Creating Games with Appeal

What do you look for when choosing a game to buy or play?(Falmouth University 2021).

I look for games that make me think, this might be emotionally, politically, strategically and so on.

What keeps you engaged with your favourite games over a long period?(Falmouth University 2021).

4X strategy are probably the games that I have sunk the most hours into, and if I had all the money, skills, time in the world I’d want to be amplitude studios. After that RPG, and then story-driven games.

What keeps me engaged is probably the levelling up/collectable hook, and/or narrative. So for example as Breath of the Wild has been mentioned a few times, I have to complete all the shrines, and get them all! When replaying a game I enjoy going through the different option.

Playing Games for Research

Part of creating games with appeal I believe is playing games for research so you know the genre mechanics inside out. I play mobile games with good core fantasies, and I’ve been hooked recently on games like Cats and Soup and Terrarium.

Building Awareness of your Game

I usually pick games through articles, Twitter and word of mouth but if the store page, marketing materials or genre put me off I probably won’t buy the game no matter how much someone else raves about the game. The core gameplay loop, the hook and the kicker must be spot on for my target audience for Flora Fatalis.

The core gameplay loop, the hook and the kicker!

Game Mechanics

After brainstorming ideas, I made flow charts of my favourite strategy game mechanics. The mechanics displayed below will be refined and iterated on through research and testing throughout the next 12 weeks, so the general idea will stay the same but the playable prototype might look very different.

Fig 1. Masters 2021. Miro Planning Mechanics

Game Design Outline

Sprint 2 I refined and finished the Game Design Outline Document, using a template I created in Miro for Game Development (IGD720) and began considering the hook and the kicker of my concept!

Fig 2. Masters 2021. Miro Game Design Outline Draft

Concept, Hook, Kicker & The Safe Space Brainstorm

Clark (2020b) discusses the hook & the kicker for your game and follows certain constraints such as desirability and surprise to create successful indie games. “Think of it like a poem a sonnet may follow a rigid rhyming pattern but to those constraints limit the expressiveness or potential of the poem certainly not and the same goes for games. This is part of the method I’ve used to make numerous successful indie games since 2004 and I hope it will help you to succeed as well” (Clark 2020b).

Nick Popovich (2017), founder of Monomi Park and creator of Slime Rancher also discusses a safe and meaningful place in your game, and I feel for a strategy game it’s important to include this. My favourite parts of playing a 4X strategy Endless Space, XCOM or sometimes RPGs is setting up your inventory, upgrading your weapons, crafting your potions, organising your material, unlocking a new science and so on. And this idea of a safe place is something so familiar to me and games I love that it’s a part of ‘game feel’ that I want to include in Flora Fatalis.

Fig 3. Masters 2021. Concept, USP & Hooks

Safe Space: A moment where you can pause without leaving the game. A greenhouse, which you can organise a play around with, UI menus and cards with the properties of flowers that you have collected.

Hook: What is the hook of flora fatalis? It’s all about poison and deadly plants, something a little different for garden game lovers.

& The Kicker: Flora Fatalis is a strategy game, one in which you will form a bond with every plant.

My ideas might change over the course of the next 10 weeks but I feel like we’re off to a good start!

Greybox Prototype

Fig 4. Masters 2021. PlayMaker and main mechanics

PlayMaker

I have programmed an idle clicker strategy game in its most basic elements, you can click, gain money and buy and plant flowers. I have also learnt how to refactor the scripts. There are more programming elements to go, but I have now go the basics to move on to art and design.

The game should be completely unique from the tutorial by the time I have finished but has provided the start of the core gameplay.

Sprint Retrospective

I spent most of this sprint programming with PlayMaker, I have some experience programming websites but I’m still very much learning. So programming takes some time, for Flora Fatalis I am focusing on having a clean, working game that is polished and has no bugs. Using a tutorial from Greg Moss (2018) I programmed the basic mechanics of my game and learnt how to refactor state machines.

List of figures

Fig 1. Masters 2021. Miro Planning Mechanics

Fig 2. Masters 2021. Miro Game Design Outline Draft

Fig 3. Masters 2021. Concept, USP & Hooks

Fig 4. Masters 2021. PlayMaker and main mechanics

References

Cats and Soup. 2021. Hidea

CLARK, Ryan. 2020a. ‘Clark TANK DEEP DIVE | How to Make Video Game Hooks: Part 1 ‘ [online lecture] YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOb-PdYwkwk [accessed 27 Dec 2021].

CLARK, Ryan. 2020b. ‘Clark TANK DEEP DIVE | How to Make Video Game Hooks: Part 2’ [online lecture] YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-8N0DuHwJo [accessed 27 Dec 2021].

Falmouth University. 2021. Falmouth Flex [online]. Available at: https://flex.falmouth.ac.uk/courses/924/modules [accessed 1 Dec 2021].

MOSS, Greg. 2018. ‘Build an Idle Business Tycoon Game with Unity3D & PlayMaker’. Udemy [online course]. Available at: https://www.udemy.com/course/visual-development-idle-business-tycoon-game-unity-playmaker/ [accessed 1 Nov 2021].

POPOVICH, Nick. 2017. ‘Slime Rancher: A Preemptive Postmortem’ [online lecture]. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyDOrNbvFN8 [accessed 14 Dec 2021].

POPOVICH, Nick. 2018. ‘Making Games That Stand Out and Survive‘ [online lecture]. YouTube. Available at:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTvBgmNL-p0 [accessed 14 Dec 2021].

ROSE, Mike. 2018. ‘Marketing on Zero Budget’ [online lecture]. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3QnovWYvwo [accessed 27 Dec 2021].

Terrarium. 2019. Green Panda Games