With particular reference to the readings you have undertaken this year what are the major design issues you have faced in developing a game for Key Stage 1 children?
Throughout the development of the Key Stage 1 game, there have been many design issues that needed to be covered in order to make a game that would appeal to the target audience as well as being suitable for them and covering the targets of the assessment. The majority of these issues were discussed and solved during the initial design and development stages of the project, where we discussed as a group what we wanted to create and also what we thought we would be able to create. Setting a limit on what we were going to do was important in stopping us from over reaching and helped us focus on the core issues that we needed to consider in the design of the game.
After several meetings amongst the group and occasionally the project managers, we had embellished the original idea of having a haunted house game by making it a progressive room to room learning experience where the player had to solve various puzzles, all related to the KS1 curriculum, in order to reach the games boss and escape the house. We eventually decided that the layout would consist of a series of levels that the player would progress through by completing a series of puzzles.
Greg Costikyan’s article, ‘I have no words & I must design,’ was a useful source in helping us solve many of the issues of designing the game such as the player’s interaction and the use of goals and struggle in making an enjoyable and challenging game for the player. As the game was intended to be a learning experience, player interaction was fundamental in the design of the game. Without allowing the player to fully interact with the game we, as game designers, would have failed to give the player the learning experience we had promised and would have failed to make an enjoyable game. This issue was easily resolved as each level of the game has two puzzles that the player has complete control over to help them fully interact with the game, along with the ‘side mission’ of collecting cookies that are scattered throughout the game and the fourth room of the game being a fully interactive mini-game.
The main goal of the game is for the player to guide the character to safety and escape the house; however, in order for the player to do this they must complete individual goals within each level, the goals being the completion of puzzles. In order to keep the goals interesting as well as informative for the player each puzzle is different so that the player feels that they are progressing through the game and achieving their mission, rather than being stuck in an endless cycle.
The struggle that the player must face in the game comes from each individual puzzle that they must complete in order to progress and then the boss in the final room who must be defeated in order for the player to escape. The struggle needed to be in keeping with the player’s abilities and as an interactive learning game, needed to be relevant to the player’s needs, therefore each puzzle and the questions the boss asks the player where focused on the KS1 curriculum. Using the curriculum to help us design each challenge made the overall design process easier as we knew what issues we needed to cover in order to make the game relevant to the target audience.
Another theme in games that Costikyan said was an important design feature is endogenous meaning, which is a term for any in game object or currency that is only relevant within the game but that the player feels that they need or want. Endogenous meaning is an important part of any games structure, it helps immerse the player in a game and is often important in motivating a player to complete certain goals or tasks. When designing the game, we could not find a suitable way to include the use of money or a shop within the structure of the game, and could not find any reason to include some sort of upgrade system but we still felt that the player needed something that would make them value the world within the game and so the ‘side mission’ of collecting cookies was created. The cookies don’t really hold any value in the game and certainly don’t outside of the game but the collection of as many cookies as possible, gives the player a sense of accomplishment.
The character design was left to me as one of the artists and in order to create a character that I thought the target audience would like I spent a fair amount of time researching different character styles. One of the styles I looked into was the Scooby Doo characters as our game shared several similarities with the cartoon; I also looked at video game characters like the sprites from the Pokémon games and various creatures from the Mario games. As well as choosing a suitable design for the characters, I had to create two characters, a boy named Alvin ‘Al’ and a girl named Anita ‘Annie’, in order to make the game more acceptable and open to both genders. The design that I settled on for the two main characters, Al and Annie, resembled South Park’s characters, sharing the overly large heads and having their walking animations as the ‘hopping’ walk. For the boss character, I decided to use the Boo ghost from the Mario games as my template, this seemed to be the most suitable form for the ghost to take as it wasn’t too serious or scary and fit in well with the cartoony style of the game that we were trying to create.
