Category: Game Design Studio 2

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Week 1-Game Ideas

Starting roots- This is a video game where the player opens a garden shop. Throughout the game, you can buy/breed other plants to make new plants for your shop. You sell your plants and get money to purchase new plants or hire employees to do a task to make more money. 

Closet dreamers- This is a video game where you play as the owner of a closet organizer. You go through levels of people’s closets and reorganize them. The levels are endless and become more complex the more you play. 

 Just the beans- In this game, you play as a coffee shop owner. You start at a small side-stand coffee shop and as you get more business you can upgrade the shop. As you upgrade the shop you can get more coffee beans, and more equipment, hire employees, and even open up other businesses. 

Food runner- In this game, you own a restaurant and you are a server. You have to get people’s orders, place them, and deliver them back to customers. Each customer will tip you based on service. Each level will progressively get harder with more complicated orders, getting drinks with food, and even more customers. You have options to upgrade different appliances or hire more employees to get work done faster. You could even customize the restaurant’s decor and even open a chain. 

Expanding- In this game you have objectives to do certain tasks for a village. Your job is to try and expand the village and build it to your liking. Each villager has certain jobs that you may need to go to, to further the development of the town. As a player, you can collect materials that are around the village and collect ingredients/objects to build more houses/businesses to further the development. There is no set end to this game since you can expand in an open world map as well as design it in any particular way you would want. 

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5 game ideas with no explicit end state

Examples for inspiration:

  • Flappy bird
  • Flower ps4 game in class
  • Minecraft
  • Fortnite Creative Mode
  • Cod Zombies
  • Animal Crossing
  • Temple Run
  1. Timelapse – build your world from ground up, including architecture and life with preset models. The twist is, you have to build the entire timeline of your world. Do you start with cavemen and continue to the current ‘norm’? Do you start with today’s world and end with alien mayhem? Maybe even create a utopian or dystopian society. The choice is all yours with an unlimited creative platform.
  2. Float your boat – phone based app; vertical flow and orientation; water constantly lowering level, if your boat fails to stay afloat you cannot continue. As the water is getting more shallow, tokens fall from the top of the screen and you can lean your phone left and right to get said tokens. The more tokens, the higher the water level stays.
  3. World of Football – football or soccer based game, pick from a handful of preset characters and start a career of football. You are in a world where you can roam around and do social things with your character, as well as go to stadiums where you play games for a club. Inspired by NBA 2K, GTA 5, and Elden Ring (ability to roam and endlessly interact). There is no end to how good you can make your player. Break records and push the limits of what’s possible.
  4. Sort it Out/Sort it – for people that like those satisfying things videos or have OCD. With endless levels and different objects to sort. Similar to tetras or those parked car games where you have to unpack a lot of cars. In this case there are levels where you sort blocks, sort shoes, or sort shirts. Different orientations.
  5. Paintball – similar to call of duty, counter strike or any other shooting game, Paintball is a console based first person shooter that has a multiplayer game mode and realistic paintball war modes to emulate the real activity.
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Infinite Games

Knick Knack Attack

Take any knick knack from your house that is destined to sell for 50 cents at your estate sale, and take it with you to someone else’s house. The goal is to discreetly exchange your knick knack for one you like better. The only rule is the Vampire Rule. You can’t exchange your knick knack for a new one unless you were INVITED into the house with the new knick knack. No breaking and entering. You can play knick knack attack literally any time you want for your whole life.

Westminster Way

To play you must hold open the door for at least one person per day. If you don’t manage to hold a door open for at least one individual in a given day, you’ve lost the game.

Egg Slap

A game we frequent at Starbucks. If you are working the oven and receive an order for a breakfast sandwich with no egg you must remove it, and slap another employee of your choice with the egg. It’s a gamble because it’s rare to get that order. It’s infinite so long as I’m slaving at Starbucks and passing on the tradition.

Never ending story

A game in which a group of friends create a basis for a story and send it to each other to constantly add new chapters and adventures. Like a never ending comic strip that friends continuously create together maybe via google docs.

