Smartbomb

I haven’t posted for a while because I’m too wrapped up in writing up my dissertation and finishing my degree. I’d post some of it, but it’s still very much In Progress, and I’m sure I’ll be tweaking every last semicolon until the deadline. I’ve got a things I’d like to post, but I’m at a pretty critical stage and I don’t have time to devote due attention. “Normal” service will resume around the 23rd of this month, with a sudden explosion of back-dated posts to cover up my slacking and the birth of AN EXCITING NEW CATEGORY!

A number of people are quite upset about Titan Studios’ upcoming cake-fest Fat Princess. Of course, speaking out against the games industry led to a rabid counter-attack by angry teenage gamers who feel like their way of life is under fire, and all that’s left of the ‘debate’ is a smoking crater of locked comment threads. I find it very depressing when things like this happen. I think of game design as an art form like any other, but… well, I’m sure feminist criticism of a photo of a fat princess wouldn’t draw the same kind of collective rage. I guess it’s a matter of democracy, or something? Everyone has access to cameras, word processors, pencils and paper, and it’s generally understood that anyone could put them to meaningful use, so people are much more accepting and broad-minded when it comes to both using and criticising these mediums. But games are, generally speaking, still considered the domain of big corporations, and there remains an army of vocal young gamers who believe that commercial companies know what’s best – if they didn’t, they wouldn’t be in charge, right? Still, I digress!

I used to consider myself a feminist, although these days I’m not sure I approve of such a heavily gender-weighted phrase. The point is, I’m aware of how awful most games are regarding women. Even I find it very patronising to play a game like Lost in Blue, where you play as a rugged, adventurous boy who must protect a helpless girl who can’t even walk twenty feet to get a drink from the river if her life depended on it, and I’m amazed when developers say they didn’t put female playable characters in their game because there wasn’t enough time, or it would take up too much memory. I think my favourite moment in absurd feminist arguments was when someone from Splash Damage said that Quake Wars had female characters because the Strogg were “technically female” – an argument that they later retracted (as I recall), but has been trotted out by fans ever since.

Anyway, all of that is really just to set the scene for what I’m about to say: I think Fat Princess is okay.

When I first saw a video during Sony’s E3 press conferences, my first concern was whether players were supposed to force-feed the princesses. You don’t though, so that’s okay. Well, I think you’re supposed to go out and fetch cake and then she’ll happily choose to overeat – so while you’re not forcing the food down her gullet, you’re still a feeder (fetish article – possibly not safe for work), which isn’t entirely cool in my mind – but there’s a big difference between forceful abuse and enabling unhealthy free will, so I can’t say it’s flat-out wrong. And before anyone accuses me of hating normal-size women, I say ‘unhealthy’ because these princesses become quite undeniably obsese.

So, with the fat issue given a faint green light, we come to what people have become so riled up about. It seems that the main objection is that the princess is being objectified – literally, that she exists only as an object within the gameplay, rather than being treated as an equal character. Would it be better if the princess had a personality? I seem to recall, somewhere in all of the chaos, someone said they wished more games had strong female characters, like Portal. I wonder, were they talking about the mute, empty vessel that you play as, or the “technically genderless” AI that acts like a sadistic ex-girlfriend? The woman in Portal – whose name escapes me at present, which only emphasises my point really – is intentionally left as a blank slate, because Valve want the player-character construct to be weighted heavily towards the player, so that they feel more personally involved. She seems, to me, to be just as much of a gameplay object as the fat princesses (princessi??) – very little more than an avatar to represent your place in the world. Feminist gamers seem to generally approve of her, because she runs around and solves puzzles and does things, but of course my view is that it’s the player who is responsible for all that.

For this reason, I can’t deny that Fat Princess is a sexist game, but only in so far as all the playable characters are male. I just can’t say that the idea of having to rescue a princess shocks me much? I mean, for one thing, I think of her more as an anthropomorphism of a flag, than an objectified woman – I think this could be the problem that a lot of gamers have. Everyone’s used to breaking into a fortress and making off with booty, so what difference does it make whether it’s a flag, a briefcase, or a princess? This seems to relate to my personal theory about masculine and feminine attitudes to games, but since I haven’t really written about that yet (and I definitely don’t have time today), this will only make sense to those of you who I’ve discussed this stuff with in person. In this sense, denying her a personality probably works in the designer’s favour – the closer she is to being an actual object, the less she seems like a crude portrait of a woman. If you see what I mean.

