suggested changing to D10 instead of d6
Players found matching system super confusing
Match system is fussy
Interesting ideas
Observations:
10 chips was good
Nobody was too bored
People didn’t roll on the board
People would often forget to pay in
Revision
#
Description
Purpose
1
Changed matching system to have it by value comparison rather than number comparisons by dice
Realized odd calculation was what was important so wanted to simplify the experience so players could focus on that
Playtest 6 - 1
Date: February 7 – 14:30
Playtesters:
Female 21, semi novice player
Male 23, semi novice player
Me
Time: 10 – 15 minutes
Playtester Comments:
Playtesters found it frustrating that one player would be a clear obvious winner around the middle of the game
Observations:
Comparing and rolling went much more smoothly and playtesters due to simplified comparison system
Playtesters would again forgot to pay in
Playtest 6 - 2
Date: February 10 – 20:00
Playtesters:
Male 23, semi novice player
Me
Time: 15 minutes
Playtester Comments:
Had fun
Found three dice a little difficult to calculate
Revision
#
Description
Purpose
1
Changed Jesters 2D6 to a D4-D8-D12
Wanted to make choice of probability choice more interesting
2
Tiered payout system instead of payout to only one player
Tried to solve problem of winner being too apparent early
3
Updated rule sheet
Add structure in to make experience easier to absorb
4
Changed king's dice from 2D6 to 5D6
Wanted to create cases where players have to maximise and thought adding more dice would be fun to roll
Playtest 7
Date: Friday 11 – 17:50
Playtesters:
21 male, hardcore player
30 male, hardcore player
23 male, experienced player
24 male, experienced player
Time: 15 minutes long
Playtester Comments:
Felt like it took 30 minutes when it took 15 minutes
Told to consider probability distribution more
Found counting the Kings 5D6 a slow tedious task
Players didn’t think it was fun to roll King’s dice because the King’s dice is not their dice
Suggested rephrasing the rules to make it easier to understand
Observations:
One playtester didn’t like maths, and used his phone to keep track of numbers
Playtesters used their fingers to record differences
Playtesters arranged payouts in advance of the round to make it faster
Revision
#
Description
Purpose
1
Modified the rule sheet to include terms and bullet points with breakdowns as well as more explicit details
Make the game easier to understand
2
Included a method of keeping track of your difference
Take the mental load off the player
3
Changed players D4-D8-D12 to D8-D10-D12
Due to analysis of probability curve and number distribution (refer to Anything Else section)
4
King’s Dice changed from 5D6 with pips on them to a D20 and D10 with numbers
TO make it easier to read and I preferred the more flat probability curve (refer to Anything Else section)
Playtest 8
Date: February 13 – 20:35
Playtesters:
Male 21, hardcore player
Male 24, semi novice player
Me
Male 23, experienced player
Time: 15 minutes
Playtester Comments:
Found rules difficult to understand
Figuring out people’s dice roll most difficult
Observations:
Understood rules quickly and game was resolved with payouts = 21,22,15,10
Revision
#
Description
Purpose
1
Introduced a sheet of numbers and player use a token to mark what their difference from the king's favor is.
Make figuring out players difference easier
Playtest 9
Date: February 13 – 23:00
Playtesters:
Male
Me
Male
Time: 15 minutes
Playtester Comments:
As soon as one playtesters heard about terms then they switched off
Instead of difference players put down the number they got so they could visualize the difference easily
Observations:
Using the new scoreboard worked well.
Revision
#
Description
Purpose
1
Added a day counter row as well
Get another unnecessary detail out of the player's head
Final Set of Rules
You are one of several jesters performing at the King’s week long banquet. Jesters got bills to pay so to win you must earn the most money before the banquet ends!
Rules
Jesters earn money by gaining the Favor of the crowd who pays them based on the day’s performance. The Favor a Jester receives is judged by the difference from the King’s Favor to a Jester’s Dice roll in terms of numerical value. The different Favors are as follows:
Lowest Difference
King’s – 4
Queen’s – 3
Prince’s – 2
Duke’s – 1
Highest Difference
Money is paid out to each Jester from lowest to highest difference from the King’s Favor.
Turn Structure
The game takes place over 7 days (turns). Each day has four phases:
Perform
All Jesters Perform by rolling their dice.
Kings Favor
The Kings Dice are rolled setting the King’s Favor.
Improvise
A Jester can choose to Improvise. This can be done only once per Improvise phase.
