Alright, this comes a little bit late, but better late than never, right?

The thing is, I’ve already been helping out with the launch of TWO games on Steam Greenlight, the platform through which indie game developers can show their upcoming games and have them voted by the Steam community to be sold on their store (it’s not that easy to get your game up there if you’re an indie dev). The first one was BetaDwarf’s FORCED, which by the way succeeded in a great Kickstarter campaign recently, reaching over $60,000 in pledges by fans.

But recently I helped out fellow developer Nicklas Nygren with the Steam Greenlight campaign for his new game Knytt Underground, which got released a few weeks ago on PS3 and Playstation Vita.

And what did I do? Well, I created this little interview video, of course! Recorded at the IT University of Copenhagen (gotta love the views from those glass boxes) for the game’s publisher, Ripstone, the video is shown right on the front page of the Greenlight page for the game (Go on now! Vote for it!)

If you still haven’t seen anything of the game, suffice to say that it’s possibly Nicklas’ best work yet. Visually striking, with tons of rooms to explore, lots of characters to talk (with dialogues to laugh a lot about), secrets hidden literally EVERYWHERE (watch out for a hint in the video interview!) and some great challenges, this is one heck of a game to go through.

But I won’t spoil anymore of it for you. I seriously recommend you check the videos on the Steam page and give the game a try for yourself!

Funny that it took me seeing Simon Cutajar’s blog post about the last Exile Game Jam to realize I should probably update my blog with it as well…

But here it is nonetheless: Coin Knights is the last game I’ve worked on since Super Screaming Skull Bros 2, this time along with Simon Cutajar, inspired by the arcade cabinet made by the RedGrim boys. All done, as usual per game jam standards, in under 48 hours.

But whereas the previous game was a 2 player co-op experience, Coin Knights is a 4 player competitive game where each one of these brightly colored and blocky knights will have to collect the highest amount of coins possible before the time runs out.

Simple enough, but there’s a bit more to it. The central theme, given by the Exile Game Jam restrictions, was uncertainty, and we addedgreedto that (one of the themes that were also commented at Exile). Players will have to fight each other to collect the treasure chests, get the coins inside (which can appear randomly in groups of 10, 20, 30, 50 or 100 coins) and bring them back to the castle. Players can hold up to 4 treasures at the same time. The catch is that the contents of the chests are unknown to the player until opened, and if the player is too greedy he might stumble upon a bomb. And a bomb will, simply enough, make him lose all the coins he has collected.

So players will have to decide whether to keep collecting coins or bring what they have so far to their castles so as not to risk losing it all.

Oh, and players can push each other away by using their shields. Or steal the contents of a chest before they are collected by a player.

Unluckily for us the game was not finished on time thanks to an untimely bug caused by the randomly spawning treasure chests, which totally crashes the game sometimes before reaching the time limit. Hopefully both Simon and I will be able to further polish the game, fixing bugs and adding a few more power-ups that will make the gameplay more chaotic (personally I also want to increase the size of all the sprites so that the action is bigger and crazier).

Simon and I worked on the design of the game from the very beginning, with him later on focusing on the programming and music side while I made all the graphics and sound effects. For now you can play the current version of Coin Knights here!

Playtesting Coin Knights at Exile Game Jam

I have a confession to make:

Up until last week I had never seen any e-sports event. Not just that I hadn’t ever been to one in person, but I just seriously had no idea how big the scene was!

And now, after spending an entire day at Copenhagen Games with the awesome people at betaDwarf, I can say I’m amazed at all the craziness going on.

Starcraft II matches being commented live? Check.

Counter-Strike 1.6 teams full with their own jerseys? Check.

Booth babes giving away free coke and chewing gum? Check.

Lots of beer in Denmark? Check.

So what was I doing there? Capture every single moment on video, of course! betaDwarf had their booth in a very visible area, right next to the Snot! and World of Football booths, two amazing indie games under development right here in Copenhagen, and in front of the massive EA booth for FIFA Street.

And what was going on in our booth? You guessed! We were letting people play the latest playable build of Forced!

Forced is the new name for what was previously being called Faith of the Guardians, a co-op arena combat game in which up to four players will have to complete a series of challenges as gladiators.

Some of the people who stopped by and participated in our tournament to see which team achieved the highest score even walked out with Diablo 3 beta keys!

