Speed Painting Tutorial: Concept Art for Video Game Industry

Awesome (and inspiring) video. Visual magic with photoshop and an excellent way to present gaming concept arts.

Creating sense in the impossible

Here's the situation: you are a powerful warrior in the city of Yharnam, a place fulfilled with an army of beasts and ancient monsters. You have a huge war axe and an arsenal of explosive potions. The battles against the creatures always end in a complete carnage. With your powers, you can destroy colossus, face the undead and survive in inhospitable conditions. But, there’s one thing you can’t do: open a closed wooden door.



This example comes from Bloodborne (Playstation 4, 2015), one blockbuster game created by FROM SOFTWARE and launched this year. Besides the great power of your character, some simple situations like destroying wooden doors are impossible in the gaming universe, forcing the player to tread more dangerous paths. Surely, you have found this kind of situation in other games: your character can free-fall from high levels, but is killed with a punch; a weapon that exterminates gods can’t cut a rope; a missile that explodes tanks can’t destroy a wall. And, normally, this kind of situation makes perfect sense in the gaming universe. Sometimes, we even wait for this kind of absurd situation in games.

Why can we accept this kind of anomaly – that makes no sense in the real world – in gaming narratives? One good explanation comes from Ensslin (2015) that postulate one nuclear point of this discussion: some games are “unnatural narratives”.

Following this author thoughts, we can say that some games have more unnatural content inside its narrative than others and “(c)learly, mainstream videogames are full of physical impossibilities” (ENSSLIN, 2015, p.53) allowing a kind of suspension of disbelief by the players. Ensslin (2015, p.53-54) also says that we can find another unnatural details in games like anthropomorphised creatures, “the anatomic dimensions of some hypersexualised characters would be anatomically impossible”, “teleporting, between geographic areas is a standard form of fast in-game movement” or the Bloodborne’s example previously commented in this post.

We have lots of games that explore fantasy and the impossible in its interfaces. It’s part of the nature of some games. On the other hand, we have games created in a very realistic way that work with a great dose of credible facts. To better understand this relationship we use the words of Ensslin (2015, p.55) again

some games are more “unnatural” (…) than others because they deliberately violate the ludo-narrative conventions of their genre and the medium itself in order to evoke meta-ludic and meta-fictional reflections in the player – as well as other types of philosophical and critical processes.

One point should be emphasized in this context: the fun offered to the player is always fundamental in any case. A good game design work is fundamental to balance the equation of the fun blended with the unnatural elements of the gaming narrative.

We’ll discuss more on this subject.

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Reference:

ENSSLIN, Astrid. Video games as unnatural narratives. IN: FUCHS, Mathias. Diversity of Play. Meson Press: Lüneburg, 2015. Click here for free download.

Game Design Lessons: Presenting Perfect Puzzles

Excelent game design lesson from The Game Prodigy channel. Simple, objective and ludic.



Puzzle games, by definition, focus on logical and conceptual challenges, although occasionally the games add time-pressure or other action-elements. Puzzles are a good format to structure interesting choices in games and this brief presentation synthesizes these ideas. In this short video we have inspiring ideas for game design and gaming concepts.

#GoGamers

My approved proposal to "The Videogame Cultures Project: 7th Global Meeting" (Oxford, UK)

Observing iterative design on the mobile indie game Dominaedro

Author:
M.A. Vicente M. Mastrocola (Postgraduate Research student and graduation level teacher at ESPM/São Paulo, Brazil; vincevader@gmail.com)

Smartphones and tablets are leading sales of electronic devices around the world, and became a rich field to explore gaming initiatives. Mobile media created a ludic ecosystem in which large publishers and small studios coexist; the new ways of digital content distribution allowed a gaming market with big productions and indie experiments to live in the same platforms. In this scenario, we seek to analyze a development process involving an independent Brazilian mobile game named Dominaedro, launched by Ludofy Studio in 2014.

Our focus in this work will be to discuss iterative design – a design methodology based on a cyclic process of prototyping, testing, analyzing, and refining a work in progress. In this context, we understand iterative design as a methodological tool to create a game. We intend to observe this kind of developing process, giving emphasis to the analogical prototyping phase that gives us some feedbacks from the beta-testing players, like in a qualitative research. Finally, we present the importance of the iterative design to quality assurance in the digital version of the game.

Data collected through 20 beta testing sessions showed the importance of iterative process to improve a gaming experience and to facilitate the production of the digital product. Based on this content we will demonstrate the whole process of creating a mobile game – from the idea, passing through the prototypes, until the final version.

We conclude highlighting the current tendency to create indie games using accurate design methodologies to gain audience in a very competitive scenario, and how indie games could be a learning point for aspirational game designers and small publishers; we will also emphasize the importance of using digital social networks and specialized media to publish and support an independent game.

Keywords: entertainment, mobile, iterative process, Dominaedro, indie game, Brazil

How gamification works wonders for work-life balance

Source: HP

The core structure of a QUEST

Today’s post is about one of my favorite subjects: quest design. A good quest could create immersion and, consequently, an emotional attachment in players. In order to discuss the creative process of quests in games, we will bring some ideas from Jeff Howard (2008) from the book “Quests: design, theory, and history in games and narratives” (one reading that I strongly recommend for all game researchers).

I’ll try to synthetize some nuclear thoughts from Howard in this post. First of all: the space where the quest happens is fundamental to merge the player’s imagination with the narrative. Space for quests should be fantastic (an alien world, a steam punk city), dreamlike (the oneiric realm of Bloodborne, the mysterious ambient of Back to Bed), allegorically arranged to convey ideas through their layout (puzzle games), organized to create a sense of progression through difficult ascent, and labyrinthine (HOWARD, 2008, p.50).



To construct the spaces of the quest is essential to keep in mind some considerations: embedded meaning (allied with plot, narrative etc.), a balance between challenging obstacles and exploration and a sense of progression, and the organization of spaces according to “quest hubs” (HOWARD, 2008, p.58).

After the definition of a space for the quest (based on a previous narrative) it’s very important to tune the characters with the objects of the quest, creating challenging situations. In the Batman’s game, Arkham Asylum, the player wears the hero’s cape to fight the Joker as a final threat. The main narrative has the Joker as the final challenge and, stage-by-stage, there are other villains to stop (Scarecrow, Crocodile, Poison Ivy). For players who want a more immersive challenge, there are a great number of side quests to face: Riddler’s trophies hidden in the scenario, mysterious inscriptions with the diary of Amadeus Arkham and many more.

In games like Arkham Asylum, the balance between main quests and side quests creates an experience for different kinds of players. Some will try to end the game through the main line. Others will finish the game looking for each hidden element in the stages. Think quests for the videogame’s platforms are a challenging exercise and Howard’s book helps us structure this kind of thought more precisely.

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Reference:

HOWARD, Jeff. Quests: design, theory, and history in games and narratives. Wellesley: A K Peters, 2008.

Player interaction patterns

Today we have an excellent image to understand the complexes video games ecosystems and the multifaceted relationship between players and games (FULLERTON; SWAIN; HOFFMAN, 2008, p.52). We can bring some interesting examples to our discussion: single player vs. game (Super Contra); multiple individual players vs. game (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade); player vs. player (Mortal Kombat - versus mode); unilateral competition (Evolve - one monster vs. four hunters); multilateral competition (multiplayer games like Quake); cooperative play (Pandemic board game); team competition (Soccer).

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Reference:

FULLERTON, Tracy; SWAIN, Christopher; HOFFMAN, Steven. Game design workshop: a playcentric approach to creating innovative games. Burlington: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2008.