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Prototyping 50 Games in One Semester

Posted by timothy on from the espresso-subscription dept.

StarEmperor writes "Gamasutra has a good feature about four grad students who created 50 games in one semester. The article presents their insights about game design, evaluating gameplay, and generally what makes for a fun game."

52 of 72 comments (clear)

  1. Re:[OT] Glitch in the matrix by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    Get out. Get out NOW.

  2. I've got a fever & the only prescription is mo by peipas · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ...storyline. Grim Fandango, for instance, is one of the most amazing games I've played. It has a great story, a unique style, and hilarious bits thrown in here and there. Being able to interact with a story can be brilliant; I think this is where some of the Final Fantasy series' popularity comes from.

  3. Do It Again by mpapet · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'm always happy to see stories like this. There are huge gaps in entertainment for low dev costs and this is how you make them fly.

    -No, your games aren't going to be in WorstBuy anytime soon.
    -No, your games aren't going to get any attention whatsoever from the media.
    -No, you won't be able to afford porting them to the console du-jour.
    -No, you won't attract VC to grow your business.

    -Yes, you will have some loyal consumers. Make your games multilingual (i18?) and you'll have many.
    -Yes, you can build a very successful enterprise.

    In all cases that's the way doing something original works. I wish more young Americans had this kind of attitude and perserverance.

    I just hope they are smart enough to keep going on their own instead of using it as a resume builder.

    --
    http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
    1. Re:Do It Again by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      yes, they started a site where you can make games to and learn about the process.

      http://experimentalgameplay.com/

      also, Kyle Gabler has expanded on the tower of goo idea and built it into a product: http://2dboy.com/games.php

    2. Re:Do It Again by Mordok-DestroyerOfWo · · Score: 1

      You're absolutely right. Some of my favorite games, the ones I play the most were on the SNES platform. I don't own a next-gen system and have no intention of buying one. From what I have played it seems to be all graphics and very little story line. Now if you'll excuse me I need to chase some kids off my lawn.

      --
      "Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
    3. Re:Do It Again by edwdig · · Score: 1

      I don't own a next-gen system and have no intention of buying one. From what I have played it seems to be all graphics and very little story line.

      Most modern games:

      Graphics
      Storyline ... ... ...
      Gameplay

      It's rather disappointing, as a lot of modern games are interactive movies rather than games.

    4. Re:Do It Again by KDR_11k · · Score: 1

      -No, you won't be able to afford porting them to the console du-jour.

      Ironically Tower of Goo is getting ported to the Wii.

      --
      Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
    5. Re:Do It Again by KDR_11k · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The gameplay got better over time as the tolerance for bad design choices went down. These days it's unacceptable to require the player to find secrets with no hint towards them or have huge mazes without any map function. It's unacceptable to kill the player with traps he can't see coming to force trial and error or to make progressing through the game impossible because the player failed to get some object that he can no longer access. Outside of retro-styled games there is no massive death penalty in RPGs (died? Sorry, you lose all items and experience) and mindless grinding is much less common (outside of MMORPGs, at least). Yes, some people whine that this made games too easy but it's entirely possible to make a game difficult without resorting to massively cheap crap. Oh and controls got a lot better too.

      --
      Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
    6. Re:Do It Again by FunkSoulBrother · · Score: 2, Insightful

      These days it's unacceptable to require the player to find secrets with no hint towards them or have huge mazes without any map function. Really? I've found it to be more or at least as prevalent in games these days to hide secrets which are completely unsolvable without a guide. I think the developers are just assuming that kids will disseminate the information on GameFAQs or other websites. It's really a shame too, as I like to solve things myself. You can probably beat the game without any of that game guide bullshit, but you won't "100%" it.

      Oh, and as far as the built in map functions these days, I liked mapmaking on graph paper, but I can concede at least that I'm a huge nerd from another generation on that one.
  4. Re:nice try buddy by omeomi · · Score: 4, Insightful

    And as a CS grad student, how is this different from every other semester and summer?

    I've played the Tower of Goo game. It's really a fun "casual game" sort of game, and honestly, they came up with an idea that was fairly different from much of anything else out there, which isn't easy to do. They didn't just make yet another Tetris clone, or a Bejeweled clone, or some other puzzle game that's been done a million times, they seem to have tried to come up with really innovative game ideas.

    The Experimental Gameplay Project has a lot of really unique game concepts like this.

    --
    ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
  5. This is a feature from October 26, 2005 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    For FSM's sake! 2.5 years old.

    *sigh*

    1. Re:This is a feature from October 26, 2005 by NeutronCowboy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      And yet, it still seems relevant. What does that tell us about the current state of gaming? Put differently, should we discount the importance of Newton's Principia Mathematica because it is 400 years old?