If multiple Jesters wish to Improvise, rolling must occur at the same time.
Payday
Jesters receive their payout based on the difference from their Dice to the Kings Favor.
In the case of draws:
Non drawing players first receive their payout depending on their difference
Drawing players must Improvise until there is a difference
The loser(s) of the draw receive the lesser payouts
The following are examples of payday payouts.
Example 1: If the King’s Favor was 20, then a Jester at 19 is one closer than a Jester at 18. Therefore the Jester at 19 wins the King’s Favour and the Jester at 18 wins the Queen’s Favor.
Example 2: If the King’s Favor was 20, then a Jester at 19 draws with a Jester at 21 as both are one away from the King’s Favor. Both players must Improvise until there is a difference. The lower Jester gets the Queen’s Favor and the higher the King’s Favor.
Terms
Kings Dice – The D20 & D10
Jesters Dice – A set of D8, D10, D12 given to each player
King’s Favor – The number rolled by the Kings Dice the center of the board
Perform – Jesters rolling all their dice
Improvise – Jesters rerolling one or more of their dice
Additional
The Day & Difference sheet is a useful tool for keeping track of what day of the banquet it is, and what the King’s and each Jester dice rolls are. Place recognizable tokens for each Jester and King on the values from 1-28, and move a token along the Day row to keep track of what day it is.
Estimate of Cost
I estimate per item cost at:
Dice – 16.99 for 36 dice, making it 0.47 per dice, 14 are required so = $6.5
Board & Boxes = $10
Day & Difference Sheet (Multiple) = $2
Tokens for recording day and value = $1
70 chips = $7.5
Post It Note Sheet = 50 cents
Pen – 0.5 dollar = 50 cents
This comes to $28, but I can likely get discounts on many of these items buying in bulk.
So I say approximately $20-25 estimated cost.
Anything Else
In Playtest 7 I did some probability analysis using anydice.com
Kings Dice
The bell shaped curve is 5D6’s and the more flat curve is the D20 and D10. I went with the more flat curve because I preferred having a distribution with more equal probabilities over a large range of values for the King since this would be the number players would aim to get.
Jesters Dice
With the King’s new probability curve in mind I analyzed the Jesters Dice. The previous player’s probability distribution which had a max value of 24 was skewed towards the lower spectrum of possible ranges. Looking at bell curve that touches up to 30 it was more fairly distributed and given the three dice of D8,10,D12 it would make for a less obvious choice instead of D4,D8,D12 (roll D4 for least change, and 12 for most) which I would consider more interesting.
Do you have four iPads and a wireless network? If so you can operate Trash Traders! Trash Traders is an experience developed at Carnegie Mellons Entertainment Technology Center, that has shown to be fun and promote discussions about living a more green life. The following is footage collected from playtests of Trash Traders.
The following is additional footage of discussions about living a green life:
About
In Trash Traders players take the roles of four recycling centers, where each iPad is a recycling center, whose objective is to clean up the pollution in their city. They do this by fulfilling the needs of the city by creating green products using eco-items that are produced at the recycling centers. The recycling centers face a challenge though.
Each recycling can produce only one type of eco-item and more than one type of eco-item is often required to create a green product. Therefore the recycling centers must work together otherwise their city is doomed to be ruined by over pollution!
Platform: iOS | Time: 15 weeks | Role: Game Designer | Team Size: 6
Design Goal: The goal of the project was to promote a sustainability mindset in our target demographic.
Design Challenges: We faced a number of design challenges during this project including:
System design
Setup & Tweaking
Multiple difficulty configuration
UX challenges
UI Design
Tutorial
Trash Visuals and Content
My Contributions: As the game designer on the project I took the lead on directing our creative efforts. My efforts helped create a well received, fun, and engaging experience which made a good attempt to achieve our transformational goals. Other areas I made significant contributions in were:
An ideation process that created the main mechanic of the game
Angle Jungle was a great project and on completion we wanted to expose our work to the wider community for more feedback and potentially even to explore possibilities of formal assessment of the game actually being effective in its transformational objectives. Therefore we wrote up a paper and submitted it to CHI Play. Fortunately it was accepted and we were invited to present the game. My intention at the conference was then to connect with people who were able to help formally assess Angle Jungle as well as keep an eye out for good connections.