But no, I think there’s another side to this, which is just that I’m happy to write off ‘princesses’ as being an archetype unto themselves. It occurs to me that the three blogs I linked to originally are all American. Speaking as a European, I’ve grown up surrounded by stories about kings and knights and princesses and all the rest of it – not just in quaint old fairy-tales, but in newspapers and on TV. For me, there’s a huge political divide separating princesses from regular women, which kinda puts them into a different box on the venn diagram of life; their defining feature is their social status, rather than their gender, and there’s a huge wealth of existing cultural stereotypes about princessess (and princes) that the portly maidens in Fat Princess certainly relate to – such as being too naive to understand their social circumstances, and their faintly greedy assumption that they have every right to consume what their subjects provide them with.

I’m quite loathe to start talking about stuff like politics and class conflict but, if anything, I see Fat Princess less as a bunch of guys rescuing an objectified woman than it is a bunch of workers rescuing an objectified monarch. Well, I suppose this isn’t so much an attempt to justify Fat Princess – after all, I believe it’s being made in the US, so this ‘trans-Atlantic cultural differences’ argument breaks down, really – but I guess it’s another possible reason why I’m not as enraged as some other people. Because of trans-Atlantic cultural differences.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to Fat Princess, and will buy it if I ever get a PS3. It’s obviously not perfect, but I don’t think it’s nearly as sexist as a lot of other games.

I love E3. For as long as my internet connection has permitted, I have made a point of settling down in a comfy chair and watching live streams of the major press conferences every summer. I was even going to concoct an elaborate plan to blag my way into last year’s show, but then there was a big ‘internet backlash’ against much of 2006′s presentations (Giant Enemy Crabs and so on) and a lot of the larger companies threw their toys out the pram. Instead of an electric wonderland of free-to-play, unfinished games, we now just have a series of press conferences and tightly-controlled demo lounges. Of course, the old E3 was a colossal waste of time and money – the fact that random nobodies like me could realistically get in did kinda undermine its value as a trade show – but regardless of the many reasons for change, the new E3 isn’t nearly as exciting.

Traditionally, I end the week with a mental list of half a dozen titles that looked particularly interesting, and a much longer list of complaints about absolutely everything else. This year was no different. I’ll grumble about the three main “media briefings” later, but I’ll start with my nice, positive list of games that I’m interested in:

My Most Anticipated Games of E3 2008, In No Particular Order:
- Animal Crossing (Wii)
- Fat Princess (PS3)
- Fable 2 (360)
- Little Big Planet (PS3)
- Mad World (Wii)
- Beyond Good & Evil 2 (Various, presumably)
- Fallout 3 (Various)

There’s a few omissions that might upset people – I’m terrible at Resident Evil games, so I can’t say I’m that bothered about the latest sequel, for example – but this is a personal list of games I want to buy myself, so shut up. And with that out of the way, I can get on with criticising everyone in turn:

Nintendo

Nintendo lost E3 this year, as far as I’m concerned. The Internet seems to be describing Nintendo’s briefing as a shameful abomination, but I think that’s a little unfair. Gamers (or which the net is obviously rife) seem to have this strange misconception that E3 is for their benefit. The fact is, it’s a showcase event for games companies to put their products in the news – that awful, oft-used phrase “media briefing” sums it up succinctly. Sure, the specialist gaming press are also there, but those guys write about games every day. It doesn’t surprise me at all that Nintendo spent their whole presentation talking about middle-of-the-road junk for ‘non-gamers’; E3 is their biggest chance to make a splash in the mainstream media. If you want to hear about the inevitable new Zelda project, just wait a few months and there’ll be an interview about it. And I wish people would stop being so mean to Cammie Dunaway! It’s hard to stand up in front of an audience and pretend to care about trivial nonsense.

As for the actual content… well, Animal Crossing Wii looks like Animal Crossing DS, but with the kind of extra online stuff that I hoped they would put in. I’m a bit confused about how they’re integrating Miis into it (or not), but then Nintendo seem to have developed a dislike of Miis generally, for some reason. Wii Music looks like a totally pointless waste of time. Miyamoto says that this makes it better than a regular game; I imagine that would be true for some people, but not for me. The drumming demo was as cringingly bad as Sony’s pitiful Warhawk sixaxis demo, two years ago. The MotionPlus adaptor appears to be a hardware patch that gives the Wii remote the kind of functionality it should have had from the start, with end users picking up the bill. THANKS, NINTENDO! Truly, we are blessed.

