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Presentation
Presentation
The unit is transversal to boardgames and digital games and introduces Game Design as a fundamental component of all games and of creative work in defining, exploring, and perfecting a vision for playable experience in an original game. The unit is meant to provide students with a basic literacy of game design and related skills in specification, prototyping, and testing.
Game Design is the core aspect of original creative work in games and frames the remaining disciplines in game development work. Game Design literacy and an understanding of the game development process in a game design perspective are crucial to not only game design work but also work in all the other disciplines in a game development team. The unit is therefore critical to the degree, not only in preparation of more advance game design units, but also for complementing development and art units.
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Class from course
Class from course
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Degree | Semesters | ECTS
Degree | Semesters | ECTS
Bachelor | Semestral | 4
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Year | Nature | Language
Year | Nature | Language
2 | Mandatory | Português
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Code
Code
ULHT1075-16939
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Prerequisites and corequisites
Prerequisites and corequisites
Not applicable
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Professional Internship
Professional Internship
Não
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Syllabus
Syllabus
- Basic Concepts
- Definition of Game, Game Design and Game Development;
- Transmediality in Games;
- Introduction to Player Profiles.
- Game Creation Model
- Game Design Iterative Process;
- Game Design Atoms;
- Prototyping;
- Playtesting;
- Publishing.
- Game Structural Elements
- Rules;
- Procedures;
- Player Model;
- Limits;
- Resources;
- Conflict;
- Results;
- Mechanics.
- Low-level Game Design
- Systems Thinking;
- Analysis and Synthesis;
- Components of the Game as a System (Objects, Properties, Behaviors, Relationships).
- Basic Concepts
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Objectives
Objectives
- gaining a non-trivial understanding of the traits of games as objects and as activities.
- internalize iteration and experimentation as the core creative practices of Game Design work.
- knowing how to use essential techniques for informal user-testing,
- gaining an introductory-level understanding of how the design of game elements at different levels of abstraction and the relationships across elements and levels can affect the game experience.
- being able to carry out basic creative work in Game Design through systems thinking, including the ability to specify, prototype, iterate and test original small game concepts.
- being able to reliably work on games as games, given the non-trivial nature of game design and the risk of approaching game projects as other media, ignoring their nature as games.
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Teaching methodologies and assessment
Teaching methodologies and assessment
This course has a strong connection with the course Digital Game Development, where the narratives, characters and worldbuilding will be directly intertwined with that course's final project.Furthermore, students will be given practical examples of games to narratively analyze using diverging perspectives from game design, literature and expectations as a player.
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References
References
- BRAITHWAITE, B., & SCHREIBER, I. (2008). Challenges for game designers. Boston: Charles River Media.
- FULLERTON, T., SWAIN, C., HOFFMAN S. S. (2008). Game design workshop: a playcentric approach to creating innovative games, 2nd Ed. Amsterdam; Boston; Heidelberg; London; New York: Elsevier: Morgan Kaufmann.
- ISAAC, E. (2022). Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design: An Encyclopedia of Mechanisms. Routledge.
- HUNICKE, R., LEBLANC, M., & ZUBEK, R. (2004). MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research. AAAI-04 Workshop on Challenges in Game AI.
- SALEN, K., ZIMMERMAN, E. (2004). Rules of play: Game design fundamentals. MIT Press.
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Office Hours
Office Hours
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Mobility
Mobility
No
