Design for Magic Writer. Blog post 6, Design Document

No one ever reads the design document...
The tale of a game designer

Welcome back to another Magic Writer design blog post! This week is the last one and I'll be writing a more overarching post about our teams design document.

I'm the lead designer for magic writer, and in the early stages of our project I was the sole designer. I tasked myself with writing the whole design document and doing all the design work. This turned out to be much harder than expected, and later on we would collaborate on design work both the creative kind and the writing-the-document kind.

This blog's artifact: The Design Document

From Magic Writer concept document

Document from scratch
In the beginning we used a template which we recieved from our teacher in the beginning of the course. This template contained titles to be included and questions to be answered under the titles. The titles were:

States & Modes
GUI
Avatar
Controls
Enemies/Traps
Power-Ups
Level Design
Rules
MDA

From these as a starting point, we started filling out our concept document.

States & Modes
The aim of states and modes is to have a list of every mode/state in your game and how they flow between them looks like.
We do this with a brief explanation of each mode and show the paths they can take. The picture below is used to clear up the flow.

Picture made by Semih Parlayan

GUI

The GUI or Graphical User Interface section of the document should explain what kinds of design is used to deliver information to the player, things like health, score, and ammunition.

Our first edition of the GUI section used this image together with an explanation of each individual GUI part.

Mockup made by Simon Lundgren(that's me)

Originally from Magic Writer concept document

This worked well getting the point across. One of the biggest strenghts of our design document was that we used old mockups with modification to quickly get the design on paper and picture. Later on we also added this picture to show a new design.

Mockup made by Semih Parlayan

Avatar

In the avatar section, you explain what the playable character is and how they behave in the game.

Here we only used the image below and a couple of lines of text to explain how the wizard was like.

From Magic Writer concept document

This section could have more pictures to explain a bit clearer about the details, but I think we managed to get the idea and design through with words.

Controls

In controls you explain how you control the game, simply.

We had this image below and a list of every button.

Mockup made by me

Simple.

Enemies/Traps

In this section you list all details regarding enemies.

This section is very important in Magic Writer, since our weakness system is a core part of our gameplay. The first iteration had a list of everything about the monsters and then a weakness spreadsheet. Later on we cut the list shorter and added visual representations.

Art by Andre Bengtsson

Power-ups

In the power-ups section you list the powerups in the game and whatever surrounds them.

In this we simple listed every powerup with a image and their effects. Later on we also added the explanation on how their timer works.

Art from Magic Writer Concept Document

Level Design

Level design is here.

In the beginning the only thing we wrote was 5 different ways we could adjust the difficulty and pushed the task to a later date. Later on we realized that no one had done level design and things got annoying to figure out in the midst of programming. Later on when this work was done, the level design was recorded and pushed in.

No image for this one :(

Rules

Rules are for win/lose condition, score calculation and everything extra about the game.

In rules we also simply listed off the things that hadn't already explained or had no better place to be in. This section did not go through any change, since it's pretty straightforward even without pictures.

MDA

MDA or Mechanics Dynamics Aesthetics are supposed to be your design goals.

Here we copied the Magic Writer concept document MDA. They were pretty much on the same page as us.

Summary

This was our structure for our design document. In afterthought, we should have had more pictures from the start. We should also have included an intro paragraph where we explained the gameplay. Other than that, we actually got pretty positive feedback from our design document.

This blog post was pretty rushed, sorry about that!

I hope you liked this tour of Magic Writer design and tune in next week for another design related blog post.

Design for Magic Writer. Blog post 5, Level Design

Level Design? Who needs it in an endless runner? Well, it's more vital than what you think. The week before the Beta and no level design proved pretty stupid. Let's go through how It was solved.

Welcome to another design blog post for Magic Writer!

Until last week, we had no one working on level design. When I took the task of setting up the wavesystem (making the monster reset after each wave of monsters), I realized that I had no idea what I needed to implement for the wave changing system because I did not know how the difficulty would ramp. Now, this week we've been able to playtest some more, and the feedback went into the level design.

