john laudun research, teaching, writing

Resources

Getting Started

Approaches to Play

Puzzles

Game Studies

Game studies is an emergent discipline, practiced by scholars (and scientists) both within the academy and without. On the more academic side is the journal Analog Game Studies, which offers an Analog Game Studies 101; on the non-academic side there is BoardGameGeek, which has been around since 2000!

It should be noted that there is also game theory, which is a field of mathematics. While it is not central to this course, some of you may want to explore it both for ideas for game mechanics but also to anticipate possible problems with mechanics you are considering. If you want to get a glimpse of game theory before exploring any of the links that follow, Nicky Case has a fantastic interactive rendition of “The Prisoner’s Dilemma,” Trust. Play the game. Write down two things. If you find yourself interested in learning more, there is Martin Osborne’s Introduction to Game Theory (an online book) amd the Open Textbook Library has Nordstrom and Oregon’s Introduction to Game Theory: A Discovery Approach available both online and as a downloadable PDF. In addition to these textbooks, there are also online resources: Coursera has Stanford’s Game Theory class, which they claim you can finish it in 17 hours. Perhaps the best introduction is

Opportunities

  • It is too late to enter this year’s Interactive Fiction Competition, but there’s always next year. In the mean time, this year’s entries will be released to the public on September 1.
  • malev_minis posted about a community challenge for a One Box Wargame.
  • It’s okay if you have no interest in working in the games or literary industries. If fan fiction has proven anything, it’s proven that the boundaries between being an amateur and being a professional have long been blurred. Nathalie Lawhead recently gave a talk essentially arguing that hobby makers are important to the games industry.
  • Maybe all you want to do is make games: How to Survive in Gamedev for Eleven Years Without a Hit.

Ideas for Game Mechanics

One of the things you have to do when you create a game is to start building mechanics of play, and those mechanics are almost always quantifications of abilities and skills as inputs and actions as outcomes.

  • Matthew Colville addresses some of the basics of quantification in “Worldbuilding: The Demographics of Capital”. (Capital is the game he was working on.)

  • The simple d6 oracle: 6-Yes And, 5-Yes, 4-Yes But, 3-No But, 2-No, 1-No And.
  • Incompetech has a grid generator as well as pre-formatted grid PDFs you can print: Grid Paper PDFs. (Feel free to search for “grid generator” to see what else is out there.) Grids are great for maps of all kinds as well as for planning.
  • The Crooked Staff Blog offers a wide variety of fantasy and scifi architecture and furniture PDFs that you print, glue onto cardboard or foam core board, and then cut out. It’s impressive.
  • Dungeon Scrawl lets you create dungeons simply by clicking and dragging to create corridors and rooms. It’s a lot of fun.

Podcasts/Channels/Conferences

There are a lot of podcasts to follow! Some you listen to and some you watch:

Interactive Fiction

Teaching and Learning With Interactive Fiction has a lot of resources, including links to famous interactive fictions. (You can download the entire site as a PDF.) There is also the The Interactive Fiction DatabaseAdventures which list interactive fiction and text adventures.

For those interested in writing, interactive fiction there are a lot options in terms of applications that are available. The three below are both free to use and open source. They also have active development and user communities, which means help, advice, and encouragement are never far away. The apps are listed in order of ease-of-use for a beginner. Both Twine and Inky use a plain text markup language which can actually be written in any text editor: Microsoft Visual Studio Code extensions are available for both twee and ink.

  • Twine is another piece of open source software for creating interactive fiction / non-linear stories. Twine is based on a markup language that you can write in any text editor – I use , twee, as well as ink (below). You can also download the free Twine editor which has a GUI that allows you create the kinds of visualizations discussed above.
  • Ink is a easy-to-understand markup language that has Unity and Unreal compatibility. (See the website for about plugins and compatibility.)
  • Inform is open source software for creating interactive fiction. It uses something very close to natural language syntax and makes it easy to draft and then compile a playable text-based game. The website has links not only to the download but also to a variety of useful resources on interactive fiction: writing advice, community forums, and example fictions.

Game Design

  • For a one-stop shop for a variety of game development topics, GDC’s YouTube channel is impressive. We watch some of these videos as part of this course.
  • In particular, Jurie Horneman’s 2015 session at GDC, “The Design in Narrative Design” is worth the watch.
  • The Level Design Book
  • Map Crow’s “Draw Your DnD World” is about maps, but it’s also about how you should always orient your fiction/game toward actions your audience/player can take. There’s a lot of good content on his Youtube channel. For example, in “How to Build a Better Dungeon” he thinks through the process of creating a dungeon for an RPG gaming session, which includes important narrative elements like how many encounters to have in a map/session and, just as importantly, what kind of themes or premises do you want running throughout the dungeon session. FTR, Map Crow suggests 4-6 encounters per session with maybe 2 of those being substantial combat encounters. His “Jaquaysing the Dungeon” is useful for thinking about how to enrich the experience of your users-readers-audience.
  • Game Design Skills has a Player-Centric Crash Course for those who would like to be (video) game designers.
  • Indie Game Clinic’s How (and Why) to Design for Repetition With Variety.

Software

There are a lot of choices for software focused on narrative games. (I chose Twine because it’s easy to get started, if also a bit harder to do more complicated or nuanced things.) Almost all of them are focused on video games for the obvious reason that most TTRPGs just need a word processor and, maybe, an image editor.

  • StoryFlow Editor looks interesting, and powerful (and complex), and it’s available on both Steam and Itch.io.
  • Articy claims that “integrating content from your narrative design tool into your game has never been easier. Hundreds of quests, thousands of items, countless lines of dialogue - all in your game with one click.”
  • Celtx offers “screen writing, story development, and production tools for film & TV, and interactive media.”
  • YarnSpinner describes itself as “Everything you need to create compelling dialogue and branching narratives, with full documentation and community support.” It has integrations for Unity, Godot, and Unreal engines.

Game Narratives

Procedurally-Generated

  • [Featured Blog Supporting game design with evolutionary algorithms](https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/supporting-game-design-with-evolutionary-algorithms)

AI

At some point, we have to deal with AI. It’s even come for TTRPGs: Dungeons Deep.

Games to Try

  • Fallen London (online).
  • cult classics and influential: Bayonetta, Persona, Kingdom Hearts, Breath of the Wild.