Monday, June 29, 2009

First Day of Class

As mentioned some time ago, Ian Schreiber's Game Design Concepts course began today and I personally believe it's off to a great start. I love reading things that make me think in a new way or help me understand concepts with simple examples. For example, have you ever played a game called "three to fifteen"? I had never heard of it and bet most of you haven't either, but once you read that first lesson you'll realize you've probably played it many times!

I know this image is far below par in terms of graphical work typically posted on this blog, but it's actually a very rudimentary game design I created in a matter of two minutes! Ian describes how simple it can be to create a game, and honestly anyone can do it. I call my game "Rat Race", with the concept being that two rat tokens are placed at the start and their goal is to be the first to get to the cheese. Each player must roll the die and get the numbers in order to advance (e.g. roll a 1 to advance to place "1", then roll a 2 to advance to "2", etc.) sequentially all the way from space "1" to the goal at "5". If a player rolls a "6" they send their opponent back to the start position but also forfeit their turn. They do not advance if they roll a number out of turn (e.g. roll anything other than a 1 from the start position).

As Ian points out, mine isn't necessarily a good game, but it proves anyone can do it and I look forward to learning more about designing good games.

2 comments:

  1. Thanks for posting this! I had failed to put Game Design Concepts on my RSS Aggregator and who knows when I would've remembered it.

    If I remember correctly, three-to-fifteen is basically the abstract math version Tic-Tac-Toe.

    Ian specifically pointed out both in the blog and when I e-mailed him that we wouldn't be working on any digital games. As programmers, I'm sure we both know why.

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  2. You're correct, three-to-fifteen is indeed Tic-Tac-Toe! I would have explained it, but Ian already did better than I can in lesson one.

    It did strike me as a minor bummer that we won't be doing any coding for the course, but I think learning new concepts and the language of designers (for when I do land that dream job) will be just as rewarding.

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