Microsoft

Yes, yes, Microsoft did a massive about-face and have radically redesigned the 360 to be more like its  competitors… of course, the rumours about this have been going around for months, and it’s hardly a surprise. It is, however, a bit of a disappointment. My only real complaint about the 360 dashboard is that it doesn’t cope very well with having different gamertags signed in on different controllers; I think the new UI is ugly and inefficient, and I think avatars will just add an uneccesary layer to user idents. Partying up in the dashboard sounds good, but I wouldn’t be surprised if only a few games used it. The movie streaming stuff would be great if it was free, but I doubt it will be, assuming it even rolls out over here.

As for the games… well, I’ll be all over Fable 2, obviously.  I thought that ambient co-op orb thing sounded ridiculous, until I noticed the orbs appear to move around to reflect the player’s current position in their own game; I now think it is brilliant. Gears of War 2 looks almost as dull as its predecessor, although I’m sure I’ll play through with a friend sometime. I can’t say I care much about the Final Fantasy XIII announcement – it’s hardly surprising from a business perspective, and I’ve come to think of the whole Final Fantasy multimedia franchise as a relentless engine of shallow, self-indulgent fanservice. Geometry Wars 2 looks the business (although I’m still struggling to wrap my brain around the original game), but the imminent release of Castle Crashers makes every other Live Arcade game look fairly redundant at the minute. Yes, including Braid.

Sony

For my money, I think Sony’s presentation was the best this year. Admittedly, the highlight was the announcement that they would be bringing the PlayStation Network close to XBox Live’s level of functionality, but that’s basically all the PS3 ever needed. Now that sales are slowly starting to pick up, we might start seeing some decent third-party games? Their Little Big Planet powered stats and graphs made my inner economist go all gooey, and nicely showed off what could be achieved with the game.

The PlayStation Network games overshadowed all the full-price titles they had on show. Little Big Planet, Fat Princess, Ragdoll Kung-Fu, sequels for LocoRoco and Patapon, and the random stuff like Flower and PixelJunk Eden, all looked far more interesting than the new Killzone and Resistance and the absurdly-named MAG… speaking personally, I think TF2 renders all other FPS games obsolete. The Gran Turismo TV channel looks like a brilliant idea, although I can’t see myself watching it. I can kinda imagine Hideo Kojima setting up a Metal Gear TV channel, screening military history documentaries, 80′s action films and The Gadget Show.

Conclusion

Much like last year, I didn’t think there was very much to get excited about. Nintendo continued to ignore dedicated gamers, but third-party games like No More Heroes should be enough to put people off selling their Wiis. Microsoft did an incredible amount of back-pedalling, which kinda upset me because I was counting on them to stay the course and be ‘the hardcore gamer’s choice’. I guess they’re just desperate for a slice of Nintendo’s new market? And as for Sony… well, two years after release, I think I’m just about ready to buy a PS3 and complete my console collection. It’ll have to be a second-hand 60GB model of course, with their backwards compatibility and all.

On the 27th of March, Dr Tanya Byron delivered a report to the government entitled “Safer Children in a Digital World”, which dealt with issues of child safety on the internet, and regarding videogames. The ‘games’ side of her report concluded that the current system of games classification in the UK is far too confusing. Games are generally exempt from classification, thanks to the Video Recordings Act (1884), but retailers and hardware manufacturers insist that all games must be rated before they will be approved for sale or release, as a matter of policy. All games released in Europe are rated by PEGI, but games with particularly violent or sexually explicit scenes (or, amusingly, any game that features a lot of non-interactive video scenes) are also rated by the good ol’ BBFC, who (unlike PEGI) have the power to bestow legally-enforced age certificates, or refuse a game’s release (as with Manhunt 2).

Unfortunately, Dr Byron’s conclusions describe a – potentially – even more confusing alternative, where all games will be rated by both the BBFC and PEGI, with BBFC ratings on the front of the case and PEGI on the back (which is pretty much what happens already, for any game that qualifies for a BBFC rating). The general response from the games industry seems to agree with her findings, but disagree with her reccomendations – industry bodies like ELSPA have come out to say that game classification should be handled by the pan-European organisation PEGI.

Oh, she also reassured us that videogame violence probably isn’t as widespread and corrupting as certain parties may claim, but since this is pretty obvious to people who play games, it hasn’t received as much attention in the gaming press.

