CodinGame in C#



CS3380 HW2: Game Design Critiques, and PyGame Review

HW2a: Four Short-Game Design Critique Due: Thursday 9/17/15

Read the Greg Costikyan Essay: “I Have No Words, & I Must Design – Toward a Critical Vocabulary for Games” (first Costikyan link on my course website, and at: )

Imagine you are a game-publisher to whom four games have been submitted for possible publication. It is your task to provide a critique for each, in order to help the top decision-makers decide how publishing resources should be spent.

Assignment: Write up a game design critique for Mars Lander (Level 2), as well as your choice of 3 of the 4 short free online games listed below. For Mars Lander in particular, determine whether it is a game at all, and be sure to defend your opinion.

Note that a critique is not so much a review (although it can contain review elements such as evaluations of gameplay, “fun-ness” and playability) but rather a placing of the game into an appropriate context within which it may be judged. For example, the following three-step process may be useful in generating a reasonable game critique:

1. Describe the game’s formal elements (i.e. the properties we’ve been discussing in the Powerpoint lectures these past two weeks). For example, what are the resources that players have at their disposal? Do not interpret at this point, but simply state what is there.

2. Describe the results of the formal elements when put in motion (i.e. interactions which ultimately make up the player’s experience). How do the elements interact? Is it effective? Is it fun?

3. Try to understand why the designer chose those elements and not others. Why this particular player structure, and why that set of resources? What kind of player is this game made attractive to? What might you change to attract a different kind of gamer – and especially, what changes could be made to make this game attractive to you, in particular?

4. Finally, compare the games to each other, highlighting their relative strengths and faults, and any points of commonality.

Four Free Online Games:

The Writer Will Do Something:

Unsolicited:

ZType:

The Mammoth -- a Cave Painting:

Further questions to consider:

- Should this really be considered a game? Support your claim.

- What is/are the challenge(s)?

- What are the gameplay elements in this game, and how do they interact? Is it fun?

- Do you feel you have control over the arc of the narrative as the game is played? Are there meaningful decisions to be made? What are they?

- To whom is this game targeted? Who will find this fun? What are the “fun” elements for this audience?

Each critique should be about one page in length.

Turn in a hard copy of your critiques in class (as well as an e-copy to the course TurnIn folder in the CS server).

HW2c: PyGame Review Due Thursday 9/24/15

Generate a review of PyGame as a game development tool. Do this by researching it online at (esp. ), downloading PyGame to your computer and programming a simple game with it. For example, I suggest a simplified game of Breakout with multiple balls and a paddle, with bouncing surfaces North, West East but not South, and the game ends when the last ball escapes past the bottom of your screen. You may use the code for the PyGame Animation program (links provided below) for example, and adapt it to create the Breakout game.

You may choose to develop another simple moving-shape game if you wish, but in that case you must run your proposed game idea by me first.

PyGame Animation pages:





Show me your completed working program for full credit.

Write up a 3-5 page review of PyGame as an appropriate game-engine for implementing enjoyable games.

You may work on this project in two-person teams if you wish.

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