Why I loved this was that by the end of the work they had a playable deliverable that made engaging with language an essential part of the experience, not at all like the typical chocolate broccoli that tends to happen. I definitely connected with the speaker and will remain in touch with them.
Religion is a hot button issue (as usual) and I loved this talk because it opened my mind to the actual academic consideration of religious discussions in video games. Particularly interesting was how it attempted to categorize people into behavior categories.
Introduction: Angle Jungle is an award winning puzzle game built by a team of students at Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center in 15 weeks for Pennsylvania’s Intermediate Unit 1. Angle Jungle has value to first graders and above, its primary purpose though is as a supplement for 4th to 6th graders learning basic geometry.
Awards: Serious Play 2017 Gold Award Winner, CHI Play 2017 Jury Award Winner, Finalist for 50th Carnegie Mellon University Founders Award
Platform: iOS | Time: 15 weeks | Role: Game Designer | Team Size: 4
Design Goal: The goal of the project was to achieve the following transformations in our target demographic:
Primary Transformation: Build familiarity with the angle by having players solve puzzles that use a mechanic that encodes the numeric and spatial representations of angles
Secondary Transformations:
Introduce positive and negative angles
Introduce clockwise and anticlockwise rotation
Introduce angles greater than 180 degrees
Build familiarity with the protractor tool
Design Challenges: We faced a number of design challenges during this project:
Protractor tool introduction
Finding an mechanic which made angles essential
Crafting fun and engaging puzzles
Crafting additional sources of motivation
My Contributions: As the game designer on the project I took the lead on directing our creative efforts. My efforts helped create a well received, fun, and engaging experience which made a good attempt to achieve our transformational goals. Other areas I made significant contributions in were:
An ideation process that created the main mechanic of the game
In this article I will chronicle my design process in creating Angle Jungle an award winning transformational puzzle. Then how I went creating the puzzles within the experience, and finally lessons learned.
Angle Jungle is an award winning educational puzzle game for fourth to sixth graders studying geometry. At the start of development our requirements were up in the air. Following discussions with our client we settled on the following objectives:
Our ideation process began with brainstorming based on the objectives of our project. We then went through two iterations of paper prototypes.
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From our paper prototypes, we choose to refine two based on feedback.
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In parallel we began the process of creating digital prototypes based off these paper prototypes.
Pirates Life – Digital
Our breakthrough moment came when Jesse Schell, a faculty member at the ETC, posed to us that though these games used angles, both could be played without thinking about angles. We needed to make an angles essential experience. This priceless notion lead us to create Angle Jungle’s progenitor which we called Treasure Hunter.
Treasure Hunter V1
Treasure Hunters mechanic encoded the relationship between the numeric and spatial representation of angles. This was achieved by having players use numeric representations to create spatial representations in-order to solve a puzzle. We believed this embodied a system where angles were essential. We then began refining Treasure Hunter.
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After positive feedback from playtesting we next created a digital prototype.
In the above video players slot numeric values into a beam maker which creates a spatial value. A certain spatial value is required to hit an objective to solve a puzzle and receive treasure. This digital prototype then went through many more iterations.
At this point in development we had the foundations for an experience. What was needed next was to design that experience.
Experience Crafting
How does one go about creating an experience? There are infinite ways, but we began with considering the difficulty curve within our experience.
Difficulty Curve
The above graph is an abstract difficulty curve which displays a sequence of tense and release cycles of increasing difficulty. This curve would form the underlying foundation of our experience.
Gameplay Elements
With an idea of what we wanted the experience to look like, next we conceptualized the elements within the greater experience. The inspiration for this process came from a number of sources including the learning materials of our target demographic.
Our aim was essentially to gamify our target demographics learning material. We would achieve this through gameplay elements which attempted to capture aspects of the kind of problems they faced in the classroom. These gameplay elements would form the core components of the experience.
More Motivation
Whilst conceptualizing our gameplay elements we also considered the possibility that the puzzle may not be intrinsically motivating enough for players. Therefore we created two additional supporting motivational factors.
Supporting Actor
A gender-neutral character that needed assistance (inspired by Jesse Schell’s Lens of Help). Given the use of supporting characters in educational experiences is common, and there exists research on the potential beneficial effects for players. We hoped this would augment learning within our experience.
Golden Expectations
In addition we created The Cabin. The Cabin would contain rewards in the form of treasures and trophies. The Cabin would act as motivational element by creating Golden Expectations (expectation of rewards) through the aesthetic use of empty shelves as well as serve as a measure of game progress.
