GDC: Game Design Workshop

February 19th, 2008 · 2 Comments

As I mentioned in the previous post, I’m taking the Game Design Workshop while at GDC, and it’s a bit of a mixed bag.

On one hand, I’m being asked to think about game types that I wouldn’t actually ever make at my current job. It’s nice to look at hypotheticals and come up with interesting and compelling solutions. The class is aimed squarely at forcing designers to excercise their design chops, and, well, that’s what I signed up for.

The first excercise involved taking a hilariously simple game called SiSSYFiGHT and playing a round or two of it. The idea was simple, you can attack, team attack, or defend against 5 other players designated by color. 10 hit points. Last girl or two girls standing wins.

We then had to come up with our own card game, which was a great excercise. I even liked where we had gone with it, which was ironically SiSSYFiGHT plus one rule and a change of fiction. We wound up designing our whole game out and then we realized it was way too complicated. We found we enjoyed the original game’s drama and tension more, so we figured out how to take what we had designed and boil it down into a simpler additional rule which in turn changed the entire dynamic.

My only issue was that there wasn’t enough time to really finish it. This is pretty much the biggest drawback to the entire workshop, it would seem.

The second excercise I participated in involved coming up with a card game using a standard playing deck of cards and one of the seven deadly sins. This again was a great excercise in rapid iteration, and one amazingly difficult concept to overcome. One of the best take-aways from this entire workshop is Fail Early. Fail Often. Fail Sooner. Fail Faster. Realizing what you’ve built is broken and changing it immediately and trying that iteration is the only way to progress through these problems. We got a simple card game built quickly in about 40 minutes when it normally takes that long to write a design document.

But again, there really wasn’t any time to test the last iteration we came up with. I thought we were onto a decent solution, and were forced to wrap up and head into yet another workshop session. While I get that rapid iteration is key, and we’re learning this fairly quickly, where I think the workshop fails is in allowing people some job/mission satisfaction of completing a goal. I feel like we’re constantly “moving on” for the sake of time and we’re claiming to have learned the lesson at hand rather than coming away satisfied our design met the criteria.

Lastly, we started playing a few rounds of the Three Musketeers. More on this tomorrow, as we really just got our feet wet playing it a few rounds and learning the mechanics/dynamics of it. We’ve been asked to modify it to be a three or a four player game tomorrow.

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Tags: general

2 responses so far ↓

1 Saxifridge // Feb 19, 2008 at 2:17 pm

Sounds like fun.

Like I said, my experience there was not exactly awesome. I spent most of the time in presentations about how to make animation more procedural, nothing really there for me as an artist. I am came out of it thinking that I needed to actually get out of game design. I guess that is why we have Siggraph.
2 Adam // Feb 19, 2008 at 6:41 pm

I can’t wait till I create the procedural game design engine. . . . It will basically be a bot that spits out Harry Potter and Team Fortress ideas at every turn.

Scenario: Lord Voldemort is guarding the control point, make sure you cast Avada Kedavra so he doesn’t end up dominating you.