Anyway, as part of the ‘socio-cultural aspects’ module of my game studies degree, I wrote an essay about the Byron report, the state of UK games classification, and so on. Again, I agree with most of her findings, but I don’t think her conclusions make much sense. Speaking as a British consumer, and having done some research into the BBFC and PEGI’s methods, I’d really feel a lot happier if we just rated everything through the BBFC. I can understand that games would have to go through PEGI anyway, to qualify for release in other European countries, but I just think the BBFC have a much more sensible approach to classification – by taking into account the contexts in which game events take place, for example.

Ideally, I think the general classification exemption for games should be lifted, and the BBFC should establish a department dedicated to classifying games; either that, or create a British Board of Game Classification, with equivalent powers. Either way, following the BBFC’s own guidelines, games require a slightly different approach to classification compared to films – basically, because of film viewers interpellating with the victims of violence, whereas game players are more often directly identified as its perpetrator. Either way, once all games are being rated, we can have BBFC rating icons on the front of the box, and written content descriptions on the back, which seems like the clearest way to get the relevent information across to uninformed consumers.

That said, I have no idea how much something like this would cost. It just seems like the most logical answer to a complicated problem. I think it’s insane that a game like No More Heroes can have no legal age rating in the UK, when a game like Mass Effect does. I mean, Mass Effect has a lot of gunfights, and offers the opportunity to glimpse a pair of nipples, but No More Heroes is constructed entirely out of senseless slaughter, rampant perversion, and foul language.

You can download my complete essay here.

I usually have quite a lot to say about gender in games, so it was one of the first things my friends suggested I wrote about on my blog. I thought it over for a few weeks, but kept coming back to the same conclusion: I can’t write about gender in games, because I am a man. Of course, this is totally ridiculous – the idea was to write about gender in games, not specifically women; and even if it was, I should be capable of writing about the subject without feeling fraudulent. So what was the problem?

As part of my studies, I recently read a small stack of articles on the subject of games and gender; tellingly, most of them were written by women, about the gender of characters in games. I’ve never entirely understood why this is such a big deal. Obviously, being a man, most games characters share my gender, so I’ve never had the kind of revelatory experience that many female writers have described upon playing as Lara Croft for the first time. I always used to write this off as being due to some kind of misogynistic genetic programming, but my recent work made me think it through more deeply. If suddenly playing a character of the same gender is supposed to have had such a great effect on players, wouldn’t it follow that playing a character of a different gender would have a similarly noticeable effect? Speaking personally, I’ve never really cared what gender Lara was – all I cared about was how quickly she could kill wolves, or how far she could jump. Perhaps I’m just used to playing as female characters? It’s a tempting explanation, but it seems quite arrogant, and if female characters were so prevailant then Lara Croft wouldn’t have had such an effect on people. Why do people get so worked up about something so trivial? Alternatively, why don’t I care about such a crucially important issue?

During my research, the following line jumped out at me from a paper by the delightful Helen Kennedy:

It has been argued that the internal spaces of game worlds stand in for the mysterious and unknowable interior of the female body[.]

I have no idea where this has been argued, but I’m prepared to take her word for it.

The idea stuck in my head. Taking it somewhat out of context, I began to reconsider Tomb Raider‘s gloomy caves as representing “the unknowable interior of the female body”. This, surely, would make Lara herself – the instrument with which I explore these areas – a kind of digital phallus, thrust into an unsuspecting game world so that I may probe its nooks and crannies. This was an interesting new perspective on character gender, and it made more and more sense the longer I thought about it. Generally speaking, I’d say I view Lara as a tool for interfacing with virtual environments; a device with which I exercise my will. I think this is the root of my problems with most existing literature on gender in games – with the exception of Dr Kennedy’s article (which didn’t reach any particular conclusions), everything I have read on the subject focused on looking at the characters and watching them do their thing. I don’t watch Lara kill wolves and steal treasure – I use her to kill wolves and steal the treasure myself!

