I'm Moving to a New Blog!

I've moved to a new blog! Here's the link:

http://SuperHeroesInRaceCars.com/

I plan to keep this site up for the sake of not breaking any links that might be pointing to this one.

Still waiting for part three of the Magnet Ball articles? Click here to read the full postmortem!

Click here to read about what I have planned for the new blog (and why I decided to make a new blog in the first place).

Magnet Ball Postmortem, Part 2

This article has moved! Read it here:
http://superheroesinracecars.com/2014/06/25/magnet-ball-postmortem/
Sorry for the inconvenience!

Magnet Ball Postmortem, Part 1

This article has moved! Read it here:
http://superheroesinracecars.com/2014/06/25/magnet-ball-postmortem/
Sorry for the inconvenience!

It's Time to Revive this Blog

It's been eight months since I last updated this blog! That's basically almost an entire academic school year. So rather than doing what I did last time, where I wrote an 1800-word blog post that basically said, "I'm busy," I'm instead going to talk briefly about some of the near-term plans that I have for the future of this blog.

The main reason why this blog grew inactive was because almost all of my posts tried to become super-huge, mega-articles, and that habit just became too impractical to maintain. I've talked about this problem before, but bad habits are hard to break, especially when you feel like you have to maintain a consistent style of content across the whole blog. I've tried writing smaller, less significant posts before, but I never really liked them because they felt like they were out of tune with the rest of the blog.

One of the good things about coming back after such a long hiatus is that it's a lot easier to stop worrying about things like that, which gives me the freedom to develop a new style for the blog that will end up being more engaging for my readers and less painful for me. I'll probably still end up writing some long articles every once in a while, but I'm also looking forward to writing some shorter ones.

I will also try to remember to post more about myself every once in a while, especially when interesting things are happening to me. I've always been somewhat opposed to writing posts about myself, mainly because I always saw the core content of the blog to be about game design and development rather than about me. Although, I've now realized that this is a really silly sentiment to have when writing for a blog that's named after yourself, and it's especially silly when considering that most of my readers would definitely be interested in my personal updates since most of them know me from outside of this blog.

So what topics can you expect me to write about in the near future? Well, at the current moment, I've been working on a postmortem for Magnet Ball, which was the game that I made for this year's Independent Games Festival. Since that's definitely going to be one of my super-articles, I'll likely release a smaller post before I'm finished with that article, and such a post may end up being as short as this one.

A Retrospective of SISTA's Game Design Workshop

As I mentioned last month, the University of Arizona’s new School of Information: Science, Technology, and Arts (SISTA) has been organizing a Game Design Workshop for kids. The workshop was a one-week summer program that aimed to teach kids about game design and development, and I was lucky enough to have been hired as a teaching assistant for it. There was one other TA, as well as three instructors, which meant we were a team of five teachers in total.

Our biggest challenge was the fact that this was a brand new workshop being run for the very first time, so we essentially had to design it from the ground up. The bulk of the work was done by the instructors, while we TAs were given specific tasks to learn Stencyl, take notes on our experience, and design some lessons for it. During the several weeks before the workshop started, we were mostly working remotely, using online tools like Google Docs to collaborate. During the final week of preparation, we all met up to bring everything together and to "test" the design of the workshop so far by running through a mock version of it. The workshop then ran for two sessions, where each session lasted for one school-week (five days), and then end with a big playtesting event, where all of the parents and relatives could come in to play the students' games.

So was the workshop a success? Many of the people involved—from the kids, to their parents, to the rest of the SISTA faculty—were blown away by how amazing they thought the workshop was. The positive feedback was pretty consistent across both sessions, and it’s been immensely satisfying to read through the anonymous surveys that we’ve been collecting.

In this post, I’ll point out the various aspects of the workshop that I thought made it work so well, while also pointing out the various problems that we failed to avoid. Even though I found the typical postmortem format to be pretty useful when writing this, this is more accurately described as a retrospective. I'm not really in a position to be able to speak for the entire team, and since part of the goal of this post was to critique my own performance as a TA, I've added a few self-evaluation sections as well.

I've Gone Viral! . . . In China?

This blog really doesn't get much traffic at all. I get anywhere from 2-20 pageviews per day, and that number usually spikes up to around 40-60 views on the days following a new post. The "low season" in between posts isn't completely dead, because plenty of people seem to land here from Google Images. For instance, I got an interesting spike in traffic last month when Extra Credits started a T-Shirt design contest and apparently a lot of users were landing in my History of Extra Credits articles looking for images.

