So you might remember that on the home page I said that I was hoping for an idea to come to me. Well an idea did come to me, and not that long after properly starting this project.
You see during the summer before I came into Year 13 and began this blog I got really into a game that my brother has on his IPad. The picture to the right is a screenshot of the game in question.
Those of you who are into Android and Smartphone game apps may recognise the game as Candy Crush Saga. A relatively new addition to the vast variety of different game apps that have been released since the Ipod Touch first came out.
This game takes the well-known and often addictive match-three game style and gives it a new colourful twist to make it a new and surprisingly original game, with well over 100 surprisingly difficult levels to clear and only a certain amount of lives to do it in before having to give it a rest and patiently wait for the lives to be replenished.
It's a very simplistic game, recycling a very old and well known playing style, and the levels all involve exactly the same principle to complete them - line candy up to clear the board and shoot for a high score, and yet this game is fast becoming one of the most successful games of its kind, if not the most.
Now I'll just give a little insight into my personal taste in games. I'm into console games full and through, though I do own the Nintendo 3DS as well, and I also don't own any kind of smartphone or equipment that utilizes touch screen technology (3DS excluded). I see android games being played all of the time, normally through passive glances at people with their heads immersed in them, or watching someone else play and sometimes giving what I deem as helpful advice.
I have played smartphone games before, namely the really well known ones like Angry Birds, Temple Run, Subway Surf and Jet-pack Joyride but don't avidly play them to a point where I want to go back and play more of it, or even moreso make me actually want to get a smartphone just to play them. I can however recognise them as being addictive games, although I could never really put my finger on why they were addictive until I started playing Candy Crush and actually started contemplating the question in earnest.
For someone who wants to become a Game Designer, understanding the elements of games that attract people to play them and no less keep playing them is one of the key things that you need to know if you want to make commercially successful games, and now that I have to design the basis for a potentially successful game in order to pass my Media Studies course, I figured let's try and find the answer to that through doing this project; killing two with one stone which is always how I prefer to work.
Now I just told you all of that so that you could get some idea of where my trail of thought and inspiration for this project came from. I want to answer a personal question through doing this course:
"What is it about every commercially successful game out there that has made them as successful as they are?"
To answer that I'm going to start analysing the particularly successful games out of the genre that has fast become infamous for the addictive quality of its games - App Games or Smartphone Games.
And ultimately to this end, through playing Candy Crush and becoming vexed by how such a simple game can be so popular, I intend to ultimately create the prefix for a potential Game app that will hopefully boast the qualities of a successful game.
Now finally we come to the idea itself. There's very little to show at the moment except for the name of the project (also subject to possible change in the future) -
CircuitBoard
There's also this rough plan that I did at the end of one of my classes when I decided to put something down on paper. It's a little insight into what I have in mind so that you can begin speculating.
Right now this is currently all there is. Once I have more ideas and maybe have some research under my belt I'll put up another post that expands on this. It's too early to head off in any particular direction at the moment, but once I have something definite I'll put it up. For now you can guess and speculate, but keep tuned in for more in the future.
Also this post is a means to explain the direction that I'll be taking for this task. As I've already definitely settled on looking into app games as the main focus of my project.
So heres an introduction, and now the work begins. I've got a question to answer.
See you next time!
No comments :
Post a Comment