I think I can surmise my thoughts neatly by saying that Lara Croft is not merely a character, but a player-character. To point at her breasts and call her feminine – or point at her pistols and call her masculine – is to overlook the contribution of the player who dictates her actions. Characters in games will reflect the personality of their handlers, or at least the personality their handlers chose to adopt within the game. The hijacked marionette I see running round in cut-scenes may well be a feisty young lady, but once I take control she becomes a cautious accountant, crawling from room to room while obsessively preserving her ammo and medkits for an emergency that will never have a chance to occur. For any given instance of Lara, her personality is constructed by an on-going negotiation between the player and the game designers; players can generally do what they want, but if they try to overstep the mark, Lara sternly exclaims “No!”. This is the ghost of the designer, using her as a mouthpiece to tell the player to re-think their actions.

So what does all this mean, exactly?

I don’t really believe that you can define a player-character by their appearance, or biography, or any other pre-authored information, because none of that stuff takes into account the fact that there’s an unspecified sentient player making them run and jump and sing. Perhaps you could say this ties in perfectly with saying that Lara Croft is a masculine character because of her guns and insatiable appetite for defiling virgin tombs, but I’d still think you’re an idiot – that kind of logic implies that entering any strange location and exerting your influence to achieve some personally preferred state is a uniquely masculine activity, and I don’t find that argument very convincing. Depending on how far you abstract gameplay out, pretty much anything at all would then become a masculine activity. Shooting wolves; sending your friend a birthday present; breastfeeding a baby; wiping your nose.

I would say that, for any player-character, there is a spectrum of potential playing styles, and if you can define one axis as relating to ‘gender’, or ‘masculinity/femininty’, then it must be always be present. If it is possible to have a masculine or feminine approach to a game as broad as Civilization, then I think you must be able to have a masculine or feminine approach to Tomb Raider. If you really must assign a gender to a player-character, then I think the only real point of reference you can take is that of the player – if there’s a real difference between how men and women think, which seems to be the underlying assumption of terms like ‘gender studies’ or ‘masculinity and femininity’, then the cognitive functions of a player-character must always be rooted in the player’s own gender.

Female characters in games are important for reasons of representation, but that’s a broad topic that goes far beyond mere gender concerns. I think the real issue of ‘gender and games’ lies not in the gender of characters, or even in the actions that they can perform, but in players’ attitudes to ‘play’ itself… but this is a just pet theory that I’ll expand on in a future post sometime.

References:

Kennedy, Helen (2002) – Lara Croft: Feminist Icon or Cyberbimbo?, Published on gamestudies.org

Tomb Raider (1996) – Core Design, various formats
Civilization (1991) – Microprose, various formats

I have become slightly obsessed with cocktail cabinets.

I think it’s because I’m planning on getting a place of my own, soon – my mind is reaching out for things to decorate my future house with. Really, a cocktail cab would probably be a bit too impractical for my living room, but that hasn’t stopped me thinking about them. Anyway, this game was inspired by Microsoft’s Surface, which emerged victorious from the cocktail cabinet battle royale I held in my mind recently. I wanted a simple, fun, multiplayer game that you could play with your friends over dinner.

You select the number of players, and each player is given a virtual control panel that can be dragged around the table to a comfortable position. A little car pops out of each control panel – with different colours corresponding to different players – and begins to drive around the open space, following a simple AI routine. The control panels contain some statistical information, such as the car’s remaining health, fuel and ammo, and a list of ‘desires’ that the player must prioritise. Desires – such as “Attack Red Player” or “Collect Ammo” – can be dragged up and down in a list of preference, which feeds into each car’s AI routine to establish its particular behaviour patterns. Cars drive themselves around the table, collecting power-ups, attacking each other, and treating physical objects (such as plates) and virtual panels as impassable obstacles, until the game is manually declared over. The winner is the player who scored the most kills.

I wrote an essay about game genre definitions as part of my coursework, and I would now be perfectly happy to never hear the term mentioned again. After some intense research into genre studies itself, it has become clear that genre descriptions themselves are fairly meaningless.

Genres evolve as part of an ongoing negotiation between artists and audiences – although, in the games industry’s case, ‘artists’ includes publishers’ PR departments, and… well, games journalists manage to sit in both camps, depending on how much editorial freedom they have. But, in theory, you have one group of people making art, and another group appreciating it, and both groups eventually start to notice particular trends and themes, which are sometimes focused upon and become recognised as a distinct genre.

It’s a very organic process, with genres merging and subdividing and coming and going, all with the flow of time. Once upon a time, Doom was an ‘action’ game… later, it became a ‘shoot-em-up’, and now it’s specifically a ‘first-person shooter’. Because these genres have expanded in different directions, they have bifurcated out to become more specific – and, hence, relevant. Similarly, they can describe different elements of a game; not just gameplay, but setting. ‘War’, for example, which could be subdivided into ‘World War 2′ or ‘interplanetary war’, depending on whether you’re describing Call of Duty or Halo.