Give Graciously

A game in which you always keep a bag of necessities in your car for homeless people, which you continuously give and refill until there are no more homeless people. The more bags you give out the more points you get.

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Game Thoughts 1/9

Flowers

I like the idea of the game and I understand why people play it. Flowers has beautiful graphics and animations. The sounds and soundtrack are soothing and pleasant. Personally, I just don’t play games like that. I find I analyze them more as a piece of art and not as a video game.

Journey

I was far more interested in this game than flowers. I loved that there seemed to be more mechanics to learn and master with the controller. For some reason I felt like I was achieving more in Journey than I was in Flowers. I also associated the Journey game with other similar games I have played which I think made me ask more questions about how they manipulated the environment differently.

Calvin Ball

I did not like this. No thank you.

Cow Clicker

Cow Clicker took me back to 2009 freshman year of high school. I thought it was a stupid waste of time then, and I think it is now. When I think about the amount of time people waste on things like Cow Clicker, I don’t doubt the inevitable extinction of the human race. That’s all.

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Thoughts on Two Computer Games — Flowers & Journey

Flowers

The trip starts with empty green land — the mountainous valley and peaks without grass, its protagonist is flying petals whose mission is to seek other magical petals to get connected that will restore the exuberant landscapes. It is an impactful game because it educates us that collaborative decisions can fulfill the dream toward reality and that each process of environmental protection matters in determining how large amounts of grassland can be recovered.

Journey

The trip starts in a desert environment where the protagonist has the courageous confidence to overcome the upcoming obstacles and is willing to take opportunity costs; the main character believes that faith can be everywhere and is feasible if he dares to explore each solution strategy. If he thinks he can fly over the sky to dive deeper into his real insight, and fulfill it to become a reality. It is an impactful game because it not only demonstrates how faith can become the greatest power fuel for depressive periods of struggle but also proves that miracles do happen if you can accomplish each set of obstacles and challenges of life’s course; in other words, think barriers as the opportunity to gain weapon of creativity that defeat the confusions.

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Thoughts-1-9-23

I like how this class picked up from last semester and how most of the class wasn’t taken up with reading the syllabus and doing introductions. I was also interested in the Painstation because I had no idea that game existed and how many people wanted to play it. During class, we talked about how some people are completionists and want to fully complete the game by getting all the achievements and checking every box, myself included. Another question that was asked was why this was, why do you feel you need to complete the game to that extent? I feel I want to get everything out of the game that is possible. I want to find all of the hidden elements of the game and check all the boxes. During class when Max was playing the flower game, I felt a little frustrated with him for not hitting/collecting all the flowers. Although, I don’t think you needed to get every single flower, just the flowers that glowed around them. The user experience wouldn’t change from not collecting them and you would continue to open/brighten more areas of the game. When I played Journey, I liked the aspect of the game by just following subtle paths that were presented and how easy it was to pick up on the game.

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Thoughts – 1/9/23

Today’s first class was pretty successful I’d say. Feels like we picked up where we left off in the first semester, but added some more intriguing ideas. I enjoyed the Calvin Ball demo. Although very loose and abstract, my dad read me Calvin and Hobbs before bed when I was little so I’ve always like it, so that connection was nostalgic for me personally.

The Painstation presentation was interesting to say the least. I had never heard of that until today, and was curious about a lot of the morals that surround such an idea. I asked in class
“how is that even allowed?” and Prof. Ames explained that there are waivers involved. Also, taking it a step further I tried to get into the rules and objective of Painstation, asking how you win, and questioning whether there are points involved or if the winner is the person less injured in the end. It helped spark an interesting thought and brainstorming moment in my brain for future projects: the idea that there doesn’t necessarily need to be points involved, but maybe things you can feel such as emotions. For example, the winner of the game is somehow determined by a certain level of happiness achieved through gameplay. I think that would be an interesting thing to play around with this semester.