Yeap, it’s done! It was a great experience for me being an instructor on such workshops. I did the workshops with my friend, Alek (http://sigmagames.pl/), for the game developers team of Turkish game dev studio (C-reate Game Studio). We knew that this team is already doing games, but we thought that they lack tools and some thinking landmarks about game design in general. That’s why we talked about game definitions, some other discussions about games, about game concepts, creating documentation for the game and at least, about physical prototyping. I think that physical prototyping part was the most interesting for them. If you did some physical prototypes then you know that it’s super-cool way to design games. If not, you should try. So we did couple of physical prototypes, first of some iPhone game concepts that were invented on the workshops. And then a whole day long we’ve prototyped cool idea of FPS game. Well, I’m not good at describing such events, but it was fun and really nice experience. I think we managed to do this workshops really good. I’m really happy that I could share some of my knowledge to the people that appreciate it.

I love working directly with game mechanics and resolving problems that came when we add something to our ‘game’. And we did stuck for a while prototyping the fps game. I think that was a nice lesson for them and for us in general about designing game systems. I’ll try to describe it as I remember it.

So we were prototyping and doing some simple model of fps game in order to build upon it all of our cool ideas inside the game concept. So we had: a board, avatars, a mechanic for avatars movement, mechanic for killing and mechanic for fog of war (already working like it should in the real game). And all of that, it was working and there wasn’t any problems. One thing you could feel about it, is that it was nothing interesting, really. But that was just a base for our cool ideas. There has to beginning somewhere, right? This foundation is very important. You have to built it very carefully, otherwise the game will fall apart just like a house built on to weak foundation. Foundation has to be strong.

So after we thought we have something simple, working like it should, we started to think about adding more to it. We thought that some obstacles would be nice. But then a chaos came In a moment the board was full with many obstacles… I don’t mean just walls or some wall-like foundation, but we had also some hills and the bridge! Crazy! And then we started to add rules for these game objects. Walls? Simple, if you’re behind it enemy can’t see you and you can’t shoot through the wall. Even with this we haven’t think if the avatar behind the wall can be see by enemy diagonally, that is on some angle? Playing we decided that yes, he can be seen in this way. But what about hills? Shouldn’t they be something more than just an ordinary wall? So you could climb up them and shoot from them and if you’re on the hill you have a bigger range so you can shoot from the distance… And people on the ground? Well they can’t see you if you’re on the hill and only from another hill if they have you in range then they can kill you. I think it was like this at first. And… MANY problems emerged. As we started playing with this rule-set we saw it very fast that the game is unbalanced now, because if you’re on a hill you basically won a game… So it was a game about getting first on the hills… Bad! So we thought how to make being on hills less rewarding for the player? So we said that if you’re on the ground and you have in your range the guy in the hill you can kill him easily. But this way being on the hill didn’t give you almost anything. Getting on the hill cost more movement points, it was more costly then normal move and it didn’t give you anything cool, really. So it was bad again. We were thinking about changing movement system, so you could move more spaces in your turn. We also redesigned level… for the hills! And still, the problem was the same. At least we made a rule that you if you want to kill the guy on the hill you have to climb up there and then you can kill him. Also getting on the hill cost you less, so that climbing up and killing was possible in one turn but firstly you had to in the previous turn end your movement by the hill. But that was stupid to do with these rules, because you was then easily killed by the guy on the hill. So again – the problem wasn’t solved. Some of us wanted to add a shooting game mechanic now, because they thought it would solve it. But I thought that it would just add more chaos to this simple prototype. We gave ourselves a least try to make it work just with the systems we had already. And it did! We added a mechanic that said that all hills have a dead spots. I mean, they are circled with the walls. So a player can in one turn come close to the hill and wait safely to climb up in the next turn. Also the guy on the hill can’t shoot gut at the hill, but he has time to escape on the other side of the hill. So we made it working! But it took us about two hours and well, we could easily dump those hills away or never put them so early, because the game wasn’t about hills. We didn’t say anything about them in the game concept. Great lesson for all of us: just add one system, make it work nicely and then add another. One by one, and concentrate on the core gameplay.

It was great to be with you, guys! Hope to see you again in the future, you and your games

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