The important thing to remember is that genres only become established when they describe a broad enough sample of works. I suspect this is one of the reasons why Llamasoft’s seminal acid trip simulator Space Giraffe was written off as a Tempest clone by so many people – aside from its own sequels, there haven’t really been any other games like Tempest, so people had a hard time understanding the subtle differences. I’m not suggesting that this is why it flopped, of course, but it’s part of why the game is so misunderstood.

So, given that genre definitions are so fluid, and usually only describe one particular aspect of a game (‘it has guns in it’ or ‘there are platforms’), I get very annoyed when people start bandying them about without thinking. I especially hate the way ‘role-playing game’ seems to have become shorthand for ‘contains meaningless statistics’ – I become consumed with rage when people try to tell me that Zelda isn’t an RPG. One acquaintance of mine believes adamantly that a game is only an RPG if it has random battles.

Anyway. My essay concludes that there will, rather obviously, never be a single, definitive list of genres. Sticking two fingers up to Plato’s theory of forms, I propose that the best practice we can hope to achieve is to develop a method of classifying current genres for a particular point in time, and to always remember that games can be placed within multiple genres at the same time.

You can download the complete essay here.

Ghettris is a deeply serious game about racial segregation.

Players are given a sequence of randomly-shaped blocks of a particular colour; green, say. Once they have completed a solid, horizontal line, the line fuses together to form a ‘ghetto’. Then the player starts getting blocks of a different colour; say, indigo. Players must complete an equal or greater number of solid, horizontal, indigo lines on top of the green lines. Then the complete mass of indigo blocks crushes the green blocks underneath, dropping to the bottom of the screen and forming a new ghetto. Points are scored based on the number of lines crushed.

Obviously, it’s making a clever social statement about how racial segregation is an ongoing spiral of woe, and how socially segregated groups can escape the ghetto but others groups will just end up filling their void, and so on. Or maybe it’s just a load of coloured blocks?

Invader is a charming 2D adventure game by dessgeega. I chose it as the subject of a close textual analysis, written as part of my coursework this year. Rather than simply copy/paste the whole 3,000 word analysis here, I’ll summarise my findings.

Invader is a delicately considered game based on the iconic interplanetary conflict of Space Invaders. Thrust into the role of a downed space invader who is fighting her way back to her family, players are led to review the invasion from a very lonely, personal perspective. What starts as a well-intentioned fight for survival gradually drives players into a bloodthirsty quest for revenge, leading us to question whether there is ever a justification for violent conflict. Most importantly, it’s also a lot of fun! Download it and give it a go!

You can download the full analysis here.

Puzzle Park is a fun little game I devised as part of the coursework for one of my game design modules.

My original idea was to hybridise the tight spacial challenge of Tetris with the broad elemental planning of Sim City, to create a casual puzzle game in which players would create a patchwork landscape from a series of random tiles. I decided to break away from the topic of urban planning, partly to help cover my inspiratory tracks (sneaky!) but mostly because I wanted to broaden the game’s appeal. Central to the game was the interactions between different elements – such as with Sim City‘s residential, commercial and industrial zones – so I spent some time thinking about real-world situations in which these kinds of interactions occur. I hit upon the idea of an ecosystem, with different groups of animals and plants and things all relating to each other in different ways, and settled on an African safari reserve. Conceptually, I mean.

So, basically, you select your game type and difficulty level and so on, and then  get about ten minutes in which to place a series of tiles representing lions and zebras and trees and roads and things. Making particular tile combinations – such as putting lions next to zebras, or connecting buildings with roads – scores bonus points and creates a little graphical flourish, such as cars driving from building to building. As play progresses, the park ecosystem undergoes a visual evolution that mirrors the player’s developing score. Depending on the game mode selected, the game ends when the players reach a target score, exceed a time limit, achieves an objective, and so on.

For my coursework, I wrote up a basic design document for Puzzle Park, with a word limit of 6,000 words (not including the barrage of tables in the appendix). You can download it here.

(The snazzy title picture was drawn by minkee, for use in my initial game pitch presentation – the lovely vector version she gave me has been marred by my raster resizing, but that’s entirely my fault. The wobbly pixel art screenshot mock-ups are my own work.)