I’m sure you will be able to see what it was like at Copenhagen Games really soon at www.betadwarf.com, but meanwhile you can have a sneak peak with these pictures.

It all started with a cake by Tim Garbos in Corinne’s Facebook wall for her birthday (as seen above).

And what started as an innocent little monster cake with a Danish flag became a series of back-and-forths between some of us to out-do the other. A real cake war!

In came Samuel Walz’s improved version of the cake, dubbed the Cakemonster 4.2 (in a seemingly random version upgrade) with:
- More candles
- More strawberries
- Improved danish flag (more cozy according to Sam and possibly attracting Spanish tourists)
- Candles already lit

This upgrade didn’t go unnoticed, and soon after Kristín posted on Corinne’s Facebook wall yet another improvement!

This new sexier version of the cake was now up to Cakemonster 6.8 (Woah! These numbers go up fast!) and according to the official changelog it included:

- Make-up, it’s what every cakemonster needs to feel oh so pretty
- Bigger shoes
- Two extra creepy fingers on each hand!
- Engraved candles

Then Kayode (feels so weird to call him like that now when we all name him K.) allowed us to take a break from monster cakes and gave Corinne a different kind of drawing. Birthday laser included.

But alas, it didn’t take too long before the Cakemonster evolved even more! Now it went up to a more stable-looking version 7, courtesy of Freyr!

This version’s biggest upgrade was obvious: the Cakemonster was now together with its extended family! (With a lovely meme in the background).

At this point even Google joined the cake party!

Meanwhile I was deciding how to add my two cents for Corinne’s birthday, and seeing how I was in the 3D Game Art course at that moment it just felt right to take the cake to the third dimension!

Apparently the one who started this entire cake trend, Tim himself, felt up to the challenge. After all my cake was in 3D, sure, but it was not our dearly beloved Cakemonster! So here came the new 3D rendition of it by Tim!

Taking it personally (I mean, come on, Tim did publicly state that his cake was meant to beat mine!) I declared the Cake Wars and quickly returned this personal attack with the following picture with my cake angry and ready to cut the Cakemonster (9.3? I lost count of the version number already!) in pieces:

But it seems like you cannot simply take it against Tim’s cake and leave unscathed… His next move took it yet one step further! The Cakemonster could now move and do a backflip! Or a sideflip… Or… well, something that ends with lots of colorful lines! It lacked the several improvements made during the day, but hey! It jumps! And that’s awesome, right?

Ok, so he’s made the Cakemonster animated? Alright! I’ll take it on! I’ll make it interactive!

After all we’re Game Designers in here, so why not quickly learn how to do a simple First Person Shooter with the Cakemonster?

Of course a picture just doesn’t show the full thing, so why not give the game a try? It’s available here and it only needs the Unity Web Plugin to play!

At this point Tim had made me think that he was giving up and would not take it further (LIAR!), so I happily sat down… until an unexpected challenger raised up!

The duo of Samuel and Kayode surprisingly made this flash game based on Space Invaders, with with the Cakemonster (this time once again in its latest version) attacking… both Tim and me. Oh noes! Nice touch with the custom-made music, by the way! Of course you can also play it yourself here!

Were these two the winners of the Cake Wars? Up to now Corinne had received more than enough cakes and Cakemonsters to make this for her most delicious birthday yet.

But NO! That was definitely not the end of it! While I couldn’t stop laughing at the second Cake Wars game, Tim had inadvertently created something that could easily surpassed any digital cake! He made a REAL cake in just under 30 minutes!

Sure, it’s made out of an orange. But it’s still a cake with two candles! And two Danish flags! And it’s still a Cakemonster (11.7?).

That last sneaky move was performed 5 minutes before midnight, thus officially closing Corinne’s birthday. I gave up, I couldn’t reply on time and Tim Garbos won this Cake Wars.

And I’m sure this is one war that will go down to the history books

I’m taking the 3D Game Art course at the IT University of Copenhagen this year… though I’m not really registered for the course (I can still attend the classes). And we were asked to build a robot in 3D by using ONLY primitives. No modifiers, no textures. Just plain colors and basic shapes.

So I decided to make Bender from popular TV show Futurama.

I know it’s not perfect… but it’s as far as I could get by using the restrictions imposed and my still limited 3D modelling skills

I’m not going to explain a lot in this post because right now we’re quite short on time, but I just wanted to update my blog by letting you all know a little bit about the game we are working.

