Friday 14 September 2012

Week 1 (Fall 2012) – Components of a full game, Portal 2 Test Chambers, and re-designing soccer :)

             The past week has been full of surprises, as it is a new semester of school and I am finally in my last year of school. This course has already proven to be interesting, since our first assignment is to create a complicated puzzle using the Portal 2 level creator, which is known as the “test chambers”. I really look forward to working on and designing a level in Portal 2 with my GDW group in the next few weeks.


During this week’s lecture, we discussed which components make up a game, such as the game engine, the physics engine, and the graphics engine, and how it is important in a game. We also discussed and had an in-class poll about whether or not bag game design can ruin a good game, or if awesome game design can help a bad game. It was a good and tricky question, and I was going to put my answer as “bad game design can ruin a good game”, but some of us could not open the website fast enough before professor Nacke closed it to view the results.

During the second half of this week’s lecture, we also had to pick a sport and redesign it so that is physically different from the original sport, without changing any of the rules. For this assignment, my group and I decided to go with the sport of soccer, as it seemed interesting enough to play around with how the game worked, and to change the game in a way that will have a huge impact on the gameplay. We had brainstormed many ideas, and in the end we decided to change the layout of the field, by changing it to a circular field. We also added a spherical net that will “cover” the entire field, so there will no longer be any boundaries for the game, as the ball will bounce off of the net or walls when kicked. The rules of the game still apply normally, as we were not allowed to change it, so you can pretty much think of this version of soccer as “soccer with no boundaries”. 

That concludes my blog post for the week, tune in for more next week!

Sources:

No comments:

Post a Comment