Amanda Potts

Play as this little dude to expand your business. Start with collecting tires and then move on down to the ocean to get some sweet pearls.

This game is a way to show how our society runs only off of money with complete disregard to the effects it has on people and/or the environment.

My critique notes were about color camera angle and the pile of pearls. Pearls shouldn’t be in piles so now they aren’t. The angle of the camera has changed to be farther up and angled to see farther forward. The character is now gone so that the game is in the point of view of the player. The ocean is now its own level.

Trying to define things like game and play are difficult because they aren’t meant to be stated/described but are meant to be experienced. Although the importance of experience in game design is stated clearly the author still seems to try to find a way to define things that are meant to be experience. The connection between problem solving and playfulness with the idea of a game makes little sense to me. A stick is useful for many games but isn’t used to solve a problem, unless you consider swinging at the air the problem needed to be solved. For the basic elements of a game I have to agree with the concepts not completely with the terms used as the concept of technology tends to be that of humans inventions/reinventions of things that are used to serve a purpose rather than simply physical elements used to serve an immediate purpose.

Seeing that a table used to determine whether or not a wall would appear seems to have no rhyme or reason, it would seem that it was created by constantly testing and fiddling. Even more amusing than a bunch of university grads trying to understand the process a programmer went through to create something that worked is finding out that the thing they were trying to figure out was created by a drunk programmer who got sudden inspiration. It is rather interesting to think about how most archeological sites are from centuries or even millennia ago while the ones for video games are a mere 2 or 3 decades.

This is the GIF of my first Unity project. It’s a Rube Goldberg machine that unveils an image.

PacMan seems to be both a complex and simple game. Simply by analyzing the path/route that the ghosts take and where they are trying to get to shows that the concept is somewhat simple but the result seems more complicated. Basically there are various modes that the ghosts switch between while there are also different paths that each ghost takes.

Trying to read through this and remember every detail is impossible for me. I understood the idea and the process but there are details that I have already lost. I know that the red ghost is always going for the spot pac-man is in. I think the pink ghost goes for 4 spots ahead of pac-man. The blue ghost goes off of both the red ghost and pac-man’s position. The orange ghost behavior changes based on how far away from pac-man he is.

It’s interesting to find out about the paths that the ghost from pac-man take as I have played that game since I was a kid and could not figure out how they determined where to go. I used to think they had set paths that I just couldn’t figure out from playing the bit I did. Now I know the ideas and process behind them and maybe will get to beat my old high score.

For the original article this is about: http://gameinternals.com/understanding-pac-man-ghost-behavior

Some games I enjoy playing:

Minecraft – Classic survival game that incorporates exploration with zombie fighting/survival.

Monster Sanctuary– Breed and fight monsters to protect the castle and keep your family’s legacy alive.

Dying Light – Zombie survival set in a city that is quarantined from the rest of the world.

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Monster Sanctuary is a monster fighting game. To play you hatch monster eggs and then train them in order to defeat powerful monsters called champions. Every champion you fight allows you more levels in the game to be able to show your ability to keep your family’s legacy alive.

Game design isn’t just video game design. Games are an ancient concept and by studying them we can hope to understand how and why games last for long times. There are not any direct steps on how to create a well-loved game. The only way to do that is to create a game test it, have someone else test it, fix it, test some more, fix it, and continue that until you get a game that is enjoyable. To be a game designer one must design games, it is that simple.

I am a game designer.

That simple sentence means more than you might imagine. That sentence is encouraging and motivating. That sentence describes so many details of a person. I am a game designer.

Game designing takes many skills but the main one is listening. There are various people that will need to be listened to. The audience, the team, the client, the game and the designer themselves. In order to truly understand the game, the designer will need to listen to the game.

I don’t know why I never thought about the need to listen as the most important part of game designing. It makes sense. To create something someone wants you to you need to listen to what they ask you to make. To make something enjoyable for the player, you need to listen to the audience and what they want. In order to keep the game running well, you need to listen to the game and whether or not it’s working the way you intended. For you as a designer to create something you want to and enjoy you need to listen to yourself. Listening is extremely important in game design.