As I’ve already written in the Global Game Jam website, [BLANK] is a videogame about uncertainty. You wake up in a strange environment, unable to see properly and with no recollection of how you got there. Players will have to explore this environment to slowly recollect the memories of the events that took him there in the first place.

But how does one explore things when he cannot see?

The game is (still!) being made by Team Flying Noses (a pun on the early beginnings of our group), which is formed by Daryl Hornsby (UK), Kayode Shonibare-Lewis (UK), Micael Svensson (Sweden), Nicolai Brobak (Denmark), Patrick Dekhla (Sweden) and me, Anchel Labena.

From left to right: Patrick, Micael, Daryl, Anchel, Nicolai and Kayode

And finally, a teaser picture of our game!

Again, don’t forget to follow the awesome #NGJ12 Twitter Team for live updates of everything going on. I assume that the Twitter stream will probably spring back to fast action as soon as the game presentations begin .

In case you hadn’t noticed yet, the Nordic Game Jam 2012 has just started!

Among a small group of people we’re tweeting about every single thing that is going on over here at the IT University of Copenhagen, like the awesome indie games being showcased by some big indie names and Manveer Heir, Senior Designer of Mass Effect 3, giving the intro keynote for the game jam, which is part of the international Global Game Jam 2012.

So, what are you waiting for? Follow everything that is going on here by searching for the Twitter hashtag #NGJ12 and listen to everything the following people are saying:

• Mathias Poulsen (@mathiaspoulsen)
• Jonathan Van Hove (@joonturbo)
• Daryl Hornsby (@delta_gemini)
• Simon Cutajar (@scutajar)
• Jacob Herold (@JacobHerold)
• Benjamin Schaffer (@Bert_Baker)
• Anders Lystad Brevik (@Norwigi)

And, of course, me, Anchel Labena (@Anchelspain)

Not much else to say except that I’m already all pumped up for this event! Also I will be hosting a few friends from previous game jams at my place during both the Nordic Game Jam and the Spilbar event taking place one day before.

Oh, and did I mention that Manveer Heir, senior designer at Bioware (and currently working on Mass Effect 3) will be the guest keynote speaker for this year’s Nordic Game Jam?

Expect me to be tweeting (as much as possible given the big time constraints I will have that weekend) everything going on during those exciting days!

Ladies and gentlemen: it’s ON!

From January 27th and until the 29th game designers, programmers, artists and much more everywhere around the world will participate in the Global Game Jam 2012, a fun, worldwide event in which the objective is to create videogames in just 48 hours. There’s also a non-digital games track available for those who prefer to stay away from computers.

Like last year I will be taking part of the Nordic Game Jam, which is the local event taking place at the IT University of Copenhagen at the same time as all the other participating game jam sites. That doesn’t mean in any way that only people from Denmark will be around: as a matter of fact I’m already meeting a friend from last year, Olli Harjola from Finland one day before the game jam starts.

Again I will try to post here and tweet through my @anchelspain account everything that is going on at the Nordic Game Jam (or at least as much as it’s possible with all the craziness that will be going on during that 48 hour period).

Meanwhile I’ll leave you with this really cool video showing what the Global Game Jam is about!

Alright, so I have a game, or at least a prototype of it. How can I improve it?

Because if I had the time, I would definitely work out a few quirk things that ended up unfinished.

First of all, character animation.

Because I actually made different sprites for the main character running around, at least in one direction, but I didn’t have the time to look into how to implement this in an 8 axis movement. It’s one minor thing that can make a strong difference between a sketchy prototype and a polished build.

But that’s purely aesthetics without much effect on the gameplay.

On the other hand the island, the gameworld itself, could do with a lot more detail and greatly improve the final effect. After all this is a game about exploration, and what good is exploring if there isn’t anything interesting to visit?

Stine likes games that show a lot of different areas full of mysteries, with old ruins, swamps, dangerous seas and more. For my prototype I had to put the limit at some point and I could never focus on making any area strong in characterization. I also couldn’t give my gameworld a nice, consistent story. It all ended up quite rushed in that aspect to tell the truth.

Then I would love to make the quests more interesting. I mean, right now as it is the game is full of fetch quests: go here, take this, find this guy, blow this cave, open that chest… A little bit more depth would have been very desirable. And that means lines upon lines of code, of course. It wouldn’t be so hard now that I have a grasp on the basics of scripting but it’s not something that I am willing to jump on right now.

