Game Design Exercises

Many people feel that creativity is something that people do or do not have, and it doesn't help that there are few resources to develop and hone an internal sense of creativity. However, what most people view as creativity is just thinking about something differently or deeply. This can happen in a few ways:

• simply staying with a topic beyond the common ideas or solutions
• studying a topic enough to see the details and nuances of its structure beyond the surface
• thinking about what you are doing critically so you can reflect on and learn from the failed ideas
• continuing to ask questions or constrain the ideaspace to generate uncommon ideas or insights

The purpose of these exercise is to get you thinking about potential games you might be interested in creating in code.

Understanding Game Critically: Finding Objects and Rules

For those of you that do not know Pac-man, here is a brief description: it is a game in which the user moves a yellow, chomping pie (Pac-man) left, right, up and down around a two dimensional maze filled with edible pellets. Eating all the pellets on the board brings Pac-man to the next level. There are also four ghosts moving around the maze, trying to catch Pac-man. If a ghost catches Pac-man, Pac-man dies. There are a few special, larger pellets that render the ghosts harmless for a short period of time (during this time, Pac-man can eat the ghosts for extra points). Pac-man can also earn extra points by eating fruit that randomly appear for short amounts of time. The goal of the game is to eat all the pellets without being killed by the ghosts.

• You can also try playing the game to get an understanding of how it works.
• There are many variations of this game as well (including playing on Google Maps!)

You will not be coding Pac-man (unless you choose to do a variation for you Final Project) but, thinking about the Sprites (Classes) that make up a game and the Rules (problems to be solved), you will see that you can already build a credible model of the important aspects of the game from its description.

Start by thinking of the Sprites that will be needed, with attributes (like points, direction, etc.) they might need and methods (eating a pellet, moving toward the player or home, etc.) that might make the game's main loop easier to write. For each thing you see on the screen, write a brief description of its role in the game and what it might need to keep track of and do to fulfill that role. Designers ofter use CRC Cards (given as index cards) to help them with this step.

Then think about how the game's Rules and how they might be broken down into single steps that can be applied repeatedly. These are the problems and algorithms that need to be solved to make the game work the way it does. After you have identified the rules, think more deeply about them:

• describe several steps that make up the solution and how they would be updated and checked many times per second in the game's main loop
• identify steps that would be useful if they were already done, either by the Arcade engine or a class you built
• analyze the rules and their steps to find the game's underlying structures: what are similar to other games you know? what can be changed to make interesting variations of the game?

As a reminder, there are no right or wrong answers to this exercise since creativity is built into programming. In fact, part of the point is to realize how many different ways there are to analyze the same game.

Brainstorming Game Ideas: Generating Many Ideas and Iterating

Work together in small groups to create as many high-level game ideas as you can and then select three to write out more completely to present to the class:

• 4 minutes: start by generating as many genres, goals, or settings as your group can on its colored index cards
• 1 minute: then each group will select some cards of each type (color) to use to generate an idea for a game
• 15 minutes: come up with game concepts based on the three constraints given on the index cards as a group
• 5 minutes: fill out the mechanics and theme for your group's three best game ideas and write them down
• Share!