3D Print All The Voxels
You know what’s better than voxels? 3D printing your voxels. Here’s how to print your voxels with this great Node Package
https://npmjs.org/package/voxel-print
Usage
First you need to connect to ShapeWays, which is pretty easy to do:
var lpr3d = require("voxel-print")({ username: "Your ShapeWays Username", password: "Your ShapeWays Password" });And then you can print stuff by just calling
lpr3d:lpr3d(voxels, function(err, result) { if(err) { console.log("Error uploading:", err); return; } console.log("Uploaded model:", result.model_id, ", url:", result.url); });
(via Super Mario Mobius Strip by joabaldwin on Shapeways)
This is a mobius strip of Level 1 or Super Mario Bros. The whole level is wrapped around itself in a single surface, and poor Mario begins and ends at the same spot every time :(
All the elements from the level are there: every mushroom, turtle, cloud and star. They are all carved out of the surface at different heights, which looks fantastic when you have a light coming from the side, and each block casts a shadow.
It’s a great piece to have on your desk, or to hang from a string to let it spin around.
Atlas from Portal 2 3D printed by Shapeways.
An amazing video which analyzes the systems of Megaman & Megaman X. Specifically shows how they were made visually obvious and how the visual taught you the systems of the game. Much thanks to Michael Todd - @thegamedesigner for tweeting this.
Finding The Charm (In Video Games)
When we first set out to make a game we think about what we want the game to be composed of. What is the world that we’re creating? How does it act to us? What does it feel like? We answer these questions and then we go off and try to find the fun (read @danctheduck’s post The Cutest Kindle Game Ever: Panda Poet specifically, the Long Lesson: First Prototypes Always Suck section) by iterating on our prototypes and designs. Everyone talks about how they found the “fun” in their game - and it’s an important journey to document and discuss. But in the middle of discussion, arguments, and brainstorming to find fun there’s something else that’s happening. The “charm” of your video game is being formed.
Prototyping and iteration is essential. It’s what lets your game be what you want it to be. That process though can sometimes get stale and you can quickly become frustrated. So to keep things fresh, interesting, and exciting we play with our designs, we play with our video games, and by playing with our creations they form a personality of their own. Our audience starts to become attracted to our game not just because of how fun they are - but more so because of the subtle characteristics of our game that make it unique and speak to our audience. Our game isn’t just a fun game it’s that fun game - it’s unique.
In a recent game we’ve been working on over at Toy Studio we were stuck in a bit of a rut and waiting for feedback from some alpha testers. We had made some changes to the design of the game in an effort to find the fun but weren’t sure if they were good or bad, or how they’d be received. We just knew that we made them. Our programmer Evan while waiting for game design feedback went on to tackle e-mail notifications for the game (as it’s turn-based). While buildling out e-mail notifications he decided to have a little fun with it and started writing funny but relevant messages to people in the studio and our alpha testers. Here are some of the messages that he wrote:
Your opponent has just laid down a simply smashing move! How insulting! It’s as if they just said to you: ‘I’ll use small words so that you’ll be sure to understand, you warthog faced buffoon’.
It’s as if they just said to you: ‘you are a tiny-brained wiper of other people’s bottoms’!
It’s as if they just said to you: ‘you are the son of a motherless goat’!
Your opponent has just laid down a word so hip that Tyson might not even know it! How insulting! It’s as if they just said to you: ‘you are the son the a window-dresser’!
Your opponent has just laid down a very metrosexual, ‘I keep my hair gel in the closet’ type word, Chris feels very challenged! How insulting! It’s as if they just said to you: ‘your mom goes to college’.
Once the e-mail notifications were in we started hearing great responses from both our colleagues and friends. Everyone looked forward to the e-mails. Not only because it meant that it was their turn - but also because they had something rather funny to read and it potentially could be about their friends. It was charming, funny, and personal. The game was interacting with you and your friends on a personal level.
It might seem like a small thing, but sometimes it’s those small things that make people really excited and delivers that extra bit of character which delivers the complet experience. Our programmer Evan could have easily simply typed in, “Your opponent has made a move. It’s your turn now.” but instead decided to have fun with the game we were making and in the end “found the charm”.
There’s no exact formula or steps you can take to find the charm in your game (or for that matter your craft). It simply comes from the love and passion you have for it. Rather than letting the frustration, angst, and staleness take over during development remind yourself that making your game is a game in of itself - and the more fun you have with making it the more fun your audience will have playing it.
