Enchanted Arrows Design Issues Essay Draft

Enchanted Arrows Design Issues Essay Draft

Introduction

In this essay I shall analyse the design issues myself and the other members of the Enchanted Arrows team faced, when creating a game with a KS1 (5-7 years old) target audience. I shall do this by primarily focussing on the ideas of, Marcos Venturelli and xxxx. The authors xx, xx, and xx offer alternative viewpoints when analysing video games but in this review I will mainly discuss Space of Possibility and Pacing (Venturelli), 2009, Page 1) and xx (). (Insert Name), date, page number).

Enchanted Arrows is a 2D educational spelling game, where the player controls the crosshair of an on-screen archer, and tries to shoot at items on the screen. Once an item has been shot, a stream of bubbles containing letters of the alphabet, appear on screen. The player must shoot the correct bubbles to spell the name of the item, thus clearing that item from the screen. They must repeat this process to clear 3 items, whereupon they can move onto the next level. Every item spelt correctly will give the player 100 points. Any items spelt incorrectly will deduct 50 points from their overall score.

I shall begin by using Venturelli's theory of pacing to analyse major design issues in Enchanted Arrows.

Pacing

Marcos Venturelli defines pacing as "...a concept related to the overall rhythm of the game, the relative speed at which the different moving parts of the system are put in motion." (Venturelli, 2009, Page 3). What Venturelli means by this is...

In practise, the main gameplay mechanic of aiming at and shooting bubbles was not as engaging as we hoped. Indeed, the majority of the game consists of waiting for the right letter to fall to correctly spell a word. This problem is compounded by the pattern the bubbles follow when falling onto the screen. Sometimes, bubbles on the left side of the screen, near the archer, will block line of sight to the bubbles on the far right half of the screen. This results in the player having to wait until the bubbles on the left have reached the ground and popped, thus leaving a clear shot to the bubbles on the right.

Space of Possibility

Venturelli defines the space of possibility as "...the collection of all possible actions and outcomes inside the designed space of the game - all actions and outcomes artificially made possible by the system." (Venturelli, 2009, Page 3). By this definition, the space of possibility in Enchanted Arrows is incredibly small, since the player can ultimately only carry out two main actions, spelling a word correctly, or failing to spell that word.

Venturelli links this concept to movement impetus, the "will or desire of a player to move forward through a level". (author, year, Page).

Venturelli says "". (Venturelli, 2009, Page 3). What Venturelli means by this is...

List of Design Issues:

Main gameplay mechanics simply are not engaging in practise. Most of the game involves waiting for the right letter to fall, to correctly spell a word. This gives the game a very slow pace.

Not enough gameplay variety due to time constraints. Both boss levels had to be cut due to time constraints. This is a shame, since they would have spiced up the gameplay, and let the player take a break from the main gameplay mechanic.

Have to Wait for Letters to fall. (Sometimes letters on the left side of the screen, will block off the letter you need to show on the right side, which is frustrating).

Difficult to tell if the game is enjoyable to play, due to the age group we are creating the game for. What bores us to tears, they may love.

Four separate issues, well that' a start I suppose.

 

Bibliography

Venturelli Marcos, "Space of Possibility and Pacing in Casual Game Design - A PopCap Case Study", 2009.

Available online at: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/MarkVenturelli/20091107/3497/Space_of_Possibility_and_Pacing_in_Casual_Game_Design__A_PopCap_Case_Study.php

P.S. 

As you can see this is an extremely rough draft. I'm still deciding which sources to use other than Venturelli hence the gaps at the start.

Hopefully my draft is on the right track.