Week 9, Assignment A - Reflections on Gaming presentation

We presented our idea for a game in class the other day:  MechWars, a tactical, first-person robot combat game.  Obviously, some of our points may not have come across as well as they could have through a hastily made PowerPoint  presentation and a relatively short explanation.  I'll attempt here to strengthen our presentation.

First, I don't believe that the idea of just how much customization would be available to the player was really stressed enough.  The extent to which a player's mech-unit could be altered to fit their particular aesthetic tastes or play-style was intended to be a wide extreme.  We actually spent quite a while discussing exactly how this would be achievable through in-game options and menus, so I feel like we could have spent more time on it during the actual presentation, though I figure it seemed like an afterthought to some of the others in the group, rather than a main focus.

Second, I think the concept of the number of available game modes--and how they would function--could have been described better.  It kind of ended-up sounding like just another first-person shooter, Call of Duty knock-off, which is exactly what we were trying to avoid when conceptualizing.  We wanted to introduce a wide variety of game modes from which the player could choose to play when accessing the online-multiplayer capabilities of the game; to allow for some rather interesting match-ups.  I feel like it could have come across better if we hadn't used the same names so prevalent in other games:  such as Deathmatch, King of the Hill, and Capture the Flag--and instead came up with something more original.

When it comes to describing games, there's four major points to hit on:  Goals, Mechanics, Objectives, and Rules.  I believe that the most difficult of those to describe would be Mechanics, for a number of reasons.  Oftentimes, a game's mechanics will be the most complex part of the game--at least, in a non-casual setting.  The controls, for one, are usually going to grow more and more complex in direct relation to the growth of the game.  In our game, the player is piloting a giant robot.  This would pretty much ensure a complex control scheme, or maybe a steep learning curve:  easy to pick up and difficult to master.  As the technology through with games can run increases, one will pretty-much find that the number of actions that the player-controlled character can perform will also increase.  Despite this growth, the Goals and Rules of a game generally stay at around the same complexity, such as, "Kill the enemies," or, "Plant the bomb in their base within five minutes."