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We also recognized the need to space out our rewards for better impact. We therefore arranged rewards into evenly spaced intervals.
All Together
Together these pieces could further flesh out the difficulty curve of our experience. The peaks of our difficulty curve would now commonly correspond to the introduction of gameplay elements, and the dips would be periods of rest at The Cabin.
The experience needed more though, it cried out for substance in the form of puzzle content.
Transformational Puzzle Complexity
With a high-level view, and the fundamental elements of the experience in mind we went about crafting a set of transformational puzzles.
This process resulted in a jumbled pile of puzzles. This was a good first step, but it did not fit the experience structure we wanted. We therefore turned to a mighty tool. The spreadsheet.
The spreadsheet consisted of columns of each gameplay element which we incrementally increased to raise puzzle complexity. This tool complemented the design process as we created more puzzles based on these new complexity constraints.
Two additional considerations came to mind during this process:
Include drops in puzzle complexity when introducing new gameplay elements to allow for more effective tutorials.
Have the majority of learning occur early when complexity is low.
The result of this work was a structure of thirty levels which we then playtested.
Although initial playtests were largely positive they revealed two design issues:
Lack of Angle Diversity – High occurrence totals of fewer number of angle values in the total experience meant a lesser exposure to different angle values.
One Gem Solutions – Solutions which required only one angle gem on more complex levels meant less interaction with different angle values.
Both issues were detrimental to our goal of building familiarity with the angle system. Therefore, two methods of analysis were used to solve these issues:
Angle Distribution Analysis – Counts of each angle value used.
Angle Solution Analysis – A comparison of solution angles against angle values used.
These methods revealed a number of such ‘issue’ levels.
Angle Analysis Results – First Pass
The result of iteratively applying this analysis was that both the complexity and angle diversity was maintained and improved. This ultimately meant a better attempt at achieving our transformational goal.
Occurrence Totals of Angle Values
Transformational Objectives
At the end of the project we ended up with a concrete primary transformational objective, and several secondary transformational objectives.
Primary Transformation
Build familiarity with the angle system by having players practice solving puzzles using a mechanic that has an encoded relationship between the numeric and spatial representations of angles.
Sharon Carver – ‘The actual angle choices at the various levels and the angle meter seemed to work well and COULD promote learning of the concepts and spatial relations of angles, as long as students don’t game the system’.
Secondary Transformations
In addition to our primary transformational objective we took the opportunity to introduce a number of secondary transformational objectives in manners that were natural extensions of the core experience (providing the experience with more puzzle content).
Protractor Tool Usage
To solve a puzzle, players had to work out the angle that was required to be made. This was difficult for some playtesters and therefore provided a natural opportunity to introduce a protractor scaffolding tool.
By making this tool available we built in the protractor in a manner that was of a natural clear benefit to our players. We hoped by doing so to build familiarity and appreciation of the tool by creating a puzzle environment where it was undoubtedly helpful. Playtesting showed that this strategy ‘seemed’ to work.
Sharon Carver – ‘I especially like the meter that shows the full 360 degrees while the player is working on selecting angles. It would definitely be worth testing the impact’
Introduce both anticlockwise and clockwise rotation, and angle addition and subtraction.
Angles Above 180
Expose students to angles greater than 180 degrees.
Design Considerations
Whilst exposing students to our core mechanic (an encoding between the numeric and spatial representation of angles), initial levels would allow brute force approaches to be rewarded in order to draw in the player with easy rewards.
Allowing for such ‘brute force’ (choices made without solid reasoning) approaches, resulted in the following criticism being raised:
What if players are not doing the thinking you want?
In the defense of brute force, we responded with the following counter points:
Absolute mindless play is rare, so since the use of numeric angle values are essential even with a brute force approach, players are likely to at least reason about this aspect of the game.
Supporting brute force approaches makes the experience more accessible (we had first graders reach level 22 with help!).
Brute force approaches are only reasonably satisfying in low complexity puzzles (playtesters who solely practiced a brute force approach experienced frustration on more complex puzzles).
Most importantly though, we admitted that when complexity was low players would not have to think ‘much’. This was intentional. The experience allowed it for a deeper purpose.
We intended to combine that brute force motivation together with puzzle complexity as a transformative tool to incentivize a ‘logical’ approach. As puzzle complexity slowly increased the experience would naturally create skill appropriate ‘teachable moments’ for teachers to capitalize on.