This blog's artifact: Level Design of Magic Writer

The Design Document
In the design document the chapter about level design talks about four "knobs" which can be turned in order to change the difficulty of the game. These four things are the following:

• Monster Health
• Monster Speed
• Monster Spawn Rate
• Lenght of Words

(Looking at this now, powerups can also be used to change the difficulty. But since it was not considered when making the decisions it is left out for now.)

Monster Health

How quickly a player can defeat a monster depends on the monsters health. This is also relevant because item which crits deals 2 damage, making it more important to choose a fitting amount of health.

Playtesting showed that players did not like increase of health, since they expected to defeat a monster with a certain amount of damage.

Monster Speed
How quickly the monsters can move impact the chaos of the level. If the monsters move too quickly, the player gets stressed when writing items (which can be the intention).

Playtesting showed that the monsters moved too quickly, making it hard to even get past the first level.

Monster Spawn Rate
The spawn rate also effects the chaos level. How many monsters is on the screen at the same time impacts how much there is to keep in mind while playing. Since players have to consider what items has what property to be most effective.

This one is the hardest one to judge. We think the monsters are moving too fast, but that might be because the monsters are spawning too fast. This area is the one who needs more testing to find the right numbers since I think it might be the most important one too.

Lenght of Words
This was a problem we only noticed recently. New players had much trouble with words such as: Hippopotamus and chilipepper. They took the focus away from the strategic planning and weakness gameplay and challenged the player simply to spell the word correctly.

This was fixed by simply removing the hard words. Later we might implement a way to have new harder words come at later levels.

Summary
We had a problem since no one had done level design.
Playtesting showed that people did not want change in health, that the monsters were too fast, the spawn rate needed more testing, and that lenghty words made it hard to get into the game.

I hope you liked this tour of Magic Writer design and tune in next week for another design related blog post.

Design for Magic Writer. Blog post 4, Controls

Of course I can control my character, it's something unimportant to fix for later. Or is it? Magic Writer's control scheme has went through several changes during development all for users better enjoyment of the game.

Hello there and welcome to another Design blog post for Magic Writer.

During the development of Magic Writer, we've had discussion regarding the control scheme for the game several times. Both teachers and members as well as playtesters have voiced their opinion on the matter loudly. The designers job is to collect all those responses and form a plan to fix this. Let's go through the problems one by one.

This blog's artifact: Design of the controls.

To put some perspective into the controls.

Movement
One part of the group wanted to use the WASD keys to change lanes. But I wanted to use the arrow keys for that purpose.

The argument for WASD was that it was more optimal together when firing items with space. It was also faster to get your hands to after you've finished writing an item.

My arguments for the arrow keys was that it would feel more natural to a broader audience than the WASD keys. The separation of writing(letters) and movement(arrow keys) would make more sense to the player so they could go write->move->shoot, letters->arrows->enter.

Playtesting then showed us that players actually wants to move before they shoot. This made the arrow keys become the permanent choice for movement options for us, since we didn't want to go against something the players was doing naturally.

Shooting
Space or Enter was the big question when it came to shooting.

Arguments for space was that it was closer to the left hand's thumb after writing, which would make it the more optimal way to shoot.

And for enter it was because the letters->arrow->enter would feel better to execute than letters->arrow->space. Also because enter is a more natural choice because people are used to finish writing with enter in chat messages.

This time, playtesting showed us something interesting. Half the players would try and use space and half the players would stick with enter. After keeping enter and later discussing the descicions with our teacher, we decided both buttons would be able to shoot items. So a player could stick with the option he/she was most comfortable with.

Summary
Problems in the controls of our games sparked discussions in our group which brought out different opinions from the members. Later on, playtesting revealed what worked and what didn't work. From there we took decisions which would be the most intuitive to a first time player.

I hope you liked this tour of Magic Writer design and tune in next week for another design related blog post.