And of course we have combat. Somehow I always wanted some sort of simple, old 2D Zelda styled combat in the game, even if to provide some extra difficulty in completing the quests. Again, this is not a core element of the game, but I really think it could evolve the gameplay a lot more. Not very complex combat sequences, but just basic sword fighting. The idea of using spells against enemies is also there, but that’s more of a second thought, even though it would be very cool.

Now, I don’t have any real plans of continuing this game any further, but I do want to keep using this little island of mine as a test lab to try out new ideas I might come up with for other games. It has the framework and now I know the tools. I’m still not perfect with coding, but I can definitely do much better now with the experience I have gained this semester.

And again, you will probably be able to try this prototype out yourself in the portfolio section. Keep reading for an update soon!

It’s taken forever, but it’s finally done!

The final, working prototype of my game Adventure Island (tentative title, I know the name is already taken) is now finished, complete, and will stay as it is for my final hand-in for the course User Experience & Prototyping at the IT University of Copenhagen. It’s very much unfinished, it has flaws everywhere, but there is just so much that you can do with a prototype given the amount of time that we had.

So how did it turn out?

Well… I would say that I’m quite happy with it. Especially considering that up until this moment I had never done an entire game with the Unity Engine by myself, all from scratch. Sure, I had worked before with Unity (R.E.C, Mr. Optimistic and The Hitchhiker), but I always worked with other team members for those, and always at least one of them a programmer. This time however it was only me. That means that I had to learn how to code JavaScript from zero while at the same time designing the level, making the graphics (ok, they weren’t that many, I got lazy at some point and I reused sprites all over again) and playtesting and making changes.

Not to mention that I had to remember that this game was for one person in special, not me.

I have to thank Samuel Walz and Martin Fasterholdt for helping me with some random bugs I was encountering in the build (as usual the typical mistakes: I left one “;” out of place, or “GameObject” should not have started with capital G).

But besides that I think it turned out quite nicely. The quest is reasonably long for the average player to do in one sitting without going by too fast, the world is expansive enough so that it encourages the exploration I was aiming for, and players can take different approaches at beating the game.

And you can drown in the lake. Be careful with that.

As I said there are still some bugs here and there, but those are going to have to stay for now.

I plan on making the build available for everyone in my portfolio soon enough, but that one will most definitely have a few tweaks to make it more polished for public availability. Stay updated!

Aren’t we some awesome fellas? Now… what were we doing that day?

Does it have anything to do with the trailer for the upcoming game Heroes & Generals by Danish developer Reto-Moto? I would check out their website just in case…

Doesn’t this look crude to you? Don’t worry, it’s just a minor sketch of what I would later on improve with Photoshop, but this here was my first attempt at designing a UI for my game for Stine.

I’m a fan of simple, non-intrusive interfaces, so my first attempt at a UI for the game was really empty, without much in the way of the player.

A simple health-bar and an icon representing the item at hand at the moment. Since the main focus of the game is on exploration I wanted to use as much screen real-estate as possible for the actual gameworld. Also I refused to add a mini-map on the screen at all times, since I thought that would detract my player from the feeling of immersing herself into the world.

But what if the player gets lost? What if he wants to switch items, or look at the map, or just check what the quest at hand is? Well, for those moments I designed a pause menu with all those functions built in as separate pages that the player can scroll to:

Again, the idea was to keep things simple. Not many buttons, not a thousand icons everywhere. I wanted the player to select an item to keep at hand at all times, and then switch back to another item when necessary. By switching tabs the player could read the quest list and see an overworld map with a red dot marking the current position.

During the User Experience & Prototyping class that we held at my university dedicated to designing a UI I had my partner Martin give it a look and voice his opinions on this. He had also drawn a UI for my game with the ideas he had in mind without looking at what I had done first.

The differences couldn’t be any more shocking.

While far from being very cluttered, this UI showed important information like a much bigger inventory, the name of the village or area you had just entered, a quick-slot item bar, a dialogue box, a mini-map, a quests list and a health-bar located right on top of the main character.

Some things like the mini-map I still was sure I wanted to avoid, as well as the dialogue box (since I don’t expect my game to have a lot of heavy conversations or multiple characters speaking at the same time). The alignment bar was a nice thing, since the player has the possibility of doing good or bad deeds, but I thought that this was not something that needed to be immediately seen at all times on the screen.

