Some indeterminable time ago, Noah Falstein spoke on serious games at a silicon valley IGDA chapter event, and I stumbled across the posting the other day. Given that in all likelihood I will soon be designing my own serious game, for a pretty serious purpose, I watched the whole 80 minutes and even took notes.
- All carrot no stick. Never ‘force’ player to do something.
- Allow player to get thru game without learning anything, but make it so they do better the better they learn.
- Gold with jewel - perfect score, gold still available for non-perfect score.
- Voice over is cheap and informative!
- Can’t fail - prevents you from moving forward until you complete…but random answers can get you through. Still, they aren’t much fun - no bonuses, lower score, etc.
- ‘Serious game’: it Can be just a curriculum with quiz-show type interface. No need to make the next Mario…
- Mini-games give variety, look to traditional formats : crossword puzzle.
- Make abstract things concrete - see speech icons in mata hari; treat physical and non-phys actions the same but add info to distinguish. Today I die = concrete out of abstract poetry.
- Start designing in middle of game, not start - not that shud start at level 10, but shud save the work of the intro for halfway thru dev time, when more practice = better work. First thing people see shud have benefit of some experience.
- More money = less innovation.
- Ron Gilbert - puzzle dependency diagram: think in terms of players tasks, start at end and work back.
- multi-player in Cisco: in classes makes sense, outside not. Same here: only multi in pilot?
It’s a curious thing. I’m not a game designer, never studied for it, never had designs (pun intended) on doing it, and when I undertake this task I feel I’ll just be doodling in the margins of the theses of great men. On the other hand, that serious purpose I mentioned above includes the pressure of succesful completion of a whole EU project…kind of indicates that I do whatever I have to do to get it right.