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Just in case, DBC are a series of meetings concentrated on working on games, but not only to make them. It’s a initiative held currently in Warsaw and we want to study games, analyze them, create some really crazy game concepts, game mechanics, learn new technology and just hang out with each other. Ohh, and of course we play, too

Now on, in my *free time* besides working on DBC, because I’m its founder and CEO I also work on two game projects:

- I started to learn Construct2. Constrcut2 is a tool in which you use visual programming language to make stuff. I like it, because I found it to be really good for making 2D game prototypes. You can make them using it fast. Also I think it’s a great tool to learn game implementation. Maybe not so good, but it’s HTML5 only, so games you create are exported to HTML5. I don’t know if it’s something to worry about looking how fast HTML5 is developing. Besides, there are just simple prototypes! If you’re looking for tool to implement 2D game prototypes in a efficient way be sure to check it out.

- To implement something simple, just to learn Construct I came up with a simple game concept I called: Space Lasso. It is a 2D horizontal adventure shooter (?)

In the game you control a spaceship in some long-away galaxy. Galaxy full of worm-like aliens who fly in different directions. Your race is so strange that they never invented anything like an engine. Instead, they made use of those worms. You can shoot a line from your space ship. If this line will catch the worm then you will fly after the worm But there are some dangers! Black holes are flying there and they can drag your spaceship into their center destroying it… Better be sure to always have a worm to connect to or otherwise you’ll end in one of those pesky black holes!

About its implementation… I have its elements, but it’s still not ready to show. I have to sit and take some hours to connect all of those elements so it will work great If I find those couple of hours free, I’m should I’ll manage to do it. If… there won’t be any new problems with the implementation of juts with the game system

- And the other game project, my new one, is a game concept called Save my sushi! It was made on DBC and working on its prototype not only to make it playable, but also to make a review of the process in which I create it. This review is one of my idea about my future TALK on DBC. I want to show people how I managed to do what I did, how my process looked like in details so they can, maybe, learn something from it

DBC 5.0 (05.11.2011) WYŚWIETL POKAZ SLAJDÓW POBIERZ WSZYSTKIE

The last DBC ended a two events long cycle of meetings focused on implementation of our game concepts. We used tools like GameMaker, Construct 2 and Unity. Some of the games should be avaiable for download soon, and you can read about one of them at MoaCube’s website: http://moacube.com/news/a-glimpse-into-the-future/.

This kind of implementation-focused meeting poses its own problems, unfortunately. Not everyone was fully prepared and proficient enough in the game-making tools to actually code their games. Same thing with the physical prototyping — it takes some practice, after all.

On the bright side, being aware of the problem is the first step towards improvement . We plan the next DBC to be more focused on theoretical design, with some time reserved for those who would like to learn how to implement their ideas.

14 members came to this event, and Konrad Olesiewicz from Codeminion joined us later, upping the counter to 15 people. The meeting started with a short TALK; this time given by the humble me. I spoke of the relation between board and video games, both from the player’s and the designer’s perspective. My goal was to present the advantages of physical prototyping in service of video game design.

Thanks to Tomasz, the TALK was recorded on a professional camera. Unfortunately, it’s still not translated to English.

After that, it became a bit of a free-for-all. Some worked on their projects, some discussed their ideas, some just played games er, I mean, did their “research”;)

I can also say that the game I personally worked on is almost playable at this point. I’m very proud of it, though it’s too early to show it to the world yet.

DBC’s website should be up soon. Here’s how the “official” logo is going to look like:

Many thanks to everyone who attended. I hope I won’t miss a meeting — it would be such a shame. And thanks to all the DBC members – you make it fucking awesome !

Special thanks to MoaCube’s Tom Grochowiak for the English translation.