      --
      Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
    2. Re:This is a feature from October 26, 2005 by kaizokuace · · Score: 1

      I agree, I read this at the source back then!

      --
      Balderdash!
    3. Re:This is a feature from October 26, 2005 by steelfood · · Score: 3, Insightful
      It's relevant, certainly. But, I'll bet you'd be surprised if a /. headline read:

      Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica Attempts to Explain Everyday Physical Observations and then proceeded to wonder if this book could change the field of physics forever.

      On a site that's "news for nerds," events that were made public 2 years ago would hardly be called news. That, and this might just be a dupe that was spaced so far apart nobody can remember the original (worse than the dupe on SHA1 being cracked).
      --
      "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
    4. Re:This is a feature from October 26, 2005 by NeutronCowboy · · Score: 1

      I guess I don't consider that article news in the sense of "XYZ happened". If that'd be the case, the article would indeed be old and stale. However, that's not the case - I consider it instead to be something like a whitepaper or case study: something that stays relevant for long after it was published because of the insight that it offers.

      Not to mention that what is old hat to you could be news to someone else. Or would you argue that because someone wrote about everyday physics once, no one else needs to point new people to it?

      --
      Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
    5. Re:This is a feature from October 26, 2005 by CougMerrik · · Score: 1

      No, but you shouldn't report it as "news"

  6. Re:Cheap game space by maxume · · Score: 5, Interesting

    http://www.kongregate.com/

    Desktop Tower Defense is pretty addictive (for a while anyway):

    http://www.kongregate.com/games/preecep/desktop-tower-defense

    Also liked this one:

    http://www.kongregate.com/games/AlejandroG/spin-the-black-circle

    --
    Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
  7. productivity vs. burnout by Thelasko · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This article basically says that shorter development cycles produce a better product because of diminishing returns. What it doesn't state is whether this development cycle increases or decreases the burnout rate for developers.

    I think it would be a nice follow up to do an extended study of this kind of development cycle in a corporate environment and examine the turnover rate for developers. Will they be intrigued by working on something new every week, or will they get tired of the quick turnaround and quit?

    --
    One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
    1. Re:productivity vs. burnout by JustinOpinion · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's worth noting that the article is talking specifically about prototyping, not necessarily full game development. They do acknowledge that once a good idea is found, it will take some time to give it the polish and variation that people expect from a full game.

      So, I wouldn't think of this as any developer's full-time job. Rather, they are describing a strategy for coming up with novel game mechanics, game genres, game elements, etc. Maybe in-between big projects, you give your designers/developers a few weeks of this kind of structured rapid prototyping. At the end, you decide which ideas are not worth pursuing, which ideas could be polished into small games (for release as flash games, as mini-games inside full games, etc.), and which ideas could be expanded upon to create a full, novel game. (E.g. the next "Portal" in terms of novel game-play.)

      You're probably right that any developer would burn-out if they tried to churn out a new, novel game every week (they might also eventually become frustrated by never being able to "finish" any project). But as a way to sometimes come up with actually creative game ideas... it definitely has merit.

    2. Re:productivity vs. burnout by roovis · · Score: 1

      This article basically says that shorter development cycles produce a better product because of diminishing returns. What does this say about Duke Nukem Forever?
    3. Re:productivity vs. burnout by hvm2hvm · · Score: 2, Interesting

      "I think it would be a nice follow up to do an extended study of this kind of development cycle in a corporate environment and examine the turnover rate for developers. Will they be intrigued by working on something new every week, or will they get tired of the quick turnaround and quit?"
      That's exactly what kills the creativity: trying to systematize creating, trying to find a perfect 'way' that will always work and ensure originality. No, it can't work and it never will as long people have deadlines or a fixed timetable. They need to be able to say no to a project and yes to another whenever they want. Otherwise they tend to become like the system itself, thinking in 'development cycles' and other bullshit. Some games take days to think of and years to create, others years of planning and thinking and relatively shorter development time.

      --
      ics
    4. Re:productivity vs. burnout by sahala · · Score: 2, Informative

      The prototyping method from the article has been around for a while at CMU, since about 1998 in a class called "Building Virtual Worlds". The whole theory is to get people to think creatively by giving them a central idea, a bunch of constraints, and an even bigger set of tools to play with.

      The process is actually intended to NOT be perfect. The idea is for people to quickly design an idea, then sketch out the idea in code using prototype tools, then test it out in front of an audience, all in a week. The interesting part is when people start building on ideas from projects that are showcased. The good ideas are repeated and built on, and others are archived.

      Think about this though...given a few simple constraints, you can do ANYTHING you want. It basically becomes a weekly cycle of playing, where on review the interesting parts are noted and you move on to the next play session.

      I agree, some ideas take years of creating and planning, building. But, this process is never clean. The very best ideas are usually grown through quick iterations and experimentation, which Randy Pausch's process forces pretty well.