However, these mini-spikes in views usually aren't very significant compared to the traffic I get from subscribers every time I post. So imagine my surprise when I noticed a spike that was slightly bigger than the usual new-post spike. This spike happened just a few days before I posted my most recent post, and that should have been part of a really low season since I haven't posted an update in over a month. After looking into it, I found not one, not two, but three websites with articles linking to me.

Long story short, someone seems to have translated my article on How to Think Like a Designer into Han Chinese. And since then, it's been getting passed around and reposted on multiple Chinese websites.

Why I'm no longer Skeptical about SISTA's new Game Design Workshop

[This article explores some of my fears and predictions about the workshop. To find out how it actually went, click here!]

Starting tomorrow, the University of Arizona's School of Information: Science, Technology, and Arts (SISTA) will be launching its first Game Design Workshop. It's a one-week program designed for kids between 6th and 12th grade, and it's being run for two consecutive sessions. I volunteered to be one of the two teaching assistants helping to run the workshop, and our latest assignment is to write a reflection on how we think the workshop might go. One purpose of this reflection is to produce a more visible representation of the work I've been doing so far, which makes this assignment a perfect fit for a blog post!

Given how busy I've been all summer, I was starting to think that I wouldn't be able to update this blog again until fall, so I'm glad that I was able to use this assignment as an excuse for a new post. Plus this gives me a good chance to practice writing posts with smaller scopes. Most of my posts tend to start out with a vague plan that I'll just talk about everything I want to say on a single topic, and then I'll figure out how to merge them all into a coherent thesis later. It is an absurdly slow process, and it's about time I stopped doing that.

For instance, this post started out as a list of predictions about how the workshop might go, plus some descriptions of the interesting aspects of the workshop's design woven in. Fortunately, I had enough sense to realize that the workshop would probably be over before I could even finish such a post.

Deconstructing the Iterative Development Process

This post actually started out as a retrospective for the game I've been working on for my internship/independent study with Riverman Media. At first I was planning to write on everything I've learned during this semester, almost like a postmortem for a project that isn't over yet. But such a post would have probably ended up being a loose collection of small tips, and I prefer to use this blog to explore deeper topics. So I decided to write on the biggest and most confusing problem that's been bothering me all semester: how to properly use the iterative development process.

In the past few years, I've seen at least three memorable explanations of the iterative process, and most of them were too complicated to be practical. It wasn't until I read Jesse Schell's description of the process that I started to believe that I finally understood it, but when I tried to apply it to this project, it just didn't feel like design to me. I have experience designing things in several different media, but for some reason, I felt like I was having trouble migrating my usual design perspective to a long-term game project.

The more I explored this problem, the more I realized how shallow my understanding of this process was. I had learned a lot about the surface details of this process, how to use it, and why it worked. But I didn't really understand why this process was designed in the way that it was or how to fix it when something went wrong with it.

I eventually answered these questions by trying to design a brand new development process that would work for me. I was basically trying to reinvent the wheel, so it was little surprise that I arrived at the iterative development process as my answer. But along the way, I was finally able to wrapped my head around how this process is really meant to work. I decided to turn this exercise into the premise for this post, and the result is a guide that teaches this development process by focusing on its design rather than how it's used. In other words, it's the kind of guide I wish I had read before starting this project.

Everything I've Been Doing Lately

Now that it's been almost two months since my last blog post, I figured it was time for a mandatory blog update. Because I don't have time right now to finish one of the longer posts that I've been working on for the past several weeks, I decided to write a quick post that will hopefully make the slowness of updates seem more justified.

There have been many times when I've wanted to post about some of the cool things that have been happening to me lately, but I just didn't like the idea of posting several small updates about them. If I did that, then the smaller updates might start to crowd out the "real" ones, which might turn this blog into a self-promotional personal blog, rather than a game design analysis blog. So to prevent that, I'll just dump everything I've wanted to say into one big post.

Packaging Design: the Experience of Treasuring our Favorite Games

Writing about this topic might seem rather unusual, especially with digital distribution on the rise. But considering how most game developers, myself included, share the dream of creating games that players absolutely treasure, I feel as though flawed packaging design is getting in the way of this dream.