Results
The results of this process created an experience that contained:
Suitable learning and puzzle complexity curves
An appropriate pattern of tense and release
Appropriately interspersed rewards
An exposure to a wide variety of angle values
A mechanic where angles were essential (encoded the relationship between spatial and numeric representations of angles)
The transformational puzzle complexity in Angle Jungle can be best exemplified by the following diagram (note it dips at times of gameplay element introduction).
Number of Gems against Level
Well what did the games design ultimately translate into? Get a glimpse in the following promotional video (I’m happy to share raw footage on request).
Lessons Learned
So what can we take away from this experience. First some classics:
Paper prototypes are your friend!
Ask yourself can I play this game without thinking about the core subject matter? Is the subject matter essential to the experience?
Consider experience curves from the get go to help structure your experience
Study your target demographics source material, and use it as an additional source of inspiration in your design process
When introducing new gameplay elements introduce it in a low complexity environment to make learning easier
Have most of learning occur early when complexity is low
When designing scaffolding tools try to design them in a manner that is of a natural clear benefit to the experience
If extending your experience is necessary, do so with natural gameplay elements that can serve transformational goals
Guess and check is not the enemy of education. In fact, I believe the availability of simple strategies can create accessibility to larger demographics
Additionally, whilst designing this educational puzzle game one question came to mind.
How can puzzles serve transformational goals?
At present my thoughts are twofold:
Well designed puzzles can create engaging experiences for players which designers can use to piggyback onto to achieve a transformational goal.
Puzzle complexity with brute force motivation can be combined into a transformative tool to create skill appropriate teachable moments at the boundaries of brute force and logical gameplay strategies.
Before I started my Masters of Entertainment Technology I visited an old friend in Northern Ireland. The following are a collection of photos taken during my trip.
As part of the educational game project my team was working on we were required to build a reward system. This system took the form of a trophy room which would display trophies that players had earned. After playtesting though we found we had created an expectation for treasure which we were not fulfilling. The following is a gameplay video where our players would collect treasure chests at the end of each level.
So in order to fulfill this expectation we created additional art assets which we would use to fill up our empty room. We faced a dilemma in this regard. We did not want to force players to see treasure added to the room at the end of every level. This would be far too disruptive to the game experience. So how does one fulfill the expectation of reward without forcibly having the player see the reward appear?
Well one thing helped us in this regard. We already designed fixed reward intervals through the trophy system which forced players to go to the trophy room and observe the new trophy being added to the trophy room.
Fixed Visitation
In our experience we had periods of fixed visitation where the player would be guaranteed to be seeing the Trophy Room. Looking at the experience more methodically we were giving trophy’s at the following intervals (we had thirty levels).
One and thirty were absolutely necessary since they began and ended the experience. The others were decided based on difficulty curve which was designed in previous weeks. Again we asked ourselves the question. How does one fulfill the expectation of reward without forcibly having the player see the reward appear?
As part of the Game Design course taught by Jesse Schell at Carnegie Mellons Entertainment Technology Center, we were required to create whatever game experience we wished. The one requirement we had for this experience was that it was to be excellent! So I created Dominate, a tablet top strategy game!
In addition to creating the experience we prepared a marketing and rule sheet, as well as a written record of our iterative playtest driven process. The following is materials from my playtest notes.
Playtest Notes
Playtest 1
Date: March 29th 2017
Purpose: Playtesting initial concept
Playtesters:
Me
Time: 20 minutes
Playtester Comments:
A significant number of broken rules
Two resources for construction, sheep and wood were unnecessary
Need a method of counting the different resources, can’t keep track of it mentally
How do I know when I won?