But this UI really made me realize about something: in my attempt to make the UI I had been thinking for myself, and not for my player. My UI was very “consolified”, more apt for big TV screens and playing with a game controller.

But Stine, as shown on my previous interviews with her, prefers to play on the computer, with mouse and keyboard. And Martin’s UI lent itself much better for that type of control.

I definitely needed to make a big change here.

So in comes my new UI. Still aiming towards the simplistic side (also please mind that this is a Photoshop mock-up, not a real in-game UI), with an inventory better geared for PC gamers like Stine, accessible from the numerical row of the keyboard (with the 6th number opening a larger inventory screen so that players can re-organize their items into the quick-access list). The health-bar I still preferred to keep on a corner so as to maintain UI distractions on the sides rather than in the middle of the screen. This game is all about enjoying the exploration after all.

As I said, this is still a far concept from what the UI would look like in the actual game. But these mock-ups and the comments from Martin helped me realize my vision closer to that of what Stine would like.

First of all yes, I know the name “Adventure Island” is taken, but this is just a working title while I define all the game rules, objective and even the world itself, which is not even an island at this point.

But what you have here is the very first early prototype of the game I’m making for Stine in the UX & Prototyping course at ITU.

Almost entirely based on the paper prototype I already wrote about earlier this month, the objective of this early build is first and foremost, to get me acquainted with JavaScript in Unity. I had already worked with the Unity Engine before (see the games Mr. Optimistic, R.E.D. and The Hitchiker in the projects section of this site), but this was the first time I was doing the coding by myself, no other programmers involved. This meant learning quite a few things from scratch. I tried a visual scripting tool, but it didn’t help much without at least understanding a few of the basic things of JavaScript, since I was constantly hitting a roadblock when my 3rd person controller object wasn’t detecting the collisions with the other interactive elements of my scene. It took me quite a while to figure out what was going wrong (hey, I’m not a programmer, remember?) but eventually I got it right, so with a few tweaks here and there I managed to get a working framework which will later on let me expand this game world easily by reusing the current code.

So basically this prototype is still pretty much devoid of gameplay. Sure, you can talk to NPCs, they trigger events, and you can use the boat to cross the lake (even though right now it still looks as if the main character is WALKING on water). But later on I intend to add some minor combat element into the game as things get bigger and better. Not that I have much time left for making combat very interesting and innovative, so I will borrow many things from the good old Zelda playbook.

Yes, this game is being heavily inspired by the Legend of Zelda series. Considering that this is a project for a course in which we are meant to make a game for someone else, not ourselves, you could think that I’m playing foul here and using a game that I like as a model (because yes, I’m a HUGE Zelda fan). But if you’ve been reading my previous entries about what Stine likes in a game, you will definitely agree that a game based on exploration in the way that games like Zelda and Oblivion (should I start making references to Skyrim now that this new behemoth of a game is out?) do it.

But of course this game is neither Zelda or The Elder Scrolls. And neither is it World of Warcraft, as much as Stine would love to see it (mind you though, she is waiting for the game that will finally beat WoW so she can jump into it and lose herself in this new world).

But I’m taking cues from here and there. You have a relatively big, open world (Zelda and Skyrim check), with some areas closed until you have the right item/progress in-game that you find in chests (Zelda check), characters who give you quests that add to a log (Skyrim check) and in the future, I hope, simple combat based on sword and spells (Skyrim and Zelda put together for a check).

But my focus of attention is still on the exploration aspect of the game.

While still unfinished this world already has a forest, a lake, a volcano and a town, with some paths here and there so that the player doesn’t get lost, but it’s still pretty much a green land without much to do or discover.

What I did though was work on the camera: when the player is in a town or in an important area, the camera zooms closer to the character (which, by the way, is still an unfinished one, and needs to be changed into a girl, more on that in future posts). This way the player can pay attention to the tiny details of the areas. Say, for example, an inscription on a wall (something I know Stine will be very keen to look at and decipher what it means) or a window with someone looking through it. Also when the player talks to a character the camera zooms in even closer so as to emphasize the characters who are interacting with each other.

But when the player heads out into the open, the perspective changes. It doesn’t zoom out the camera. Instead I’m changing the field of view of the main camera. This makes the main character appear still big enough so that he is not lost amidst a sea of enemies or other things in the world (of course, once I start populating it with such elements), but allows the player to view what lies around her much better. This distorts the view in the corners a little bit, but I think it also gives a nice effect of the world being kind of round.