For example, I own plenty of games that I absolutely love, but whenever I go play some of these games, the casings that house them almost always leave me disappointed in a way. Not only is it a shame that the packaging doesn't live up to the quality of the experience as I remember it, but it almost makes me feel silly for having had such high regards for the game.

While I know that game casings are primarily designed for minimizing the cost of manufacturing and distribution, I believe developers are underestimating the impact that their packaging can have on a player's experience. Much in the same way that listening to a game's soundtrack can bring back fond memories of one's experiences with a game, a well designed casing can keep a player's love and respect for a game alive long after they've stopped playing it.

Project Aeon, and How I spent my Holiday Break

It's been a month since my last blog post, so today I'm going to write about what I've been doing since then. Even though I've been on break from classes for the past month, I've been incredibly busy working on a Flash game called Aeon. I first introduced this project in my History of the Interguild series, and given that this is a blog about game development, it's odd that I haven't written more about the game that I'm currently developing.

Most of this game's production has been incredibly slow, inefficient, and just plain horrible. But recently, I managed to turn this project around while making more progress in just one month than I would have made in a full year otherwise. In this post, I'll explain the major challenges that have held this game back for so long and how I drastically improved my time management and productivity skills.

Course Analysis: MIS496A

The class that this blog was originally created for has ended! This was one of the best classes that I've taken at this University so far. Thanks to my tendency to morph class assignments into interesting personal projects, here are some of the things that this class has allowed me to do:

1. Start a gaming blog!
2. Make some cool QR-code posters for my club.
3. Get the idea for how to run our club's awesome Facebook group.
4. Get an internship with Riverman Media for next semester.
5. Make my first seriously-designed level.
6. Design an impressive infographic resume.

Of course, none of these things are what made this class so great. After all, I wasn't the only student who loved this class. So in this post, I'm going to analyze this past semester and figure out why exactly we found this class so enjoyable.

Nine GameDev-Related Things to do During your Holiday Break

I just finished writing a lengthy blog post on my club's website on how to productively spend one's holiday break. An article with that much effort put into it would normally be posted on this blog, because on the club website I usually only post short summaries of what we've been up to, which no one really reads. And so I'm tempted to describe this latest article as a guest post on my own side blog.

The reason why I decided to post this article there as opposed to here was because it's very specifically written to my members. When I asked some of them during our last meeting what they were planning to do during the break, I was shocked to find out how little they seemed to value the free time they'll have starting next week.

Or maybe I'm just weird. After years of struggling to find the time to work on the Interguild, I seemed to have developed some strong mental barriers against wasteful time spending. But that's not to say that I have good time management skills. It just means that I procrastinate by finding something else to work on. For instance, today probably would've been better spent writing my 10-page final paper for my MIS class, rather than writing a 10-page blog post for my club.

Level Postmortem: MIS496A HW5

Postmortems are traditionally reserved for critiquing the development processes of entire games, but it shouldn't be too far of a stretch to apply the same kind of analysis to a single level.

Introduction

This level was made for a homework assignment for the class that this blog was originally created for. The project was really open; all we had to do was create "something" that would highlight what we've been learning in class. Some people made videos, others made skits, and one group went as far as to make a advertisement campaign with the goal of getting more students to sign up for the class next semester.

Naturally, I decided to make a level, and the game I chose to make it in was Canvas Rider, an HTML5 remake of the popular Flash game Free Rider 2. The level is currently uploaded to the Interguild. To play it, copy the code in the textbox, visit the game page, paste the code into the textbox under the game, and click load.

How to Think Like a Designer: Applying Graphic Design to Game Design

I made the above posters a few weeks ago as part of a class project where we had to initiate a QR code advertisement campaign, which I naturally dedicated to my Game Developers Club.

Making these posters was surprisingly nostalgic. It reminded me of the three years that I spent learning graphic design in high school. My school offered four years worth of graphic design electives, all of which were taught by the same teacher. Because I transferred into the school during my sophomore year, I only had time to take the course for three years.

That class taught me one of the most important and universal skills that I've ever learned: how to think like a designer. Not only has this applied directly to making websites, but it has also helped me improve at public speaking, cinematography, writing, and of course, game design.

In this post, I'll be analyzing how this class was able to teach me this valuable skill so that you too can start thinking like a designer.

