ludossier » computer games

The results are in!

mw — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 23:00:47 +0000

After two months of waiting, I got yesterday a letter from the Open University saying that I passed the computer games course (Digital worlds: designing games, creating alternative realities) with score 80%. Not bad. I’m sure I got marks deducted for going over the word count limit in the description of my charity game design; and in other questions I was probably too terse. It’s always a fine balancing act of return for time invested.

The important thing is I enjoyed the course. It covers a wide range of topics, from the economic impact of the game industry and the social perception of videogames culture, to how modern games are produced and getting a small taste of it by designing and implementing our own little maze or platform game with GameMaker. Topics like serious games and games with a purpose were also included. The assessment’s questions were as wide-ranging as the course, but I can’t give any further details without getting into serious trouble. I can safely recommend this short course, but then, being an OU employee, I’m obviously biased.

Escher’s great video game

mw — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 21:55:56 +0000

If video games existed at the time historical figures lived, who would you like to have designed one? And which kind of game would they design? Some curious suggestions at the Guardian’s game blog. I especially like the proposal for a one-level platform game by Escher. Something along the picture on the left, I imagine. A single level would be mind-boggling enough, let alone having to face further levels if you manage to escape this building!

Clowns Away!

mw — Sun, 10 May 2009 23:22:29 +0000

I’m currently taking the pilot (i.e. not public) presentation of Digital worlds: designing games, creating alternative realities, a new 10-week distance learning course about computer games, their history, their economic and cultural impact and their design. As a practical taster of the issues surrounding the design of games, we get to create our own games using GameMaker.

I’m quite impressed with GameMaker: it has a very easy and intuitive non-programmatic interface for creating games. Part of the ease comes from a wide set of built-in features (lives, health, random movement, collision among object, high score tables, etc.). It’s just week 2 of the course, and we already can create a simple action game. Each of us is extending Catch the Clown, the first game tutorial available for GameMaker. The game is very simple: a clown moves randomly around a room surrounded by a wall, bouncing off the wall. The player tries to catch the clown by clicking on it. When the clown is caught, the player gets 10 more points, and the clown jumps to a random place and starts to move faster, making it harder and harder to catch. The game ends whenever the player wants to quit.

I was not very happy about this open-ending of the game, so for my version there are various clowns at the start and each one disappears as they are caught. If the score for each one were fixed, it would be no fun. To put some pressure on, the scoring is now indirectly based on time: the faster the clowns are caught, the more they are worth. As part of the course’s suggested extensions, I also added a start screen, a high score table, and a second kind of clown with a different scoring. Here is a screenshot of a game nearing its end (the progress bar in the middle is disappearing) but without any clown caught yet…

Clowns Away! game in progress

You can download the Windows executable generated by GameMaker and give it a try! Comments are most welcome…