During the presentation of this early prototype in class, someone made a good point by asking that, if Stine likes exploration, why would I offer her a world that is not entirely open right from the start, but instead restricted until she gets the right items. My reply to this is that, based on the interview I had with Stine over a month ago, Stine likes the feeling of knowing there is a place she cannot reach yet, and she will keep trying again and again every time she has a new ability or item to see if the area has already opened up to her.

But in any case this is still a very early prototype, as this last picture summarizes.

I hope to really improve this in the following weeks to transform it into something that Stine will really like. And, as usual, I will post my progress here as the days move on.

What you see here is the very first paper prototype of my game for Stine, the girl I am making a video game prototype for in my UX & Prototyping course. It might not seem like much at first, just a simple (badly) hand-drawn map on a hexagonal grid with a small ball of aluminum near the middle of the map (it’s kind of hard to see in the picture, but it is there).

So… what is the point of this map? Does it actually serve a purpose? Is it some kind of D&D game?

Not at all! This, along with some blue paper with a hole in it and a script that I have written get together to make a paper prototype that has actually fulfilled its purpose very well. Either that, or Stine lied to me when she said she liked it.

You see, this is what Stine actually sees when she plays my paper prototype. Just a very small area of a map, with the rest all covered with the blue paper.

I gave her some very simple instructions: her character (at this point still undefined) has to find her way through the map to reach a great wizard who has locked himself up in the top of a tower. What reason she has for finding the wizard I left it up for her own imagination.

The problem is that the door to the tower is locked shut and there is absolutely no way that she can break it or climb the tower. So she’s going to have to find her way through by exploring the map, talking to villagers and perhaps acquiring some equipment. After that, I told her nothing else and I just read to her the parts of the script that I had prepared for whenever she reached specific points of the map, like the villages, the lonely hut on the North side or the spot marked with a red “X”.

Why make a paper prototype like this? Because, as mentioned in previous posts about this project, Stine LOVES adventuring and exploring in games. So my intent here is to have her move around a game world of my own creation and see how she reacts, how she moves and how she thinks (aloud) while playing it. This will help me shape up the first digital prototype of the game and represents an important step forward into creating a game entirely from the feedback of another person.

And how did she do while playing the paper prototype? That’s a very interesting thing: it was totally unexpected for me. She REALLY believed herself in this game world and feared for the life of her character. For example, one of the villagers told her that a thief hides himself in a hut to the North. She needed the treasure that the thief had taken, but when she saw that the hut had smoke coming out from the chimney she decided it was best not to break in because she was afraid the thief might be in. Since she didn’t know if she could really die in the game she was trying to be very careful about it, and refused to enter the place, instead going out to explore the world some more and maybe coming back later.

There were also some funny moments. She found a lone tree for example, one that I had drawn there merely for decoration and to avoid the map being too empty. But she was disappointed that it was only decorative and expected something else out of it. So she… hugged the tree. Yes, that’s right. She felt like she needed to interact with the tree, so she hugged it. And not just once, she did it more times when she came across it, in case that could somehow affect the outcome of the story.

More interesting for me as pure feedback was that she re-visited some areas that she knew she had already completed to see if things had changed in a way. For example, she went back into the forest where she had already opened a treasure chest because there might be something new in it.

Another important fact was that she was expecting small details that could hint her about the game world itself, like footprints of some kind of animal (in fact she was disappointed that there were only human footprints around).

The final, very important piece of feedback I got was about the size of the map. Since the view she had was at all times very limited, this gave her a feeling of the world being much bigger than it actually was. This is something that I intend to apply in a very easy way into the digital prototype, which I will discuss later on, even though I have already started to code it (yes, me, someone who doesn’t know a thing about programming, is coding this game by himself…)

That’s it for now. The next step is to create an early digital prototype based on this paper one and making good use of the feedback I got from this. And I already have some neat ideas.

In what has probably been the craziest and funniest lecture for User Experience & Prototyping, today we learned about video prototyping. That is, creating a video that serves to test a design instead of creating a digital, coded prototype that would probably take more resources and time to prepare.

And of course a UX class is not the same if there is not a short time to experiment with the new methods learned, so today we got together in small groups to come up with a quick idea for a game… and video prototype it.

This time I worked with Morten Hansen and Lasse Hansen to create the Drunk Goblins video. Just the name and the two pictures above should give you an idea of how much fun we had working on it.