Observations:
Playtesters had trouble counting tokens
Giving players the choice of resource location made resource placement polarized and clumped
Since no restrictions of village placement players would build lots of villages around themselves making the game drag out longer
Revisions
#
Description
Purpose
1
Removed wood
Was unnecessary
2
Bought chips
Made counting easier
3
Made rule about connecting villages
Limit the construction of villages and temples to speed up the game
4
Gave temples life
Made possible a lose condition (all enemy temples hp goes to zero)
5
Wrote up rule set
Needed a document to playtest rules with
Playtest 2
Date: March 30th 2017
Purpose: First playtest with largely functioning game
Playtesters:
Me
Male – 21
Male – 23
Time: 40 minutes
Playtester Comments:
Fireball need chance on hit, I didn’t like knowing I would lose for sure
Who casts first should be based on a dice roll, again I didn’t liked knowing I would lose for sure
The rules for village placement are confusing
Found resource collection rate difficult to count
Liked the strategic element in fireballing then converting enemy villages
Observations:
Players had a good time
Players wasted a lot of time counting resources
Found an issue when a player placed their temple in a certain pattern, they became blocked from building
Both my playtesters were programmers
Revisions
#
Description
Purpose
1
Allowed world to wrap around itself
Avoid issue of limitation of three building connections per building
2
Fixed in rule sheet to clarify village placement
Clarification based on request
3
Added initiative system to allow the spell phase not be a guaranteed thing
Stop the feeling that you were guaranteed to lose
4
Add a conversion of resources to belief 2:1
People seemed to enjoy the spell phase more than the build phase so I wanted to charge up the spell phase. Also it was one method of increasing the utility of resources making investing in resource growth more useful.
Playtest 3
Date: March 30th 2017
Purpose: First iteration of rule sheet, introduction of game to more ‘casual players’
Playtesters:
Me
Male – 28
Female – 30
Time: 45 minutes
Playtester Comments:
Make the game board bigger!
Color code the villages!
Board is so cluttered, can’t see anything!
Don’t need initiative rolls every time, just do contest rolls on build if wanting to build in the same spot (everyone declares where they are planning to build then builds)
Clarify rules
Observations:
Playtesters got bored waiting for their turn
Playtesters didn’t read the rules at all
Playtesters had great difficulty counting belief and resources
Playtesters found the world wrap rule super hard to visualize
Both my playtesters were more artistic individuals, casual game players – from the previous playtest it seems that my game is more suited to strategy game fans
Playtesters converted all their resources in belief as they found that part most fun
Playtester though the strategy of high belief would work. but lost because had no base of resources to sustain that burst of belief
Revisions
#
Description
Purpose
1
Made game board bigger
Reduce clutter
2
Made color coded tiles and villages
Made one's own villages easier to see
3
Introduced contest rolls on build
Way to allow free for all building while allowing to resolve two players wanting to build on the same place
4
Touched up rule page
Added more pictures in case people didn't want to read
Playtest 4
Date: 5th April 2017
Purpose: Second iteration of rule sheet and 1v1v1 setting
Playtesters:
Me
Male – 26
Male – 30+
Time:
10 minutes to understand rules
40 minutes to play game
Playtester Comments:
Include pictures of tiles on instructions
So what is the victory condition?
Mention influence earlier
Use the word adjacent, its more clear
Clarify construction rules, they are not clear
Mention that villages at 1 development level cannot be destroyed
Typo on spells, town not village
Observations:
Watching these playtesters reading the rules showed that I needed to change the information order to make the document easier to process
Playtesters were confused that they needed to select separate colors
Playtesters placed tiles on top of each other which I needed to verbally clarify
Playtesters found the phrasing of various parts of the rules confusing, and had to jump back and forward in the rule book to understand the rules
Players found the overlap rule confusing
Players found counting the resources wasnt too bad
Player suggested using higher value counters to make collection of resources faster
Players suggested a counting tool to keep track of how much you need to collect
Players suggested bidding resources to win the spell phase
Players suggested building should not be simultaneous but instead be one after another like before
Players suggested a thematic change to lighting bolt
Player had difficulty understanding the rules at first but then got into the game
Players felt the counting of belief and resources was most tedious
Revisions
#
Description
Purpose
1
Reduce cost of fireball to 1 but introduced a probability of it missing (intention is to create more tension when attacking)
Create a balanced fireball spell with an element of chance
2
Added image of village and temple to rule set
Wanted a visual indicator of what was what for easier understanding
3
Made a resource/belief tracker for easier counting
Wanted players to focus on the game rather than counting chips
4
Added 2-1 conversion to rule sheet
Improve the rulesheet
5
Made variety of fixes to rule sheet e.g reordered sections – clarified victory conditions – made explicit mention that tiles dont stack – clarified construction rules – explicitly said players are assigned colors
Improve the rulesheet
Playtest 5
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Date: 8th April 2017
Purpose: Third iteration of rule sheet and 1v1v1 setting
Playtesters:
Me
Male 32
Male 26
Time:
10 minutes to understand the rules
1 hr 20 minutes to play game
Playtester Comments:
Playtester complained that reading the rules felt like studying
Very interesting moment when players said no need for chips use the income tracker to keep a track of how much you have instead
Playtesters mentioned income tracker could use a zero
Playtesters suggested having some visual indicator for turn order
Players wanted the resource and belief tokens on the income tracker to be more obvious
Playtesters found the income tracker awkward to use, and instead wanted more numbers on it instead of having to do arithmetic
Playtesters wanted a more efficient way of removing and adding villages to the board, and suggested making color coded physical representations of the village which could be placed and removed from the board
Playtesters suggested carefully considering how to manage the player who would lose the game early – either give them incentives to stay after losing, design it so they can continue and have an incentive to stay, or accelerate the game to end quickly
Playtesters suggested trying 1v1 or 2v2 game format.