Another article that was a valuable resource when designing the game was ‘Formal Abstract Design tools,’ by Doug Church, which had a strong segment on the role of story in designing games. This was an important issue to cover as an important feature in any game is the story, whether it’s a simple narrative or an epic yarn, story is what pulls the player into a game’s world and immerses them in it. During the design process we felt that it was important to include a story to keep the player interested and to explain how the character had ended up in being trapped in a basement in the first place. Within the actual levels of the game there is no story driving the player on as we wanted the player to focus on the puzzles and the mission of escaping the house.
As we had decided not to include a narrative or any other form of story within the structure of the levels, cut-scenes were added at the beginning and end of the game. The opening cut-scene was designed to introduce the player to the characters and show how they got themselves into their current predicament and the end cut-scene was designed to show the players success and show the player a happy ending for helping the character escape.
A very important issue to cover when designing the game was what art style to use; we wanted the style to be appropriate for the target audience to keep them interested in the game and so went for a cartoony style, with similarities with various children’s programs such as Scooby Doo and similarities with games such as the Mario franchise.
Every level within the game is meant to be from a different time period and so it was important to keep a link between each level to avoid confusing the player or making the game look like it had been patched together. Each level shares similarities with the level before, such as the background from the first level being almost identical to that of the second level. The colour scheme used is also of importance, bright colours were used for most of the game to fit in with the cartoony style but between levels there was a strong contrast of colours to show that the player was progressing through the game, for example the Egyptian level is filled with bright yellow slabs along the walls and brightly coloured hieroglyphics, whereas the second level has grey bricks along the walls and bright red pots scattered over the floor.
The layout of the game was an important issue to discuss as it needed to be presented coherently for the player to help them track their progress through the game. The player simply moves from either left or right, depending on the level, completing each puzzle as they come across it before progressing to the next level. The layout style can be considered to come under spatial segmentation, which is when player progression is controlled levels and/or checkpoints within those levels. Spatial segmentation boils down to three main areas; level structure, aesthetic design and background, such as having a rolling background as the games first three levels have and a static background for the fourth and fifth levels.
The components that make up spatial segments aren’t necessarily included as they are part of challenge segmentation, which is where the puzzle element of the game comes from, both forms of segmentation are discussed in length in an article called ‘Rounds, Levels, and Waves: The Early Evolution of Gameplay Segmentation’ by Jose P. Zagal, Clara Fernandez-Vera and Michael Mateas. Although in each individual puzzle the player doesn’t have to face waves or bosses, the combined puzzles of each level act as mini bosses that must be defeated(solved) in order for the player to progress to the next level, where they will have to repeat the process to progress even further through the levels.
The final two issues that were of a big concern during the design and development process were pacing and possibility, two important aspects of games that are discussed at length in the an article by Marcos Venturelli called ‘Space of Possibility and Pacing in Casual Game Design – A PopCap Case Study.’ Pacing is the speed of progression and flow within a game and possibility is the number of options that are available to the player, as designers we have to consider both as one when designing a game in order to find the right balance for the game’s purpose, for example casual games have a high pace and very little possibility whereas big budget console games have a slower pace but a much higher possibility factor.
When designing the KS1 game, we tried to give the game a fast pace so that the target audience wouldn’t get bored but gave them some possibility. As the player cannot control the character, just completing the puzzles, and there is a linear path to follow, the game is forced to progress at a faster pace. In doing so, we gave the player very few possibilities, their path is straightforward and they cannot stray from it, meaning that the only true possibility in the game was the amount of cookies the player collected, how many tomatoes they threw at the man in stocks in the mini-game and how fast they completed each puzzle.
In conclusion, there have been many issues to consider when designing and developing the Key stage 1 game, covering every aspect from the art style to the core game mechanics. As a team, I believe we have successfully dealt with these issues in a way that has made the game more suitable to its target audience and its initial objectives, to help Key Stage 1 students learn their curriculum. I believe that many of these issues could have been overlooked had it not been for the various articles that I and as a team, we used to help us find and solve them.
