I play Advanced games

This assignment we spent time playtesting our prototype design with potential players and ideally with the other design team in the class. For this blog post we were expected to answer a few questions.  In general, playtesting was a great experience. If you can obtain willing participants, it is a fantastic way to engage with users and really test the design. Assuming there is time to adjust, the feedback you can gain is invaluable for a better designed game.  Questions to answer: As a play tester what was your experience?   Overall my experience was good. The game was easy to play and control.  Were you tested synchronously or asynchronously? Asynchronously What did you learn from playtesting the other team's game?   The other team’s game didn’t really identify the learning objective of the game, so I wasn’t really sure what my goal was as I played. This reinforced the idea that instructions or at least a simplified goal should be identified even f

For the past 6 weeks I have been working with a team of 4 to design a game for a client. Our client is a geology professor with the University and her goal was for us to design a game that could be used as a possible assessment of the learning comprehensions of her class.  As a group we tackled this project with wide open minds. We met with the client right off the bat and immediately started brainstorming ideas for our game design. Overall we tried very hard to stay in constant communication and set goals and expectations for the design. Our first few weeks were very fluid as we tried to hammer out the actual design we wanted to achieve. We had several back to back zoom meetings to not only accomplish specific assignments, but continue the communication for our goals. As a team we really focused on the prototype and what we could/couldn't do with our abilities.  On general reflection, I think our process and project has been successful. Our communication has been very strong and I

  For this assignment, I was on the search for games that are directly related to the topic of my client for an upcoming group project. My client is a Dr. Sarah Jacquet and the subject matter is based around the principles of geology, specifically the 4 laws of geology and how they can be used to reproduce the timing of a geological sequence. Part 1:  What did you find? For this part, I started as most people probably did and preformed a few Google Searches. I soon realized that no matter what terms or phrases I searched for, I was pretty much pulling the same results. One “rabbit hole” did lead me to a game on Steam, so I then did an additional search on Steam to see if there were any more relative games, which I didn’t The most relative games I found were “The Geology Game” on Steam and a series of learning games on this website: https://www.legendsoflearning.com/ . Additionally, I was able to find several resources online of “learning modules” that could be used in helping fac

 This week we play tested four simulations, here are my evaluations of each. Space X I didn’t really enjoy this. It was far to slow for my liking and the controls were very hard to understand at first. I tried a few times but was never successful, and it wasn’t until after the 5 th attempt, did I realize I what I was trying to accomplish. The first few attempts I reset because I never felt like I was getting anywhere. I think the instructions could have had a little more guidance as to what the actual process was. The goal was obvious, dock the ship, but there was no understanding of what that actually means. I would say this was a simulation. Sky-High I liked the simplicity of the design for this. I didn’t like the instructions and the over abundance of information you needed to try it out. I was successful in that I achieved a score of 4, however, my game ended because I two aircraft came to close to each other! I believe Sky-High is also a simulation. Circuit Lab I re

  I played 3 of the 4 games (Sadly, couldn’t play the demo of Learning Factory), but for this I will be comparing “Influent” and “Password Blaster!”. “Influent” is an immersive language learning game that allows the player to navigate the 3D world learning various languages by interacting with the environment. “Password Blaster!” is an old school space blaster where the player shoots through waves of the “world’s worst passwords” by typing the password to eliminate it.   Both games are vastly different in gameplay and learning modalities with little to really compare in content, visuals, or gameplay. What was the game about? Influent is about a developer of a language learning tool that is showing off the ability of his device. You as the player navigate the world interacting with various objects to learn the word in the chosen language. The game presents “Time attacks” challenges to further condition the learning. Password Blaster is a game that showcases some of the world

Hello and welcome to the new advanced gaming blog!! This is my space for brainstorming and documenting the process as I work through the advanced level class for designing games.  In this class, I really want to build on the concepts from last class solidifying the foundation to better understand games, the design process of games, and how to best use them in a learning environment.   I am also really looking forward to playing some new games and analyzing them from an educational/design standpoint and not just looking at them as games for enjoyment.