Observations:
First time I explained as little as possible and had playtesters read the rules and play, had to explain income tracker.
Playtesters understood how to generate the board, and do the initial game setup
Had to explain the income tracker
I needed to explain both how to represent development levels, how to use the income tracker, and using d6 to represent hp on the temple
Players never used the offering mechanic
With three playtesters the maximum amount of belief/resources reached around 15-16
What happened was a Mexican standoff moment where each player had direct access to attack the other players temple, and it turns out that based on chance of spell phase the weakest player actually won the game because one player destroyed one other player and the weakest won the spell phase of the next turn and killed the other player before they could retaliate
Revisions
#
Description
Purpose
1
Changed the income tracker to the warchest a tool for keeping account of how much resource and belief a player has
Completely eliminate the need to use chips for keeping track of a player's belief and resources
2
Kept the offering mechanic
Wanted to test how it would affect a game when used properly and it was designed reduce the power of the spell phase and also mess with the power that a guarantee of casting spells first gave
3
Changed the income tracker to warchest also added a zero on it
Completely removed the need to use chips to represent the amount of resources you had allowing players to focus even more on the core experience
Playtest 6
Date: 9th April 2017
Purpose: Wanted to test what 1v1 was like
Playtesters:
Me
Male – 21
Time: 25 minutes
Playtester Comments:
Playtester got upset and felt cheated by the game because didn’t fully understand the rule of only allowed to connect to three adjacent buildings
Observations:
Playtest was short, and other player lost very quickly, playtester wasn’t happy at all, felt cheated by the game
Problem was they were in a situation where they could not build anything anywhere – I think a solution that would be in the 1v1 game mode give players two temples rather than one to add more skill to it
Used the offering mechanic to spell first
Revisions
#
Description
Purpose
1
Made three game modes – 1v1v1 – 2v2 – two players with two temples each – 1v1 – each player has two temples
Avoid the disastrous playtest happening again with giving a single player two temples
Playtest 7
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Date: 9th April 2017
Purpose: Wanted to test out what the 1v1 with two temples was like
Playtesters:
Me
Time: 33 minutes
Observations:
The dynamic was certainly different, two allied temples were placed back to back
Other two were on sides of map
What ended up happening was that middle two gained lots of resources and that built up over time, eventually the aggressive village tactic was overcome by resource snowballing and the central allied players eventually won, and the two outer players forfeited before the end of the game
Found that placing resource chips (chips that represent the resource income of a tile) made counting of resources so much faster, will do it in future playtests
Revisions
#
Description
Purpose
1
Added resource tokens onto village and temple tiles
Making counting of resource income much faster
Playtest 8
Date: 10th April 2017
Playtesters:
Me
Male – 24
Time: 42 minutes
Playtester Comments:
Initially I was doing well then the playtester converted a critical village and I lost
Playtester liked the idea of converting resource to belief
Told me that playing required multidimensional thinking, resource gain, blocking, and long term growth
Resources became so important because of offering system
Required finding critical villages and capturing them, anticipating your enemies offering
Playtester commented that warchest system was good, but they didn’t mind the old system of counting chips one by one
Playtester appreciated new method of displaying village and resources on map
Observations:
Found it hard to find resource tiles since tiles were in a pile
Revision
#
Description
Purpose
1
Playtester found better way of arranging belief and resource tokens on warchest. Keep it by the side as to not obstruct the numbers. Will update that in the rule set
Improve warchest by having tokens not obscure the warchest
2
Made a box with compartments to make it much easier to find the piece you needed
Reduce the hassle in finding game pieces
3
Added the resource and belief token representations to the rules
Speed up the process of counting resources and belief
Playtest 9
Date: 10th April 2017
Playtesters:
Me
Male – 21
Male – 21
Male – 22
Time: 40 minutes
Playtester Comments:
Asked if resources were generic
Couldnt find use for belief
Confused about building only within area of influence
Found village upgrade table super confusing they thought it cost one to upgrade to level 2
Got confused by a line that said build first cast spell last
Highly disliked the whole 3 adjacent village thing
6×6 feels small for 4 players