We used anything we could quickly find in the short amount of time we had (so yes, don’t expect the next Steven Spielberg production) from play dough and paper to foam to create a few set pieces that would be used to represent our idea of a game in which you control some goblins set on stealing all the brandy a St. Bernard dog uses when rescuing people up in the mountains (the St. Bernard being the restriction we had to use when coming up with the game idea).

With a few quick and extremely dirty editing touches (I didn’t even have time to take out the parts where you can hear us laughing while recording, or even saying “action”) we put up this short video.

Again, don’t expect anything big. But it’s good for a few laughs and, overall, shows up the potential of what a video prototype can do. Definitely a method worth giving another try!

Special thanks go to Wen Xiong for helping out as a goblin and Ronny Nilson for being such an awesome Swedish skier .

Let’s recap the past few weeks:

There’s Stine, the girl I have to make a game prototype for in my User Experience & Prototyping course. And she likes visiting complex, lush worlds full of mysteries to discover.

And if her previous statements playing the participatory design game and the map she drew for the cultural probe, I also have her replies to a small 7 day challenge that I prepared for her in which she had to reply every day to one interesting question with a picture and a footnote.

When asked about a place where she would like to live in she sent me the picture above: an autumnal picture, comfortable, beautiful, peaceful and pretty, as she described it.

But at the same time she told me that if she wasn’t looking for a place to relax, she would rather be somewhere else.

Stine herself described the picture this way:

“A swamp full of creeps everywhere, small lamps, spirits. I wouldn’t want to live there, but I surely would want to go there to explore it. So to answer the question of what I’d do in there, then I’d probably be a traveler/ a messenger.”

So I would say it’s quite clear. Stine likes exploration at its best. Not just wandering around, but being in mysterious areas where she doesn’t know what she will find.

So when I finally got to interview her (and recorded the entire conversation for a later transcription and analysis) I knew where I had to look for answers.

If she likes exploration, what is it about it that really makes her tick?

Obviously my interview with her wasn’t just about that. There were several topics I needed to tackle, but the most interesting one so far was the exploration element. As soon as I asked her why she liked it so much she almost went bonkers. And that’s an understatement when we’re talking about Stine: she talks fast, excited and almost yelling at the most intense moments of her explanation (of why she likes exploring, go figure…) But it’s fun nevertheless, listening to her wishes of being the first one ever to discover a new place nobody has seen before, of reaching easter eggs hidden in the gameworld and be able to tell everyone about it (but not how exactly to find it, she really respects the spoilers part of a mystery).

She will revisit areas again and again if she gets even the smallest hint that something might have changed since the last time she was there (something that apparently happens very often in one of her favorite games: World of Warcraft).

Taking that last statement in consideration I asked her what would do if she found a place where she knows there is a secret but cannot reach it for some reason. Her reply was that such knowledge is enough to warm her up and she will probably try for a long time to reach that secret, no matter what. What if she cannot make it? Then she will look for help online, but once again, a guide without spoilers, that only tells how to reach the area, not what lies hidden in it.

This reminded me a lot about the Zelda games, where many times the player has the access blocked to certain areas even though the game seems to be open-world. Would this limitation bring Stine down? Not a chance! I asked her about it and she gave me an example taken out from GTA III, where there was this metro station that was locked. Being in front of the door, knowing that it can be opened somehow but she wasn’t able to made her really curious to know what she would find in there, and she kept trying for a while. But once she figured out she couldn’t do it, she thought that maybe the area would open up later in the game. What did she do then? Well… she came back after every mission to see if it was open already!

On the other hand she really dislikes games that try to give the feeling of an open-world but in reality they are full of invisible walls. Her example this time was Guild Wars, where she says that it’s mostly a world full of corridors, like a forest that has trees functioning as a full wall to prevent the player from going out of the area intended. About this she says it is really frustrating, because you could really see the limits of this world, them being very tangible.

As she said it with her own worlds: “Don’t give me an open world map and then tell me that I can’t go there, it’s annoying!”

So there you go, those are some of the insights that I got during Stine’s interview about why she likes exploration in games. Obviously there was a lot more we talked about, both about exploration and about other topics like her gaming habits (how often she plays games and when and where) and what kind of game characters she likes, or what the protagonist should be like.

More to come soon!

I really never, ever thought that this video would see the light. Even less as an opening to a trailer for a documentary.

