Week 12: Readings

GDW Chapter 11: Fun and Accessibility (p341—373)

Since games cease to function if there's no player, this chapter focuses on how to make the game appealing, and most importantly, fun, so that the player will keep coming back to the game. The chapter lists several aspects that makes a game fun. 

One of the aspects is the challenge of the game. There are different kind of challenges that the players can face within a game, and some challenges may appeal to a type of players over another. However, the challenges are fundamentally designed to give the players satisfaction upon beating them. For the AR project I'm working on, the main type of challenges we would be incorporating into the game would be to have the players set their own goals and reach them. This is because the players can choose to go in different directions and set their own targets (ghosts) to attack (exorcise) within the designated play area. In addition, the players will be able to make interesting choices regarding the exorcism vs sending the spirit to heaven in regards to good-natured spirits. These type of spirits will give the players a lot of spiritual power if exorcised, but will decrease the morality level at the same time.

This leads into another aspect which is story. While being immoral doesn't affect the objects within the game much (in fact, it makes the player more powerful faster), it drives the story towards the darker direction according to the players' choices. Yet, there could be more that can be done with this dilemma that the game provides. More than just being a story dilemma, these choices between being good and bad can also affect the actions within the game as well. After reading about the types of decisions we can give to the player, I realized that more depth could be add to these intial choices we has for the game as well. For example, the immoral choices might lead the players to getting a more powerful powerup that uses up more of the player's health, matching with the idea that the player is absorbing too many spirits too fast that their body is deteriorating. On the other hand, making the good moral choice may lead to a powerup that is less powerful, but allows the player to play for longer, or that their health can restore from helping the spirits. This links to the rewards and punishments part of the chapter. For the choices that we provide, we also need to come up with suitable rewards and punishments so that the players can consider and weight the consequences before making a decision. In addition, we have to avoid repetition that could eventually causes stagnation in the fun of the game, resulting in the player to stop playing the game. One way to avoid this is to show that the players have agency in the game and can do different types of actions that could progress them further into the game.

Chapter 8: Digital Prototyping, Effective Interface Design (p258)

With the AR project being played on a smartphone, I think that this chapter provides many important things we should consider regarding interface design, since the screen of a phone is much smaller than that of a computer.

First of all, the interface should be as easy to understand as possible. With the various attacks we will have in the game, we will have to design the buttons and UI so that they are as straightforward as possible. One way to do that would be to show that the 'form follows function,' by playing arrows in the direction that the player have to swipe to attack. This will visualize the actions to the players, making the players being able to act accordingly without having to think about what the UI actually means. This will be useful especially during the fighting part of the game, since the players would not be distract by unclear interfaces. Moreover, visual and audio feedbacks that follow the attack can also further show that the attack in working or not.

In addition, using metaphors to design the interface, like the moral bar, will make it more understandable to the players as well. Using a simple face UI that can transform from an angel to a devil face is one of the options we could use to show the moral levels of the players. Also, this type of UI can be grouped together with the health and the power bars, since they are something that the players will periodically refer to. They can be grouped to a corner throughout the game, so that the players know where to refer to, and also so that they are not distracting the player from the main actions.