Each DBC apart from having great fun is a real learning experience for me. Not only on designing/implementing games, but also about managing quite a big group of people. DBC are a free game design workshops on which everyone come just because they want to. We’re a mix of people with a really different set of experiences and skills, but still – no one can’t sit alone doing nothing. If it happens then something is wrong and that’s the first thing I’ve tried to change after the first DBC…

This time I made one assumption that wasn’t suited so good for the rest of the group. This DBC had one core idea: let’s implement games! We wanted to take some of our game concept and turn them into playable games. We wanted to do it on DBC, in the teams and a lot of free time just for implementation. That was a plan and it went quite different, because we started implementing after about half of the workshops. I thought it was a problem, but well, it wasn’t. It’s all about listening to the group.

BTW meet DBC 4.0 group on a photos:

DBC 4.0 WYŚWIETL POKAZ SLAJDÓW POBIERZ WSZYSTKIE

For the first time we started DBC on schedule, because we didn’t wait for people coming too late. Tomek, one of us had a great idea to start each DBC with some kind of lecture – we called it TALK inspired by TIGJAM’s talks (http://www.davidhellman.net/blog/archives/304). I thought that a half an hour for the talk would be enough, but it transformed into a form of hour-long discussion panel. It was good, because I could see that no one was bored – everyone listened to TeeGee’s lecture about working as a game designer in polish game development studios like CDProjekt RED or Codeminion, and many, many questions were answered in this way. Now I know that doing such TALKs is a great idea, doing them on the start of DBC is even better idea and they have to take about an hour.

After ordering some pizza so that later I can just call and ‘submit’ our orders, I wanted to have a ten minute talk in which I tell everyone about DBC ongoing affairs. I thought that it would take me just 10 minutes… Some announcements I made went fast, but some were problematic. I wanted to talk about our future webpage and our logo. The thing is that from the start of DBC Ilona, one of our graphic artists started to draw some webpage layouts and logos. Also I had some propositions of logos from our internet forum. Presenting and discussing all of this took some time, because we didn’t have a clear version, but well – I think this talk did give us something, because after it on our forum new logos and layouts were posted. Also I know that probably the webpage will be run on Joomla.

When we finished it was about 12:00 PM and many people were hungry already so I called for pizza so it will arrive in an hour or so. At this time we were an hour behind our schedule, but you can’t stick to schedule on the event like this. Having such plan is still good, but as I said, the most important is to listen. Finally we started preparations for our implementations: game concept had to be presented and then some of them would be chosen to be realized and some team will be made around those game ideas. That was a theory and I thought that it will be a fast process, because most of these game concepts were already presented before. Besides I wanted just to present like a really high concept so presentation of each would take about 5 minutes. How I was wrong! I presented my two game concepts in a quick manner, but i.e. TeeGee while presenting his game concept spawned a discussion-like. Afterwards I called it a group game design, a groupie of some kind Now I know that TeeGee in this way got some cool ideas for his game which could be implemented to solve some gameplay problems he had. I made a mistake, because I cared about the schedule and I really wanted to implement more this day, so I interrupted this group game design saying that they will discuss this in teams, when we will split and start implementing. Thankfully TeeGee said that if guys want to design then let them. It opened my eyes and I even started to participate On the next DBC presenting game concepts would be more interactive experience, a groupie game design!

Then at least we formed small teams and before we started implementation we ate some… not so delicious pizza. This time pizza for the first on DBC wasn’t tasty… Thankfully thanks to the atmosphere of DBC, eating got a new layer, because everyone started to talk about game concepts which were presented a moment ago. Pizza game design! Jeez! We invented so many new types of game design on this DBC – amazing, ehh? And then, at least we sat in teams and started to work on our cool game concepts. I don’t want to spoil them here, because after we will finish them we will decide to publish them on our future webpage and here probably. In these about four hours of crazy implementation we had some epic bugs which made us laugh. So basically we were having a great fun I’m regret that we didn’t record those bugs somehow so I could show them here. Next time I’ll try to remember about this.