Game suffers from same problem as RISK where one player clearly snowballs to victory
Feels like you know who is going to win from the start based on the position
Playtesters said consider a large map and multiple temples
Playtesters suggested giving temples some resistance to fireballs
Observations:
Read the rules in 6 minutes – skimmed it
Allied players placed their temple in a resource rich but locationally disadvantaged position, and were unable to get lucky enough to break out of their bad positioning and so lost the game
Playtesters did not know the rule of adjacent first and so placed thinking they could place anywhere and that they said messed up the game for them
Revision
#
Description
Purpose
1
Remove the rule of adjacent to three
Players were not liking this rule and often players including myself forgot about keeping to this rule
2
Change the phrase resource cost to construction cost and phrasing around construction and upgrade of villages
To clarify this
3
Added new rule for temple damage
Made temples resistant to fireballs to reduce likelihood of player losing in one turn
4
Made changes to rule set based on confusions from playtest
Improve the ruleset
Playtest 10
Date: 11th April 2017
Playtesters:
Me
Male – 28
Time: 42 minutes
Playtester Comments:
Destroyed temple should become empty
Board still needs to be bigger, still feels cluttered but is improved from before
Fun game, liked the warchest system
Moving around map, places hard to reach
Didn’t want to place 1 belief villages as it was suboptimal
Inert villages seem weird in 1v1 didnt think to convert own because it felt you already owned it
I would play again
Real time strategy board game
Wished there was another dimension to movement
Observations:
Player went crazy in converting to belief to try and take me out quickly
I invested in building up resources and eventually snowballed to victory
Revisions
#
Description
Purpose
1
When a temple is destroyed is becomes empty
More sensical outcome and reward for the player who destroyed the temple
2
Clarified offering rules in rule sheet
Improve the rule sheet
What Went Right
Warchest system was a marked improvement over the old system of counting chips. The warchest cleared up the playspace and created an easy way for players to keep track of their resources without fussing around with chips. This allowed them to focus on the game.
New method for representing income and belief made collecting resources at the start of the turn much easier, before a significant amount of time was wasted counting, and this was a marked improvement.
Adding dice rolls to attacking heightened the tension in the game and had a positive effect on gameplay.
Once players got over learning the rules they had generally positive feedback about the experience, particularly that throughout the game players had the option of several interesting choices.
Adding the resource to belief conversion rule was highly appreciated. By doing so it created a good reason to invest in growing one’s village network so that a player had more resources to convert to belief. Now players would avoid wasting placing villages that weren’t connected to a resource. This helped address the problem I had seen in my first playtest of arbitrarily building villages.
The way the game was designed allowed it to be very easily scalable in terms of grid size, number of players, temples per player, resource tiles per column. This design supported a wide variety of game modes 1v1/2v2 which felt distinct, and so the game was more accommodating to different numbers of players.
Procedural generation of the board helped make the board experience fresh each time, increasing replayability.
What Went Wrong
Playtesters didn’t spend much time reading the rules, and so made suboptimal choices in the game and got upset, and felt cheated by the game. What was particularly bad was placement of temples and villages. If placed incorrectly could mean the game was lost if players didn’t get lucky with die rolls.
As one playtester pointed out my game suffers from the problem in RISK where one player will snowball to victory and this is apparent. This caused forfeiting to occur multiple times to save time because the odds were clearly stacked against the player. RISK attempted to address this problem with country cards that gave bonus armies, perhaps something equivalent would help my game.
Procedural generation of the board acted as a double edged blade. If in the case the board was generated in a manner that made blocking of a players progress easy, new players felt upset and cheated (in tandem with point 1)
Angle Jungle is an award winning educational puzzle game for fourth to sixth graders studying geometry. At the start of development our requirements were up in the air. Following discussions with our client we settled on the following objectives:
Introduce the notion of positive and negative angle values.
Introduce both anticlockwise and clockwise rotation, and angle addition and subtraction.
Expose students to angles greater than 180 degrees.
