Robert French

I’ve been teaching my design students out of Scott Rogers book, “Level Up – The guide to great video game design” the past few weeks. I think that if anyone is interested in an easy to digest book on game design this is a must have book on their bookshelves. It’s not nearly as intimidating as the David Perry Game Design Brainstorming Bible (also a great book to have handy when designing games).

Scott has done a really great job making this a hard book to put down with his clever and well placed ‘doodles’, proving once again that a picture can be worth a thousand words. The books flow is broken up in such a way that even the easily distracted reader will have no troubles getting through it. (ask me about my attention deficit disorder or pie or my cat. a dog. i have a bike. do you like tv? i saw a rock. hi!).

I had bought and read through this book about ten months ago, but this is the first time I’ve gone through a teach with it. it’s funny how reading something for personal pleasure vs. teaching with the same book causes you to focus on different aspects. For instance, the number and duration of chapters in this book works really well for a 20 day course where we can cover a chapter a day and still have plenty of time to work on a practice project (building a GDD for an existing game). Not the kind of thing that you typically (or I typically) think about when reading for pleasure, but paramount when looking for materials for courses. I’ve set up the project to span over the last 3 weeks and set simple to increasingly difficult milestones as the project progresses. (One Pager, Ten Pager, Full GDD).

While not 100% ideal (having students new to video game design build a GDD for an existing game) It is a pretty good way to keep them moving in a positive and forward moving direction while they master the volume of concepts and details that need to go into a good game design.

I give Scott Rogers and this book “Level Up – The guide to great video game design” props / kudos and my full endorsement. If you are looking to learn video game design this book has all of the major bases covered and is a truly a great read.

So I’m still working on the design of Lvl Up! (An Achievement and Experience game that I play with my students).
I’m designing this game as a web-app that can really be played by anyone that wants to increase productivity through friendly competition.

I’m currently planning out the events (in my particular case these translate to courses). Events have a name, a description, a location, a start date, an end date and can be recurring, i.e. Every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, and end after 20 times. Events also have members, achievements and levels.

Because I want this to be as flexible a system as possible, I’m trying to get the recurring event model designed so that it covers all of the same types of recurrence you would find in any quality scheduler (iCal, Outlook, Things, etc..) and I want it to be as efficient as possible so that the number of database lookups is kept to the bare minimum. I also would like it to be pragmatic and easy to understand (the rub).

As things usually happens synchronistically in my life, the Student LAB project will also need this type of event model for scheduling the various courses (without the achievements and levels). I can actually think of a few projects that I’m working on that would benefit from proper scheduling but can’t discuss them all right now Top Secret Stuff!

So off on the search for recurring scheduled events I go. Google naturally points me to the stack overflow questions related to this problem, and it also point me to Martin Fowlers white paper on the subject “Recurring Events for Calendars“. I also find a great blog entry from Cultured Code (Things GTD Application) that discusses the problems with UI design and some good ways to visually represent the scheduling system.

Reading Fowlers paper I note that he does a great job breaking down the problem into its own domain language and patterns and he takes the route of using abstract temporal expressions along with set expressions to chain together several temporal expressions and eliminate any overlap (such as in the case of a holiday). But its incomplete and leaves me feeling slightly dizzy.

The stack overflow response for “Best Storage Method” provides a half decent way to store this type of data but it’s not easily understood by a human (epoch dates) without an additional tool to interpret the dates and durations and I really would like to code the common requirements once and adopt it for the various projects as i need it. This means that “self documenting” is kinda high on the priority list of requirements and I know that if I just crank something out it will end up a beast.

Thats how my Sunday is progressing

Well I finally managed to get around to updating the site, its not 100% yet, but its usable and it looks better (IMO) .

I also have taken this time to refresh the project manager I was using and am working on theme-ing it to the site as well (http://projects.robertfrench.ca) That will help with my clients and the various projects. It gives me a centralized location to track issues and progress on a given project.

Then there is the portfolio which is terribly outdated, I’m going to have to make it uber slick I think, and of coarse the game that is just staring at me in the banner … and the games.robertfrench.ca sub-domain, but really, taking the first step a few days ago has gotten the momentum moving. which is always good Once all of that is done I will go through the painstaking validation process (which I have already done with the main page) HTML 5 validated!

Please feel free to notify me of any visual glitches or breakages if you happen to notice them, it should be 100% within the next few days.

Ah how time fly’s when you commute 135km each direction Monday to Friday!!!

I’ve been working on a website update  the past few weeks it’s been very slow going, but its getting there. You can follow my progress here or by clicking on the image over there ->> … er deRp a dErp? up there? ^ … me thinks me has a layout problem (note to self … fix layout issue in blog).

The driving factor in updating was actually the width of the old site didn’t sit well with the HTML/JavaScript game for the banner (in progress) I’m building (details to follow in another post).

I’m going to try and get back to regular blogging again, I think I can commit to Sundays and that should at least get some relevant content posted in a scheduled-ish way. wish me luck with that!

Lvl Up! has been sitting on a back burner because I told myself that I wouldn’t do anything else with it until I was finished grading papers … Which I finished doing last night (early this am) and now today I just have to plug the grades in and submit them. wEwT!

I will be linking the banner game into LvlUp! so I need to work on both concurrently (this should be fun) I want to give myself short and simple sprints to get some momentum on both of these projects … that makes me want to get both of them into an agile project manager…but I digress .

Thats all for now, more to come soon!!!

So Game Prototype Challenge v6 (#GPCv6 on Twitter) came to an end and I managed to submit … Nothing!!!

I did manage to come up with what I think will be a good game though, and after a fun run down the StencylWorks rabbit hole (despite excess tormenting and teasing from my students), I ultimately got started in AS3, so I may just keep working on it regardless. I mean you can’t really have too many fun game ideas can you?

Jason P. Kaplan has done a great job (IMHO) of getting this challenge out to the masses and I look forward to GPCv7 next month!!

Now back to a much needed site update and LvlUp!

Well its safe to say that it’s been a while … I’ve most recently been immersed (the past few weeks) in an idea that spawned from an interesting article I read about a year ago. Thanks and Kudos goes out to Lee Sheldon for being the first in the ‘gamer generation’ to boldly go where many gamers have gone before.

In place of Lee Sheldon’s thoughts of providing experience points in place of traditional grades, I’m building an online system that helps to track and measure experience points (regardless of the environment) In education, the experiences go along with traditional grades (can be converted for a percentage of the overall grading) rather then outright replacing the traditional system. This system could also easily be used in the workforce by employers to motivate the ‘gamer generation’ employees.

I call my system Lvl Up!

Lvl Up!, in itself, is a game. For my particular scenario (being a college professor in a video game design and development college) this makes a whole lot of sense for my students who have embraced this system and are actively competing for the XP. (even the slackers!). All of the students want to ‘Lvl Up!’  and the only way to accomplish that is to gain the experience points needed to get from level to level.

Experience is granted manually at the moment, but that will be changing in the near future, while still in development (alpha hosted at horoku), the system currently supports the bare minimum of sign-up/sign-in/authentication, a single admin user with the ability to give XP to users and provide a reason for it.

Over the coming days and weeks, I will be adding in the level management, proper user roles, team support and achievements… Check back for updates and a public beta!