It’s really good to have a small team like this and work with them on a game concept. My team consisted of: two game designers/implementers, game design and graphic artist. From the start I wanted my team to concentrate on the game concept so I described it to them again, divided in some parts, described game mechanics. We talked how to make it better, what can we put there and then I listed all of the tasks distributing them to each of us, so i.e.: graphic artist had a list of objects that had to be drawn, game designer without implementation skills got some subjects to think about concerning some features of the game, story and so on. And me and YaQzi divided systems that had to be implemented. We decided to implement them in Construct2. I had to make all of the main game character mechanics workable and he had to implement mechanics for monsters. My task looked fairly simple, because I already had some of character mechanics implemented – I did it in home, but it was a little mess… So after some time of unsuccessful attempts YaQzi started to help me, but we couldn’t make some thing working. So I decided to rewrite the game and it wasn’t the best thing to do, because we just basically got stuck on implementing the game character logics through the whole DBC… It wasn’t bad, because the next day after DBC I sat and rewrote it again, this time carefully and now I have everything working with a clean code that can be developed further without such problems.

We decided to make the next DBC implementation-centered again, because we need it right now – just to implement and fight a different gameplay problems then when you’re just thinking about game concept, its mechanics, etc. I met today with Urbi and he said that before DBC 4.0 he wasn’t so happy that he will have to implement, thinking that he would rather like to design new game concepts. After DBC 4.0 he saw that a completely new problems emerged and now he wants more of it

I’m really happy how the DBC is shaping. It makes me so excited about the future and I don’t know if it’s just me, but it triples me motivation to make games Thank you guys! You’re making DBC really great! I’m happy to know so many passionate people being so crazy about games!

I’m sorry they’re in polish, but I want to share with you couple of those awesome ideas for the future of DBC:

- We will have a better organized forum with many cool discussions (this process already started )

- We will have a better planned DBCs;

- We will have a great website about DBC, also showing great stuff we made!

- We will finish to some extent a game, better: couple of games

- We will have before-DBCs. That’s informal DBC will take place one week before the actual one

- We will have cool video recording;

- We will have tours, also we will travel around the world (with the teleport of course!);

- We will be paid to do DBC;

- We will have a free food;

- We will own a teleport system, so we will just teleport to the DBC

- We will do a three days DBC or something like this;

- We will host TIGJAMs

- We will have lectures with the best specialist from the world!

- We will have private screenings!

Probably you do want to know how many people showed this time! They were 14 people. Two new and one guy who travelled about 300 km just to be on DBC! That’s something What’s more it was a girl, so man, oh man We have four girls! So all in all it looks like DBC is doing nice and all of us have a really great time on these workshops. We didn’t have a internet and people were having great fun – that’s something, righting? What’s more there is idea to have a chance to stay after hours at DBC to have some more fun over there…

I won’t tell about our eating habits when we’re on DBC, because they’re not too healthy (pizza and pizza, again and again ). OK. Enough. You probably want to look at some photos:

DBC 3.0 WYŚWIETL POKAZ SLAJDÓW POBIERZ WSZYSTKIE

We started DBC with some surprises: smaller room, but it was really OK and with a lack of the internet Waiting for some people we started to watch short videos, because on this DBC we did some pretty cool challenge. From five videos we picked up one:

Someone called it a “flying squirrel”. Don’t know why, but it stuck to the picture… In teams we had a challenge like this: Design a game based somehow on the film. We divided into three teams and three cool game concepts were made. I would like to play all of these three games, because I can some nice fun potential in them. I am still impressed how much designing a game inspired by the film is a great tool in game concept creation. We will do more challenges like this for sure

Especially one game concept was quite ambitions, because it was a multiplayer with a core mechanic similar to this game:

Afterwards thanks to Rafał “Zych” we had some game analyzing session. He showed us his finished, but somehow not successful game called “Heavy Stomp” – it can be downloaded here: https://sites.google.com/site/heavystomp/.