      You can ask anyone who's taken "Building Virtual Worlds" or been in the ET program at CMU. They'll bitch about the crazy stunts they had to pull to get something working (imagine collision detection suddenly going kaput an hour before show-and-tell time) but there was no doubt that it was non-stop creativity.

  8. meh by the+brown+guy · · Score: 1, Funny

    unless one of them is Duke Nukem forever, nobody on /. cares.

    --
    Orbis terrarum est non altus satis
  9. Not exactly a dupe by New_Age_Reform_Act · · Score: 4, Insightful

    but someone here mentioned it a loooooooooooong time ago.

    http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=173642&cid=14446612

    --
    "The New Age. The New Beginning."
  10. "Nobody cares about your engineering..." by SanityInAnarchy · · Score: 2, Insightful

    This is very true, for the prototype, because half of them will be thrown away.

    That said, the kind of mechanic they were talking about really doesn't seem like it'd make something polished. If you already have a solid prototype, take some time to go back and do it right.

    --
    Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
  11. Bit old - but still important... by angryphase · · Score: 2, Insightful

    .. to read, as this goes to show what a creative deadline can help produce. Simple, elegant games that don't require your life to play or millions to develop. In fact, they now are aiming to turn these ideas into products, for their own company.

  12. Re:nice try buddy by KevMar · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I have found a lot of nice gems in that project.

    You do get a lot of simple or basic functionality tests, but some do have a nice polished feel.

    Crayon Physics and Tower of Goo stand out the most. Every few months I download all the new games and just kill time seeing what they can do.

    --
    Im a gamer, not a grammer major. This post is full of spelling and grammer mistakes.
  13. Re:Cheap game space by BForrester · · Score: 1

    Kongregate is famous, of course, as the leading gaming website that pays independent game developers. Games that are highly rated and frequently played are allotted a portion of the ad revenue generated from the page.

    It's doubtfully enough to make a living off of, but it's enough to pay for the coffee / Mountain Dew and cheesies of a hobby-level programmer.

  14. Just from the summary... by Kjella · · Score: 1

    Gamasutra has a good feature about four grad students who created 50 games in one semester. ...then this reminded me of those cheap electronic things that say "100 games" and you find there's 20 variations of tetris, 20 of blockout, 20 of frogger, 20 of ping-pong and 20 of space wars. Now 50 original games is impressive, 50 games sounded a little marketingspeak...
    --
    Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
  15. Re:Cheap game space by maxume · · Score: 1

    Desktop TD is exceptional in how popular it is, but the creator has made thousands off of it.

    But yeah, Kongregate is an example of people getting paid for games that can be put together in a couple of weeks or months.

    --
    Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
  16. Re:Cheap game space by xtracto · · Score: 1

    digisonline.com

    If you like turn based strategy games, this little chess-inspired motherfucker will absorb your time like nothing else.

    --
    Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
  17. Fun in games by BertieBaggio · · Score: 1

    For those that have it, I'd definitely recommend checking out the developer commentary in TF2. While TF2 doesn't quite fit this particular profile of rapid prototyping (9 years!), it is relevant in how much attention they paid to it being fun. They started out with some very different gameplay from what is present now - eg a BF2 / RTS-esque 'commander' - but dropped it because (among other things) it wasn't fun. They do make mention of testing out lots of different combinations and seeing what the many pariticipants found to be most fun. Of course, the commentary talks about other things such as character design and simplicity and so forth, but for those that haven't had a listen I heartily recommend it.

    --
    If all you have is a grenade, pretty soon every problem looks like a foxhole -- MightyYar
    1. Re:Fun in games by entrigant · · Score: 1

      TF2 being? For something you want other people to try please consider not using insider abbreviations. Thank you.

  18. SLASHDOTTED by Joseph+Hayes · · Score: 1

    Ahh... the price you pay for getting noticed. Bookmarked for later... I wanna try some Tower of Goo

    --
    "The irony when tending a flock of sheep is the dogs you put in place to protect them are genetically mutated wolves"
  19. Re:nice try buddy by KDR_11k · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Every game is unique but as you increase the tolerance for considering two games similar you reduce the number of unique games. Colloquially a game is "very unique" when the tolerance required to consider it similar to another game is very large.

    --
    Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
  20. Re:I've got a fever & the only prescription is by apt-get+moo · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Being able to interact with a story can be brilliant; I think this is where some of the Final Fantasy series' popularity comes from. I don't think so.
    Most Final Fantasy titles have mediocre stories with little or no meaningful interaction, somewhat nice gameplay and plenty of slashfic featurng the lead characters.
    --
    ...."Have you mooed today?"...
  21. Welcome to October 2005 by glyph42 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Seriously, guys. The article is from October 2005, you know, when the rest of the internet read it.

