History Lesson 3: Doppelscope
Doppelscope was my thesis game in my undergrad program at the University of the Arts, Zurich. It’s an abstract puzzle game where you have to bring each world into balance by making the right connections. Even tough the game received the very low grade D, it won the Unity Awards 2009 in the category Best Visual Design.
The game has gone trough a lot of iterations. More so on the visual side then gameplay wise. I’ll try to write down some of these and the current issues I’m having with the game.
History Lesson 2: Analyzing Magic Carpet
In one semester during my Bachelor degree in game design we had to pick our favorite game and analyze its internal mechanics. I worked together with my co-student Dario Hardmeier and we choose the game Magic Carpet. It was a pretty popular and innovative first-person shooter released in 1994 by Bullfrog.
In the game you fly around on a magic carpet and kill monsters that drop mana. The mana gets transported into your castle by a balloon. You win each level be gathering enough mana. The amount of mana you have also influences what spells you can use and how often you can use them as each spell cast costs mana. On later levels there also are rival magicians on magic carpets that fight you for the mana in the world. All in all it was a pretty awesome game with a lot of dynamic gameplay.
In our documentation we looked at every aspect of the game. From menu navigation over how levels are built to the game mechanics behind the mana gathering. I’ll give a few excerpts of the most interesting ones from the document.
History Lesson 1: Effective Teamwork in online Games
I’ve decided to start this blog by going through my old work and hitting my readers with a huge wall of text that is my old thesis paper back from 2003. Its a 72 page long PDF called: “Effective Teamwork in online Games”. The thesis of the paper is:
“Effective teamwork in online games can be achieved with the right game mechanics and design choices. It’s not the players fault that no teamwork takes places”.
The first part gives an overview of the multiplayer games that were available in 2003. The second part tries to analyze the teamwork of those games with gathered player data. To the paper belongs a pretty extensive survey regarding teamwork that almost 5’000 people filled out. Being the young and naive aspiring game designer that I was back then most of these questions can’t be used for proper data collection. But they still give some insight into their multiplayer preferences and experiences. The third and last part of the paper tries to provide some ideas and gameplay mechanics that help to provide the player with an environment for effective teamwork. Interestingly some of those ideas were implemented into Battlefield 2. If that was merely a coincidence or because of my paper, I don’t know.
Looking back on the paper I feel a bit embarrassed by my own naivety and style of writing. But I guess we all started somewhere. That being said I still believe the thesis holds true to some extent but I also believe that some players just don’t want to work in teams even though they’re playing a team game. So we can’t blame the game mechanics entirely for bad teamwork.
You can download the paper by clicking on the link above. Take it with a grain of salt should you decide to read it as some of those design ideas are pretty outdated or in a very draft state.
