My design issues essay. Think I'm done. I will of course have to go through it and correct many grammar and spelling errors, so ignore those.

Enchanted Arrows

Design Issues

Introduction

In this assignment I will be exploring the various different design issues the Enchanted Arrows team faced when developing a learning game, aimed at Key Stage 1 students. The initial idea for the game was proposed in a presentation given at the beginning of the year by two of our team members when we were asked to produce ideas for an educational Key Stage 1 game. The game they came up with would be a spelling game, but instead of creating a simple hangman type game, we wanted to add more skill to it to that. Therefore, instead of picked the letters you wanted from a list, you would instead control an archer, which you would use to fire arrows at the falling letters in the level. Initially, it seems like a simple and effective idea, however, this design choice would raise a number of issues that would need to be solved.

Balance

The first issue that arose was the issue of balance. I normally hear the term balance referred to in multiplayer games, this is because both opposing parties should be equal without an unfair advantage to have proper competition.

“Computer and console game developers are constantly grappling with the notion of struggle; they know that if the game is too hard, players will find it frustrating. Contrariwise, if it is too easy, they will find it dull.” - Costikyan, 2004

You also need balance in a single player game, which ensures that your opponent (whether this is Artificial Intelligence, or certain rules etc.) is not too easy to beat and equally, not impossible either. However, we faced a difficult task when designing this game, simply because we were designing it for children who were aged 5-7.

When a child opens the game for the first time, we didn’t want them to get confused and lose interest. We decided that we needed a tutorial. We did this in two parts. The first tutorial can be accessed via the main menu and was a one page spread of simple instructions. However, when a child opens a game for the first time, reading instructions is not normally on the top of their to-do list. So we created an in game spoken tutorial. The spoken tutorial would guide the player through the first level, and would then let them continue through the other levels by themselves.

“There is one obvious problem here that we face as game designers: how do we know what an “appropriate” challenge level is? Sure, we can say that a logic/puzzle game for adults is probably going to be harder than a similar game for young children, but beyond that… how are we supposed to know what is too easy or too hard? The obvious answer: playtest!.”

-  Schrieber. 2009

Because we were not the target audience, this meant that we had to take special care when designing and balancing our game, because even though it may be boring and easy for us, younger players would hopefully find it challenging and entertaining, if we have done our job properly.

Schrieber states in that quote that the obvious way to ensure that the game is enjoyable for your target audience is to have them playtest it. Being the age that we are, meant that we may have difficulty finding willing test subjects every week to test the new levels and the subtle game design changes we made. Fortunately for us, we had an older team member, Garry, who had a young daughter currently doing Key Stage 1. This enabled us to test the game throughout the entire assignment, which was undoubtedly invaluable as she raised some glaring errors that we were not able to see. For example, in the image on page one, should I spell “Tophat” or “Hat”. We used the feedback that we received to include a voiceover for each item that the player selected. This solved the problem, but had we not had this feedback, it could have been very confusing for children who played it.

It was a relief to find out that our play tester did enjoy playing the game, and was able to cope with the skill aspect we had incorporated in it. However, the main challenge of the game was for the player to be able to successfully spell the words. Just because one Key Stage 1 student could spell the words we had chosen, doesn’t mean it would be suitable for every child of that age.

 “There is another problem, however: not all players are exactly the same. Even within a narrow target audience, players fall along a bell curve, with a few that will be highly skilled and a few that are the opposite.” - Schrieber. 2009

This meant that we would need a considerably larger test group. This is because, as Schrieber says, each player will have a varying level of ability. This is when we had another stroke of luck. Garry, our older team member that I mentioned earlier, had a wife who was a junior school teacher. She was able to provide us with a list of words that Key Stage 1 students would be currently learning in there syllabus. I believe that this was an even more accurate way than having a large test group. Why rely on the feedback from 20 or so individuals, when you have access to the Key Stage 1 syllabus which has been researched and used for many years all over the country.