But Suvi Andrea Helminen is indeed making such a documentary and the trailer starts with me. I just wonder if everything else that I said at that moment is being used at all. I’m scared…

Isn’t this map amazing? This island… it’s so mesmerizing! Check out all the tiny little details in it! There’s a whirlpool, an ice volcano (yes, it’s ice, not lava) and look at that little light bulb at the top of the lighthouse!

Now, I wish I could say that I have drawn that, but sadly my skills are nowhere that good.

Instead this was a drawing by Stine, my muse for the User Experience & Prototyping course at the IT University of Copenhagen.

How did this get to happen? Well, after that little participatory design game I showed her where she came up with the idea of a desert island with a jungle in it, I decided it would be an interesting idea to see her try to draw her own map of an island and fill it up with anything that she found interesting. This was part of my cultural probe which I used to gain more insight into how Stine thinks, acts and what she likes.

When one week later she came to me with this map I was shocked. Definitely so much more than what I expected. It’s clear that she had a lot of fun drawing this!

And she didn’t just draw a bunch of random stuff. She gave a lot of thought to even the tiniest little detail, and she explained to me what this was all about.

The most interesting thing was that many of the things she didn’t really know why they were there. What are those things on the southwest island? Stones? Rocks? Monuments? She said she didn’t know, but she so badly wanted to be able to dive into her own world to see it with her own eyes and discover the mystery of the stones.

The same goes for the houses Northeast. They look like little hills where people live inside them. I asked Stine if those were hobbit holes, and she declined the idea. There could be hobbits inside, sure, but wasn’t it more exciting to go there and discover for yourself? Also they live near a swamp, and who knows what kind of creatures could live there…

What about the castle? Does anyone really live there anymore? Especially with that misty, creepy forest so close to it… Apparently those skeletons from the participatory design game are in that forest, so you might not want to wander for too long in there.

Want more? How about the little village next to the beach? It’s kinda small, but it seems protected from all dangers around thanks to the cliff.

Those are just some of the things that Stine told me about her map of the island. An island that she really wanted to visit, explore and get lost in it, learn its mysteries and who knows what she could find in it?

If this is not a very clear indicator of what Stine wants in a game, then I don’t know what is. As in the participatory design game the keyword here is exploration.

But don’t trust me for this. There’s still a lot of work ahead, and soon enough an interview will reveal more details about Stine’s obsession with exploring new worlds!

Sometimes you just have no ideas at all when you want to make a game. At least not when you need to create a game for a very specific target audience. And, as mentioned in one of my previous posts, this audience is Stine.

Luckily there are a lot of tools that can help a designer come up with something interesting, and one of my favorites we have learned so far in my User Experience & Prototyping course at the IT University of Copenhagen is the Participatory Design Game, or PD for short.

The objective is very simple: in short it consists of creating a short and simple activity that will open up the creativity of your “muse” you’re creating the game for (Stine) and give you ideas of what she will like.

Martin Ørbæk and I created a card game designed specifically for that. Each card has a concept drawn in it, be it a game character, an environment or a weapon or item. These concepts can be combined together to make even more concepts. For example, you can combine a gun with a laser, and you get a “laser gun”, or put together space and an island, and you get a “space island”.

But it is not us who were supposed to combine those. It’s Stine who had to play the game, drawing cards one by one from a pile, all facing the table, and combine those concepts as she sees fit to her liking.

As such Stine showed me her taste and preferences when it comes to videogames. She quickly dismissed certain ideas like those of a monster or space (she doesn’t like space travelling or spaceships, but can live with a game that takes place in space), while preferring environments that would be interesting to explore.

I found it funny that she didn’t use the skeleton card as an enemy, but rather as a remain of a dead body in a desert island, which fueled her interest in discovering how that person died.

A few more cards drawn later, she told me the story of those skeletons: they became ghosts. But not just any type of ghosts, those were explosive ghosts (by making use of the bomb card).

It’s very easy to make a story with Stine around, she doesn’t simply combine ideas. Instead she creates a full world breathing with background stories and interesting characters (the protagonist is a small boy with a sword and a shield who can also conjure spells, but he doesn’t really know how to use them).

It’s a very interesting take on starting a new game as a designer. You’re no longer thinking about doing what you would like to do, but rather making the ideas that she likes into a fully realized game. And it is something that I intend to see through to the end for this course.