The Pretentious Gamer

Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up Design Introduction

An approach to classifying early game concept design sees design methodologies classified as either top-down or bottom-up. Gamasutra has a good article on this here: Game Design Cognition: The Bottom-Up And Top-Down Approaches.

The short of it is that one can approach a game from the verbs or use-cases that the player can utilize, proceeding to elaborating specific mechanics for those verbs, moving onto the features and content that makes up the majority of the game itself, before finally arriving at the context and greater thematic content, etc.

The opposite approach starts with developing an overall abstracted concept of the game – answering questions such as what is this game about, what is the meaning, the setting, the ideas at play? This abstract concept is then used to construct a context which the features, gameplay mechanics and specific actions can be ultimately derived from.

Top-Down Design Plus Values Consideration at G4C 101

The first day of the Games for Change festival was focused on the “G4C 101 Workshop” – directed at nonprofits and other professionals new to game design and production concepts and essentially coach them through the processes and concerns inherent in building a social issue game. Mary Flanagan, a professor at Dartmouth and head of the Tiltfactor Lab research group just gave a talk (when I began writing this, several days ago) for the workshop detailing a somewhat altered perspective on the top-down design approach.

She began by laying out some of the challenges for aspiring serious games developers, among which include technical proficiency (programming, art, etc.), business models and sustainability (costs, funding, boards), affordability, and finally design proficiency. Since the audience was in large part new to thinking in terms of game systems, giving a basic understanding of the process of design was the goal of the talk. The main challenges were to incorporate consideration of values in the design process, and how to make rules which support that value.

Led by Professor Flanagan, the Grow-A-Game exercise directed participants through a primarily top-down approach to game design. As injecting a particular human value or principle into gameplay systems is generally a central focus of social issue games, this particular design approach began with examining potentially relevant values, and proceeding from there. Some examples of commonly accepted human values across cultures included privacy, creative expression, diversity, cooperation, group success, community, humility, and so on. The exercise used different color cards to randomly select values, verbs/actions, games, and challenges, which were then used to brainstorm new gameplay concepts using the selected value and other guidelines. One of our early card combinations was security/safety plus monopoly, from which we envisioned a game which had community security performing as a sort of gameplay capital.

It was interesting to see what a diverse group of concepts came together from such a simple exercise, although conceptually it wasn’t much of a stretch in terms of design methodology. Values become a part of the high level concepting, which can complicate matters, but a good gameplay mechanic can be designed for almost anything.

Apparently a number of serious games have been made starting from this method, including Hush (singing + human rights) and Layoff (empathy + security), both of which are worth checking out.

Also see: Part 1

– The imagery of Love made me recall discussions I periodically have with my artist girlfriend. I show her various videogames that I considered to have new and unique art styles. She responds that it looks almost the same as every other 3D game, even ones i would consider to be very different. These conversations lead to the realization that “large differences” in art direction of most 3D games in reality are only slight differences when considering the overall effect received by the viewer. While the differences in atmosphere, color tone, detail of textures & shapes, and light’s interaction with the environment may be significant between games like Shadow of the Colossus, Half Life 2, Gears of War 2 & Okami, the similarities outweigh the differences. They all consist of objects of certain colors and shapes placed within a 3D environment where light sources determine color intensity & darkening viewed from a mobile camera: essentially, the modern definition of rendering a 3d environment.

– Her primary question is: With technology at the state it is, why isn’t exploration of other methods of visually representing space more common? Can we visually create the atmosphere of walking down a city street without attempting to recreate each individual lamppost or garbage can? Can we rethink digital 3d space in a manner distinct from the legacy of games like Wolfenstein?

– As far as I can figure, there are 2 general methods of at least partially achieving this goal.
– The first is to create a 3D space in the traditional sense, but then apply complex filters to change the viewer’s perception of the world.
– The second is to rethink from the ground up how to make the viewer perceive movement through an environment while viewing a 2D screen.

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The announcement of Love is exciting to me on many levels.

A game that is as freeform and open to personal innovation as Dwarf fortress that takes place in a dynamic public place shared with friends and strangers is very compelling. You would have the ability to work with friends to test the limits of the toolset and your imagination while simultaneously being able to be inspired by other citizen’s creations and their alternative methods.

The fact that Love is the brainchild of a single person is equally inspiring and leads me to appreciate the product even more.

However, what I want to reflect on right now is the art style and how it resonates with an ever growing personal desire for videogames and their art direction.

Love is a world built out of very simplistic 3d shapes and structures. However, by using tricks that involved complicated uses of “edge polygons” and alpha textures, the game distorts these simple shapes to be slightly more fluid and dynamic in their appearance. There are no hard edges only skewed lines and somewhat blurry intersections.

This effect in practice creates a very painterly landscape where the colors and shapes themselves are alive. As you move through the land it feels as if you are progressing through a 2d image or painting: the painting is changing as you move, rather than you are moving around a static, sterile 3d space.

This somewhat new representation of a 3d space in a videogame sparked abstract discussions about the goals developers can have now that our technology has progressed to a sufficient level. For example, can we try and recreate how we view the world, rather than simply creating digital representations of objects existing in the world?

I’m going to muse a bit about this topic in my next post, part 2.

Some tips I got from a game industry veteran early in my career as a producer, after a number of disheartening incidents occurred and my confidence was at an all-time low. This is what he told me.

Shit happens.
Don’t give in to pressure or guilt.
Tracking documents are just tools.
Simplify.
Team spirit is crucial.
A formula for success: 30% Foresight + 70% Insight + 0% Hindsight

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