Key Stage 1 Design Issues
Through out the first year, a group of us have been Woking on a team project for an educational Key stage 1 flash game for one for our first year university projects. The game that I have been working on named Mr Cheesy Spelling Fun Time has been throughout the term very challenging and a new experience for me for getting an idea into a game and then getting the game done under a required deadline.
When we where working on ideas and the concept of the game we decided on creating a hybrid platform spelling game the plan was to firstly have a plat forming game where the player would collect the letters in the level and then collect the keys to complete, they would then pass over too a spelling screen were the collected words would then have to be spelt out.
In the concept stage of the game we wanted to keep to a game as much as possible adding educational elements to it, We looked at example site's such as the BBC's educational site such as bitesize key stage 1 and found that the games on the site where not really very much fun but they acted like more interactive puzzles there was not much of a goal as some of the games just kept going on with the same level and the experience felt stiff.
In relation to an article written by Greg Costikyan we can see that many of the points that we faced in the core design of the game are stated in his article I have no words and must design he talks about puzzles and games, “Chris Cralwford contrasts what he calls “games” with “puzzles.” Puzzles are static; they present the “player” with a logic structure to be solved with the assistance of clues. “Games,” by contrast, are not static, but change with the players actions.”(Greg Costikyan:pp 10)
The way we wanted to fix this from happening to our game was to introduce more interactivity to the player by letting them gather all the letters in a platform based system we, we made a beginning and a end to the game where the player would be given a certificate for finishing the game.
We also added in competition to the game in terms of hostile non playable characters that in the platform game hinder the player from collecting the keys and stop him from finishing the level.
We have always knew how the story of the game went and how it reflects in the game that we wanted to produce the general idea is that Mr Cheesy our main character is from another planet, the planet of cheese and that he has come down to earth to teach humans that is the player how to spell words, how this translates into the game was quite easy, the player would go through different levels of the game to collect letters that would later reach to and end of game certificate, we knew quite quickly from the start that the story and the game went well together and that we had no big problems trying to fit both in.
After fleshing out the core idea of our game we then looked at the style of artwork we wanted to make sure that our game looked friendly and that the look of the game could mean it could be played by everyone in that age group.
Other games that inspired us in our style are games such as the Mario series that was a successful hit within the plat forming genera. The art style of Mario is a good example of what we wanted to produce creating almost cartoon styles enemy and creating friendly childlike environment.
We have gone through a lot of iterations for many of the enemy characters that would provide the struggle in the game, they are most prevalent in the plat forming stage of the game, a good example of one of the characters that we made was called Dino Dan the ham, Dino Dam provided a challenge because we could not figure out how it would walk in the game, being a piece of ham we could not figure out how he could walk in the level, the character went through a lot of different iterations until finally we decided that the character would not actually walk but wobble along the level as we felt that that would provide the most realistic situation of showing the awkward movement and to show the character in the best light.
We want to add more of a verity of different NPC's (Non playable character) to the game to create different challenges, each non playable character will have a different method of attacking the player from hitting him to firing projectiles at the player, this will force the player to adapt there tactics to the situation at hand because he will have to take down each NPC in a different way, the player will have to find out tricks to taking down the NPC's without dying to them this should add to the difficulty and challenge to the game in general. However we have to make sure that the NPC's are not overpowered in terms of the ability of killing the player quickly and we cant add to many into the level otherwise we could risk oversaturated the level making it too difficult to finish so there is going to be a fine line in how many NPC's we can add into a level before the level becomes too unplayable.
Gender is another issue that we have tried to tackle, in a chart by today gamers based on the total population of gamers in the UK in the age group of 8-12 years 99% of gamers are boys while 96% of gamers are females this shows that there is a fairly large balance of both boys and girls so its important that we make the game for both boys and girls to maximise audience and to make sure that we are providing a general educational game.
in the design we wanted to game to be playable to both boys and girls, so in our outwork and theme we have had to make sure that our game would turn out to be gender neutral what would mean that it does not accommodate just for boys or just for girls, we tried to tackle this problem with making sure that we didn’t use wrong colours we tried to stay away from colours that are typically associated with being too girly or to boyish such as bright pink or dark red. We made sure that the design of the characters looked friendly and neutral as well.
One of the problems with artwork that we faced later on what that some of the levels that we designed where too flawed or too difficult to play right. The main levels that we had difficulties with was the bathroom and the toy box levels, when we got these levels onto the game the first problem we had was because we did not put any guiding blocks down the player would be confused in which route to take due to that that they had to jump onto different background images of the level that proved confusing because some you could jump onto the block while other where just invisible.
The other problem on the bathroom level was that the props that the character needed to jump onto where in places where the player could not get too so the player may get stuck on levels and again this would break the game play.
The main way we could fix these problems is by instead of jumping onto the background images that have been cut out into props we could just have coloured blocks to jump onto by doing this the player knows what they can and cant jump onto, it fixes the game breaking problem of the player being able to not complete the level and it could also allow for a more dynamic level, an example of this would be moving blocks that the player has to jump onto challenging the player.
Other problems that we faced with the spelling screen, is getting the spelling screen to dynamically spell a different word each time for the same level, we have found it very difficult in finding a solution to fixing this problem in the game because getting the game to dynamically select words might have to need a database of different words and we are unsure of how to make a database in action script. If the was not fixed in the game there could be a problem with the difficulty of the game and the re-play ability to it. For example if the player wanted to play the game again they would already know what is coming up and there would be no challenge in actually spelling out the work if the player already knows what’s coming up.
If we look in Costikyan's article he talks about the struggle of games and the difficulty part of a game is to challenge the player to run the game to completion as he states, “We want games to challenge us. We want to work at them. They are not any fun if there to simple, too easy, if we zip through them and get to the end screen without being challenged we don’t feel any sense of achievement, of mastery, of victory, if it comes to easily.”
If the problem is not fixed in the game, there could be a problem with the player zipping through the game because they know what’s coming, therefore there would be no challenge at the game any more and there would be no struggle or will to complete It because there is no challenge any more.
In conclusion it is vitally important that we make the game gender neutral, we cannot afford to tailor a game at such an early age group where there is such a abundance of gamers for both sexes out there. We also need to make sure that the levels are fixed making areas where the player can go more obvious from the background and we are making sure that there are going to be more then enough words to spell so that should sort out the problem of re-playability.
We are hoping to add more levels in the future to extend game play time and to add more hostile NPC's to add more of a challenge to the player who will have to adapt. In summery we still have a lot of problems that we need to address but even after a release of a product with games design we need to keep thinking how to improve from our mistakes and aim to deliver a better product.
Bibliography
BBC.www.bbc.co.uk/schools/ks1bitesize/ date of last entry. 2/05/2011
Greg Costikyan.I have no words and must design.1994
todays gamers.United kingdom national games servey 2009
Hopefully I have fixed all the grammar and spelling issues in this essay, and again hopefully, it should be worth the weight.
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