Game Design Analysis

Answer the various prompts breaking down a single short game experience. Your goal should be on content and analysis. Each part may only be a few sentences, it might be more. There is no minimum word count to the assignment, but one may be asked to revise incomplete submissions or re-do the assignment on a new game.

Purpose

Prompts

You must either choose a game from the provided list, or get approval on the game you choose from the instructor.

  1. In a few sentences, describe the game and your experience, feelings, thoughts, etc, while playing it. What did you, personally, think? Did you like it? Did you not like it? What design decisions do you think led to your impression?
  2. Identify the game’s core loop and principal verbs.
  3. Identify the difficulty curve, and major components that affect the difficulty curve. How does the core loop change over time?
  4. Explain one or two core game mechanics, break down some of its design choices. What stood out to you, mechanically, and why did the developer make this decision?
  5. Explain one or two interesting aesthetic decisions. What stood out to you, aesthetically, and why did the developer make this decision?
  6. Tell me why you believe the game was [or wasn’t] engaging. Prompts to get you started: What questions were you asking yourself about the game. What did you want to see/do more of? Why did you continue playing? What did you think about while playing? What were you curious about? What problems were you hooked on? What did you want to see happen, or see yourself doing, while you played?
  7. Identify one significant moment that happens to the player in the game (ie: death, leveling up, killing an enemy, picking up an item, winning, losing), and attempt to list every layer of communication that the game uses to convey that this happened. (Ie: Visuals, text, HUD, sound, animation, camera shake, control/input change, particles, screen effects, music change, etc etc etc).
  8. Go to http://deck.artofgamedesign.com, select “card list”, and select a random lens (There is a “random” button). What lens did you get. Analyze the game through this lens. Attempt to answer a few of the prompt questions on the card.
  9. Same as 8 with a new random lens.
  10. Same as 8 with a new random lens. 3 lenses total.
  11. Optional. Anything else you want to say about it? If you had ambiguous or uncertain answers for any of the above, talk about that here.

Submit your assignment as a word or .pdf

If you have any questions, just email me. I recommend playing a few of the games before picking one to dive deep on. Most of the games here can be explored in under 15 minutes.

Games