“Note that, by simply playing the game and getting experience with it, your audience will eventually become more skilled at the game. This is one reason why the later levels of video games are usually harder than the earlier levels. (Recall that another reason is so that the gameplay matches the dramatic tension in the narrative.) The change in difficulty over time in a single game has a name: we call it pacing.”

-  Ian Schrieber. 2009

From this list we were then able to separate them into:

·         easy three letter words,

·         medium difficulty 3 letter words

·         harder five letter words.

This provided us with the games pacing, ensuring that the game gets progressively harder as the player moves on to each level by increasing and maintaining the level of challenge the player has to deal with.

Gender

The next design issue we had to think about was the issue of gender. We knew we had to aim the game at 5-7 year olds, but now we faced a different problem. We had to somehow aim our game at two different audiences at the same time.

“Selecting characters in games seems to be different according to gender. In the

last decade, game developers started to create game characters that transport a

macho image in their games (Duke Nukem being an example) and thought these

elements can narrow the gap in the women gaming market. It turned out that

women strongly dislike these stereotypical characters. For women, combining

‘cute – humor – clever’ comes first, not the ‘brain and beauty’”

- Yatim, M.; Nacke, L., Masuch, M. 2006

Although  males tend to dominate the gaming market, we were aware that we were creating an education game, therefore these games would most likely be played as a class activity or for revision. This meant that the both are female and male audiences would be fairly equal.

The first and most obvious choice we made was regarding the main character.  As you can see by the quote above, it is believed that women have different opinions on what makes a good hero (or heroine), and as such, we wanted to design two different heroes, one for the male players and one for the female players.

However, we still had to keep in mind that this was a game for key Stage 1 students, so any “Duke Nukem” type character was not an option, not to the mention that he might have trouble firing a bow and arrow with arms like his. We believed that the best way to appeal to both genders was to create a female and a male character. This would allow the player to choose for themselves what they would like to be represented as in the game.

Competition

I previously mentioned in the article that our game, as an educational game, was primarily going to be used as a class activity, or used for revision by class peers. As such, we wanted to include some way that they could compete.

-  Cheryl K. Olson. (2010).

The above image is a survey on 1,254 students studying in South Carolina and Pennsylvania. Not surprisingly, the element of competition was a large motivator for boys playing video games.  The girls were also motivated by this element, though not surprisingly, less so than boys.

Even though it was an education game, it was still a game and thus had to be enjoyable to play. We recognised the need for competition when we played our game and felt that something was missing. It felt like you were just carrying out actions in order to make the story progress, not dissimilar to turning the pages in a book.

When we added the score, there was now another reason to play the game. It would allow the players to compete with each other, compare scores and would encourage them to play through it multiple times. With the  addition of a score system, we didn’t just increase the enjoy ability or the game, we also made it more educational due to multiple play throughs.

It wasn’t an easy decision to add the score system however. Encouraging the player to play the game multiple times meant that we had created another problem. On the second play through, the player would have to respell the same items on the same level. Not only would this be extremely boring, but it would also mean that they could get the maximum score everytime because they knew the words that they would have to spell. So adding the score system meant that we needed more items so that the player could select different items on the second and even third play through. This would increase the amount of time it would take to develop the game, pushing us closer to the deadline. In the end, I believe it was worth it, simply because it improved the game so much.

Bibliography

Ian Schrieber. (2009). Game Balance. Available: http://gamedesignconcepts.wordpress.com/2009/08/20/level-16-game-balance/.

Last accessed 1st May 2011.

Cheryl K. Olson. (2010). Children’s Motivations for Video Game Play in the Context of Normal Development. Review of General Psychology. 14 (2), p180-187.

Yatim, M.; Nacke, L., Masuch, M. (2006).

 Improving Game Design by Understanding the Gender Differences: The Cognitive Approach. International Conference on Gender in Educational Games and Gender Sensitive Approaches to E-Learning 2006, Donau University Krems, Austria.

Greg Costikyan. (2002) I Have No Words & I Must Design: Toward a Critical Vocabulary for Games. In Proceedings of CGDC Conf, Tampere University Press, Tampere.