Note: This post was originally posted on the Toy Studio Blog.
Steal Like You Mean It
Theft isn’t an easy thing. It requires a great deal of thought, meticulous planning, courage, and creativity. And it doesn’t end there. If your theft is successful you then have to figure out what you’re going to do with what you just stole. Copying on the other hand is easy. You take a look at an original, do the same thing to imitate it and you’re finished. But where’s the reward? What can you do with a copy? It definitely doesn’t have the same value as the original you could have stolen. So instead of copying - steal.
Steal ideas, mechanics, techniques, in fact steal anything and everything you can. Don’t stand for copying. Copying is easy, and there isn’t any merit in it. If there’s a particular writing style you enjoy a lot and would like to emulate, steal it. Found a web or UI layout you really like? Steal it. Is there a particular game mechanic you’re fond of? Steal it. Like I said before - steal everything you can.
See when you steal, you’re not copying. In a recent game we were designing at Toy Studio we chose to steal from Tetris and Drop 7. Almost everyone is familiar with the puzzling mechanics of Tetris and we wanted to recreate that experience in a more complex fashion. So we stole every mechanic that we could from Tetris - the puzzling mechanics, how tetrominos fall onto the board, and the manipulation of tetrominos. But then we added pentominos. That changed the gameplay a bit but it still was Tetris, but with pentominos.
One of my favorite puzzle games is Drop 7. It’s an incredible puzzler. It marries (from my subjective opinion) both luck and skill in an amazing fashion. So we stole the mechanic of revealing elements and simplified it. Instead of number matching based on the number of elements we modified it to be color matching of pentominos. Then, we decided to clear pentominoes based on matching 4 or more blocks of the same color. We included “locked” elements in the form of blocks - I felt rather strongly about them and wanted to recreate the great chain effects one could achieve in Drop 7. Locked elements were revealed when adjacent pentominoes to the locked blocks were cleared. Then we played the game with the stolen mechanics. Soon we saw the flaws.
The locked elements worked great in turn based gameplay where the player had time to think but in a situation where there was continuous gameplay it felt more of a burden. The locked elements evolved. Rather than being displayed as grey blocks that were locked, we included what the blocks would be once they would be revealed. This was a lot more enjoyable. It was much easier for a player to plan large combos and the gameplay started to evolve and emerge organically. What once was Drop 7 and Tetris had become something new which today we call BloxDrop.
If you were to pay BloxDrop today you would probably notice the stolen Tetris mechanics as they’re the most visually distinct - but as you kept playing it you’d notice this isn’t Tetris (much like our audience has found out). We didn’t copy, we outright stole. And when you do a really great job stealing you end up with something completely new and that you can be proud of. As Picasso once said, “Bad artists copy. Great artists steal.”
Game Design In The Kitchen
This post is inspired by Swery’s (www.twitter.com/swery65) GDC talk “Design Is In The Coffee” which was a very insightful talk and inspired me beyond belief. For that Swery, I thank you.
Cooking is one of my favorite hobbies. Recently, I’ve been doing a lot more of it. In the past, I have gone on “cooking streaks” where I would cook non-stop for a week and a half and then hit a wall. But this current streak has lasted a little over two months. One of the most surprising discoveries but also a blatantly obvious discovery is that I have gotten better. A lot better. Granted, I’ve always fancied myself as being able to execute delicious meals but this is different now. What I’m cooking now isn’t based on making a slight change to a recipe I found. It’s based on experience, flavor profiles, and trial and error. As I thought about this the other day while experimenting with a new frittata recipe I had realized I had found game design in the kitchen.
A lot of these lessons are basic but if there’s anything I’ve learned over the past couple of years is that sometimes it’s the most basic things which escape us. Here are the game design lessons I have learned in the kitchen and would like to share with you.
Work With The Best Product
When you’re cooking, working with fresh, top grade product is essential. The flavors that you will get from cooking market fresh wild salmon are not the same you would get from cooking with canned salmon. If you want the very best dish you’ll use the very best ingredients. Quite simple.
Similarly in game design, you work with the best game mechanics. They are your ingredients. You don’t just throw any cards, dice, action points, and bidding together with the hopes of producing a good game. You choose a card mechanic, analyze it, make sure it’s the best card mechanic you can use and if it isn’t you refine it so that it is the best. Just like one sour ingredient can ruin a dish, a game mechanic that isn’t the best in it’s natural form can ruin a game. Take for example mini-games which require monotonous repetition of a quick-time event. These mechanics eat nothing but corn and hormone injections and while they do without a doubt do the trick, they are not the best product. Whereas a mini-game which is a resource management simulation which ties into the very core of the progression and flow of the main storyline. Well that’s grass fed, thoroughly massaged, Kobe beef baby.