He described the game and some of us had some fun with it. Actually I played it and it is a nice idea combining tower defense with placing walls with which you can make labyrinths so that aliens won’t get you so fast It had some faults – I think that building structures didn’t work so good and for me it was a core gameplay mechanic. It had some problems with interface, but I think that the bigger problem was with actual process of choosing and building structures. For me these more expensive structures weren’t better then the basic ones. I didn’t feel control over building the structures. I would prefer to build those towers from single blocks, small walls or something like this. A great example of board game where the same mechanic with building walls was used is: Quoridor. In this game this mechanic is really working awesome. Nice example of this mechanic in video game is also Sanctum, which for me is basically a overcomplicated game about building labyrinths

Actually one guy from us liked “Heavy Stomp” very much, I think, because he played couple of times and it looked like he was having a blast of fun. Well, for sure this game creates emotions, it’s dynamic and fully packed with action

Again – it is a great idea to do such game analyzes on DBC. We will cultivate the idea. A photo with the result of this brainstorm-like analyze:

After all of these we had some ‘free’ time. Couple of us had to leave us, but many people stayed and we divided in two teams to work with game maker for the hour before we had to pack and unfortunately – it was over :/ I used this hour to learn more about Game Maker. I would like to thank Tomek for being patient and working with me on my game in Game Maker. I learned a lot thanks to you and just… in one hour! Awesome!

Thank you ladies and gentleman for being there! You rock!

To the next DBC!

It’s interesting to see how a formula of these meetings is forming by itself and I don’t think it’s a bad think that it’s happening like this. You see, DBC is for the people, and not just for me so it’s great that its formula is evolving with the people involved. In things we do we’re coming close to TIGJAMs, but the difference is that we meet every two weekends for one day, eight hours. For now it’s working surprisingly good! I think that with the time our community will grow up and become active not just on the meetings, because internet forum that I set up isn’t so active as I thought it would be. I’m working as hard as I can to make it a virtual place where it’s worth to post and discuss about things, get to know better, share some cool idea… I hope that someday it will be a place which will be interconnected with actual DBC workshops.

		DBC 2.0 WYŚWIETL POKAZ SLAJDÓW POBIERZ WSZYSTKIE

A little resume of DBC 2.0:

- 17 people worked on 5 game concepts, 3 game prototypes were created (one digital, two physical);

- I looked and couldn’t see no one siting and waiting for the end; everyone, every minute did something cool

- we had a pre-premiere presentation of TeeGee’s visual novel game: Cinders (http://moacube.com/games/cinders/);

- we shared 9 game concepts;

- FITS and Doom board games were played;

- we ate 5 big pizzas;

- in total we had more than 30 years of game design experience

- we had just one girl, but a cool one!

Thanks to all of you. It was a great fun to be there with all of you!

I already know that next DBC will be in two weeks and it will be even better I’m looking at TIGJAMs – how they’re made and so on and I think that I will try to borrow some of their ideas.

		FIRST DBC! WYŚWIETL POKAZ SLAJDÓW POBIERZ WSZYSTKIE

As you see from the photos we had a great fun doing all of the things. There were couple of landmarks that I won’t forgot in a long time and yep, I’m sure this, because some of them were just funny stuff, but some are problems that I have to resolve doing next workshops (coming soon! ). So here is a little summary:

-> There were 11 people on workshops (including me), a mix of:

—/> Game designers;

—/> Only one graphic artist, next time more will come

—/> Mathematicians;

—/> Coders;

—/> And even one general! ;D

-> Brainstorming was crazy, maybe too crazy? Even though I’m a believer of linking the ideas, even if the idea is just a single word without ‘game’ meaning, I think that next time I would do more directed brainstorm or I would try to analyze them and divide somehow, so it would be simpler to choose from them in the next stage when we will be doing game concept based on mix of generated ideas.

-> There were three teams, each had to create game concept. The problem was that two teams had one person with professional game design experience and one had nobody like this. I think this influenced the game concepts that came out. The team without pro-guy created game concept concentrated more on theme and didn’t think too much about game mechanics. I’m not saying they did bad, because they did a great job. I would like, in the future, to make all of those game concepts a playable reality! I’m not thinking to publish them, just to make some prototypes, maybe even something more…

-> I didn’t think about the mechanic for choosing which game concept we will try to prototype. With a little discussion we agreed to make one game concept, but it should be done otherwise… I’m thinking that the best would be to stay in the teams, so that every team would get to work on its own game prototype. The problem with this was that we had too less experienced people and when we started to do this it was quite late (just 1,5 hour left). As I think now we should this hour in some other way.