    --
    Music speeds up when you yawn, but does not change pitch.
  22. Re:nice try buddy by maxwell+demon · · Score: 1

    The word "really" doesn't give a degree, but an assertion of truth. As in "this isn't just claimed to be unique, but it is unique."

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
  23. Re:Why no source code? by robot_guy · · Score: 2, Interesting

    There is a bi-annual 48 hour solo game development competition called Ludum Dare 48h that has just finished its 11th incarnation. All the entries have to supply source so it might be interesting for you to have a look though these. This time there were over 70 final entries but you do have to realise that there is a wide range of polish and completeness.

    The competition itself is actually quite fun and provides a good forum for playing at game development as at doesn't take up much time and the end results are not expected to be perfectly polished, complete games.

  24. Did they cheat and by Zashi · · Score: 1

    Did they cheat and use this?
     
    I kid. But gojo is hella fun. The main programmer is working on porting it to the wii and has support for the wiiboard written (doubt that's in the main trunk though).

    --
    Skiffy is Spiffy, but Ort is tort.
  25. TF2: Team Fortress 2 -nt- by va.va_va.va · · Score: 1

    Are -nt- tags allowed?

  26. ok, how about the technology? by khallow · · Score: 1

    One thing I see here is that the development process here was enabled by Flash and other software. So suppose I wanted a group to do similar things. What sort of tools do they need?

    1. Re:ok, how about the technology? by Khakionion · · Score: 1

      The project later released an experimental gameplay framework to help in your rapid prototyping, consisting of many of the tools they built during the project itself. It's slashdotted now, so here's the Google cache for immediate satisfaction.

      --
      OMG! Wau!
  27. So in other words... by DarthStrydre · · Score: 1

    Dragon's Lair would never be produced in todays market. Wait, did I just consider a laserdisc player to be a console?!? AAAArrgghh!

  28. glorious trainwrecks! by kisrael · · Score: 1

    I'm involved in a site called Glorious Trainwrecks... not just dedicated to the glorious bad days of awful 90s shareware, but featuring a monthly Klik of the Month Klub "write a game in two hours!" game jam. (Most of the people use Klik & Play, this crazy great awful Windows 3.1 era game construction kit, but any system is allowed... I do most of my stuff in the Java IDE + library Processing...)

    People who dig this stuff are welcome to join the 'wreckers!

    --
    SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
  29. Re:I've got a fever & the only prescription is by Acer500 · · Score: 1

    I liked Final Fantasy 8 and 9 specifically (and the Tactics series - didn't play the famed 7), and I liked the stories a lot.

    So FFVIII was almost a movie in the amount of cutscenes, but I liked it that way. And compared to other games (maybe not the RPG genre) it had a lot of storyline.

    The gameplay actually seemed a bit repetitive at times (especially summoning) :P

    --
    There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
  30. The old 80/20 rule by Dekortage · · Score: 1

    This reminds me of the 80/20 rule that generally still applies to graphic design, web design, game design... most creative pursuits, actually. In short: The first 20% of the effort creates the first 80% of the result, and the last 80% of the effort goes into the remaining 20% of the result.

    In other words, the core ideas come quick, and all the fine details take much longer.

    --
    $nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
    1. Re:The old 80/20 rule by sahala · · Score: 1

      In other words, the core ideas come quick, and all the fine details take much longer.

      I totally agree. Back in the day, I remember Randy Pausch (who started the whole "game" prototyping process mentioned in the article) lecturing at a few of us coders for spending too much time making code re-usable. He said that code-reuse is good and all, but not in the context of prototyping and testing out ideas.

      I remember shocked whispers throughout the lab: "did he just tell us to write ugly code???".

  31. Re:nice try buddy by master_p · · Score: 1

    It's a gravity-based game...not much different than Bridge Builder (http://www.bridgebuilder-game.com) for example...

  32. Re:I've got a fever & the only prescription is by electrictroy · · Score: 1

    I think all D&D-style role-playing games are repetitive. It's the nature of the beast (fight this person, fight that person, and then fight some more). Final Fantasy stories help distract you from the boredom.

    back to topic:

    I'd like to see these programmers rewrite those 50 games using an Atari console with only 128 bytes of RAM. Now *that* would impress me. It's still amazing what was accomplished by Atari and Activision programmers 30 years ago.

    --
    The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
  33. Re:nice try buddy by keichristi · · Score: 1

    I love these sort of games, I am off to check out the links you suggested. Thanks for the heads up on these. ________________________________________________ keichristi Great printer toner and ink cartridge deals, discounts and coupons. Also, check out the latest printer reviews and technology news. http://blog.concordsupplies.com/

  34. PS3 Uses innovative control schemes by darkmasterchief · · Score: 1

    there's this control that will have some sort of motion sensors it's going to rock your socks off dudes.