History of the Interguild, Part 3: Finding the Right Home

At last, we've reached the final installment of this series. In Part One, we saw how the Interguild community was formed by players who fell in love with the game Hannah and the Pirate Caves (HATPC), and in Part Two we saw how TNT, the creators/owners of the game, nearly destroyed this community through their repeated neglect and mismanagement of HATPC.

In this post we'll look at the story behind the various websites that have housed our community throughout the years, how they've affected the course and identity of the Interguild, and how we found our ultimate home in interguild.org.

This was a very difficult post to write. The major challenge was in figuring out how to properly organize these ideas together into a coherent article without confusing you with various jumps in chronology. It was because of this design dilemma that I finished this post so late, along with the fact that school is getting very busy lately. At one point, I tried staying up until 5am one Saturday night to see if I could finish this, and I still didn't finish. But now the wait is over...

The UA Game Developers Club has Gone Global: Join Now!

Remember how in my last post, I mentioned how I made a tribute image for the Extra Credits Facebook wall? Well, the first guy to respond to that was a student from the Netherlands (no, Interguilders, it wasn't jellsprout). He was asking me to respond to what he recently posted on EC's wall. It turns out that he's currently making a game with other students for a course requirement, but he needed help with some serious problems that was hurting his development team.

After I gave him some great advice from Jesse Schell's The Art of Game Design, he wanted to add me as a friend on Facebook seeing as we were both students interested in making games, it would be great to share thoughts and resources in order to learn more.

Most of you already know about how I started a club at my university last semester called the Video Game Developers Club. We recently started our own Facebook group, so I invited my new Dutch friend to join the group. And just like that, we became an international club!

At first I didn't take the "international" aspect of the club too seriously, but today I started thinking, why not? Game development is already one of the most diverse and interdisciplinary industries out there, so why not join an equally diverse group?

Update on Email Subscriptions

This isn't that big of a deal, but I figured that I might as well let you guys know. As I explained a few weeks ago, those of you who subscribe to this blog via email get the email notifications some time between at 11pm-1am GMT -6:00, which is about 10pm in my timezone. I realized that I've been publishing of the blog posts after midnight, which means that you probably have to wait an entire day to get the email notification. So I moved the email sending time to about 3am-5am GMT -7:00.

That means that you will now get your emails about five hours later than usual, but the whole point of this is so that they don't come a day late.

In Other News...

Check out this huge pic I made for Extra Credits to celebrate the end of the Guest Artists Marathon. I posted it on their Facebook wall about an hour ago.

Click here for full resolution

If you don't know what Extra Credits is or why they've been having a guest art marathon, check out these articles I've written on them.

Understanding QR Codes through Game Design

Wow, four new blog posts within the past week? That can only mean one thing: this post is for another homework assignment.

But don't let that turn you off, because I am very excited about this post. This will be my first entry into a series of posts called Understanding through Game Design, where I analyze non-game-related topics as if they were games (I also plan to analyze actual games eventually). The idea isn't all that crazy, because any game designer will likely tell you that it's quite a challenge to find any form of human activity that cannot be explained in terms of game design.

So today, I'll be talking about Quick Response codes, also known as QR codes. When I first heard about these a few years ago, someone had told me that they were supposed to be a replacement for bar codes that could store data in two dimensions rather than one.

I never imagined that they would become the widespread phenomenon that they are today. In this post, I'll be trying to figure out why exactly people are having so much fun with these things.

Indie Games and the Crowdfunding Revolution

It's about time I started balancing out some of these super long articles with smaller ones that are more straight-to-the-point. So the point of this post will be to fulfill my latest class assignment, which demands that everyone in the class make their next blog post as a response to an article about monetizing social media (actually, I think I've already written about this topic...).

This might be a bit of a stretch (like almost all of my posts so far), but I'm going to be responding to a very interesting article from a few months ago called "The Crowdfunding Revolution: Perspectives." That article was actually the first part of a two-part series, with the second part named "The Crowdfunding Revolution: Making Your Choice."

Crowdfunding services – websites that act as both a social network to connect projects with backers and as a marketplace or escrow house for project funding – have become a popular business model in the last two years, and several more have sprung up alongside Kickstarter, each with their own perks, quirks, and twists on the basic model.

These articles take a look at the growing popularity of crowdfunding as a tool for independent game developers. Those of you who follow this blog might have realized by now that I like history, and so what caught my attention was the idea that this business model could potentially lead to significant changes in the game industry.