-> Thankfully the conference room was OK. It didn’t give us to much space, but I can’t complain. But more than 12 people and the room would be too small.

-> TeeGee and his team did some pure awesome thing to make a graphic for their game. They made characters, obstacles from play-doh and then from a shit of paper they made some kind of green screen. And then TeeGee placed his mac upside down to make a photo of the thing standing in front of miniature green screen. They were laughing that they made they’re rendering graphic for their game. Cool idea! I like it very much

-> I didn’t manage to make physical game prototype of TeeGee’s team. I think they were couple of reasons behind this *failure*:

—/> Lack of time! We had to less time to make anything awesome…

—/> Because TeeGee already started to work on digital game prototype I tried too much to resolve the reality of digital game on paper. It should be the other way around.

—/> Maybe I should’ve made a presentation about the method first, and not jumping right into the action?

—/> Only couple of people worked at the prototype. This is a important problem to be solved on the next DBC. I think that some of these not-working people were tired, but for sure some of them just couldn’t made the way to work with us. It was hard and abstract for them. It was hard to do, because only I knew how to do physical game prototyping. I think that we should just make a much more simple game, because the game we were trying to prototype was a running type of game, and a very arcade one.

But in the end we had a plenty of good ol’ fun doing games and talking about them. Atmosphere was crazy good and I can’t wait for the next DBC. From the feedback I got many guys that were now on DBC want more! Of course there were couple of problems, but for the start I think it’s very good. Besides problems are good – I can now try my best to overcome them on the next DBC. I’m really glad I started the initiative like this and I’m really excited with the future!

And now… It’s time to think about the next DBC! Hell yeah!

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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

He wrote to me that I’m better for more hardcore games. So I’m wondering if there are types of game designers? Like for example: Casual and Hardcore GD? If so, can’t a Casual one be good at Hardcore? I mean, it’s just like wearing a good hat? It should be like this, because I designed many times games that I didn’t love, there were good games, but I wasn’t hooked by them. Just, I designed them for my audience not for myself.

I think for most of us it’s like a Utopia to have a freedom and design only games that we would love to play. And yep, I can wear many hats. I just have to play and understand the audience.

Of course there’s motivation. You’re more motivated if you work on something you would love to play, so our preferences could count. But I think that some kind of love is always there – if you lose it, your game won’t be good. For sure it’s harder to work on something you just don’t feel it’s good.

What’s more – I have my preferences both in Hardcore and Casual Games. I like many casuals and hardcores. And I am a game designer – certain game mechanics fascinates me more and I’m more fascinated by complex things… That’s why I love many board games.

I can learn my audiences – there’s some anthropology stuff to use! So I don’t agree, I can design casual and hardcore games

1) I started to love running. I try to run everyday, in the morning. For now on, after about a month of running my record is: ~8km ran with two stops only That of course interrupts my other plans: a morning, about 6AM is a great time to work on something absolutely for yourself before working on something more serious… And that time was taken by my running sessions, but once my passion for them calms down I promise that everything will come back to normal!

2) I’m working on some cool game projects for Mass Creation Stay tuned, so you can play iDevices games I’m working on

3) I don’t know what to write about… I was pretty amazed by this post. Also if you’re looking for some great and different game experience check out this game. It really proves that games can be very powerful just experiences. You don’t need any high conflict, because there’s still a conflict in this game, but it’s good – without it won’t be a game. This game moved me a lot in this strange way… Maybe in the future I’ll write more about those artsy-experience-only-simple-games.

4) Ohh and BTW you must-read Understanding Comics. Really great book. Eye opener about many things not just in the world of comics, but our whole world and game world, too. It’s amazing to look at comics as a type of symbolic language. Maybe we should do the same with games to discover some usable stuff?