Cook What You Know
Although I might have wanted to cook a venison, cherry, cocoa nib, eucalyptus dish when I first started cooking I knew that the attempt would be futile. I’d lack the knowledge in technique, execution, and who knows what else (I still lack the knowledge to even come close to making this dish) to even attempt it. So I started with what I already knew. Seared citrus scallops, broiled chicken with mango salsa, things I had cooked before and was comfortable with. Rather than having a sad looking inedible dish, I had tasty enjoyable looking dishes.
You can’t expect to go from having zero experience with first-person-shooter level design and create one of the most polished FPS levels anyone has ever seen. You have to work up to it. So you start with what you know about FPS levels and you work your way from there. The level is at first small and might only feature a giant open area with spawn points that are equal distances apart, but it’s a level and you can play in it, dissect it, and decide what you’d like to improve on. It’s not a complex massive level which you can’t pick apart much like the venison dish I’d love to make. Or, maybe you are a great RPG designer and are great with skill trees but want to make an FPS. So you apply what you know about RPGs and skill trees and introduce them to a first person shooter which is an RPG done in the first person view where a majority of the weapons are projectile based RPG spells or attacks. By designing what you know, you can set yourself up for small, incremental improvements.
Re-invent The Traditional
Everyone loves a traditional Reuben sandwich or taco. It’s delicious and has been enjoyed by many for quite some time. Working with traditional dishes lets us experiment and perhaps create a deconstructed Reuben sandwich which tastes just as good as a traditional one but allows us to explore different techniques and makes it more playful. Maybe you’re curious about fusing flavors together so you try a duck confit taco for a french Mexican twist. Once again, it’s all about playing off traditional dishes to make something new and exciting.
In game design we see this all the time but often enough we don’t go back to the original traditional game mechanic. Rather than saying lets take a look at how Bejeweled Blitz adapted the match three game mechanic the question should be how can I adapt the match three game mechanic into something new and interesting? Bejweled Blitz is just one example but there are many others. Spy Party, at heart is Guess Who which in it’s simplest form is a hint based guessing game. Thinking about the traditional mechanics which successful games are built upon allow for an objective look at the mechanic without restricting ourselves by only thinking about the mechanic within the context of the game.
Experiment With Your “Flavor” Profiles
Once you’re able to execute traditional dishes and understand what products need to be combined to form a composed dish, you start understanding how these products work together and how they create a flavor profile. With this basic knowledge, you can start experimenting and compose dishes from ingredients which result in more complex flavor profiles. Experimenting with how to combine ingredients to create new savory, sweet, or bitter flavor profiles (or for the more ambitious - experimenting by combining flavor profiles) is when you start to explore new territory and come across a successful new dish.
A game’s flavor profile is much more about “feel” but could also perhaps be classified as genre. Regardless, by taking the tried and tested game mechanics which one has executed flawlessly time and time again and combining with other game mechanics which would work well together to create a great flavor profile is the next step. Perhaps you decide to pair an FPS with action points, or maybe you’d like to use the match-three mechanic to progress through a skill tree. By understanding the mechanics on their own, we better know how to pair them with other game mechanics which we might have not thought would be fun when combined. There are interesting flavor profiles for games to be made.
Make More
The most obvious thing I found out about cooking is the more I did it the better I got at it. Knife skills, flavor profiling, temperature control, consistency, texture, all the elements which encompass cooking all greatly improved. I’m not going to let this cooking streak end.
Much like my cooking, I need to design more. In fact - I don’t think any of us can say that we design enough. With that said - we must make more. Board games, card games, office games, trivia games, any games - we need to make more. Maybe we’re stuck on a 2 year project or maybe we’re on a 3-month development cycle. Whatever our situation is, we must find the time to make more games. By making more games we’ll become better designers - or hope to at least.
I’ve shared what I found in my kitchen - now it’s time for you to share what you make in your kitchen. Maybe we’ll find ourselves competing in an Iron Game Designer or Top Game Designer in the future but until then, we’ll have to do with sharing amongst ourselves and creating amazing games.
Special thanks to Merci (@merci), Robin (@robinyang), and David CZ (@czarneckid) for their comments, time, effort and love they contributed to this post.
