This reading log entry responds to the following assigned articles:
Diorgo Jonkers (2011) “11 tips for making a fun platformer” and “13 more tips for making a fun platformer,” Dev Mag, January. (Assigned 10/14)
Desi Quintans (2013) “Game UI by example: A crash course in the good and the bad,” Envato Tuts, January 22. (Assigned 10/18)
Darran Jamieson (2017) “Keep things clear: Don’t confuse your players,” Envato Tuts, December 6. (Assigned 10/23)
Paul Suddaby (2012) “The many ways to show players how it’s done with in-game tutorials,” Envato Tuts, August 31. (Assigned 10/25)
After you have read through these readings, please write a short, personal response to the reading. In your response, at a minimum, you should comment on at least two interesting, confusing, or controversial ideas that you took away from one of the assigned articles. Your reading log entry should be between 200 and 300 words, but you should feel free to write a longer response if you have much to say.
I found these readings very interesting since I have both made and help test (with feedback) many kinds of games. Some of the most common things I give negative feedback on are number 4 in “11 tips…”, number 9 in “13 more tips…”, making things clear to the player (“Keep Things Clear…”). These three things of course have different priority but they all can break a game quickly. I’m going to talk about all of them but in order from lowest to highest severity. First are leaps of faith. These tie into the last one on this list which is… Read more »
Alexi Mouratoff I found the articles quiet enjoyable to read/fun. I especially liked the Dev Magazine which had good tips for the Construct 3 assignment. It is a bit weird to me that one of the tips is avoiding using inertia cause the original Super Mario Bros had slight inertia, that when maximized allowed cool tricks/speed runs. So I feel like inertia can be good to a plat former if your designing one for speed run replay-ability. It is interesting that their is a thing called User Experience (UX) which deals with intuitive and enjoyable interactions, and then their is… Read more »
While all of the readings offered valuable and helpful information regarding game design, from Jonkers, on what makes a good and fun platformer, to Quintans in outlining good and bad practices of UI game experience, and Jamieson’s explanation on how to build a clean game design for users, all of these readings offer critical and noteworthy recommendations game developers should follow. Nevertheless, the reading that I most enjoyed, and to a more significant extent, resonated most with me, was Paul Suddaby’s different styles and types of game tutorials and which of them seem to work best for players. In particular,… Read more »
Each of these articles were particularly useful for the purpose of putting away ideas and concepts for later use in game design. The readings mostly either reinforced things I already knew were important from experience, or put into words a concept that I hadn’t thought about directly, but had felt the impact of. For instance, I always knew that I wanted to make games that were accessible to everyone if I had the opportunity, such as offering different modes or working from the beginning with color palettes that account for color blindness, having options for deaf players, and even wondering… Read more »
I took a lot from reading these articles. Mostly, it confirmed a lot of the ideas I had in mind to put into my game. The 11 tips for making fun platformers confirmed ideas I had like making diverse enemies, make powerups/collectables, and making information easy to see. It also contained ideas that I had not previously thought of, like making hitboxes for enemies smaller while making the boxes for powerups and collectables bigger. This concept makes a lot of sense, it keeps the players from getting frustrated by unfair hitboxes because it makes them unfair but in their favor.… Read more »
The articles that I found the most useful for my platform and final project were “11 tips for making a fun platformer” by Diorgo Jonkers and “Keep Things Clear: Don’t Confuse Your Players” by Darran Jamieson. The first article, and now looking back, is the perfect guide to make a platform game easy and fun for a user. The tips that helped me the most were: keep the interface simple and make collision boundaries. For the jump around exercise we learned how to make boundaries for the characters/enemies. This allows to create spaces that are easy to follow by the… Read more »