Week11: Gameplay

Gameplay is a term that gets thrown around alot and doesnt really have any certain meaning to it. In one instance it can literally be how a game plays (fast, smooth etc.) or what kind of things youll be doing in a game (puzzling, racing etc.). So all in all its a hard term define but I prefer to thing of gameplay as what sorts of things you get to do in a game. "What is Smash Brothers Gameplay like?" "Its a large beat em up with loads of nintendo characters around a 2D stage" Or at least thats how I'd define it. The general gist of what the game is.

So when it comes down to 'do you design the gameplay or game first?' it would easily be the gameplay. Boiling it down to Half Life 2, it is much easier to say Gordon Freeman has to run and survive (To be honest I really have no idea whats going on in HL2) from the bad guys. Once youve got that point, you can easily design your bad guys and then the locations he would be running through and then your genre can be chosen from the appropriate ones. It would be much harder to say "Lets make a shooter" and then build a story around that.

Of course you will most always come up with a concept for a game before designing the other things about it and what the game will allow you to do. I read up on the Gamasutra links and a game was produced that was about flying through the clouds and making friends with all of them. Then it was designed to be a slow relaxing game rather than a time or point based game.

Much like the above game titled "Cloud" in the future games will tryand introduce new types of game play. One such title is Endless Ocean which was just released and has the player swimming through the ocean taking photos of all the speices and that is all. In the future, after all the conventional genres are burnt out, we will hopefully see new ones bringing in new and exciting game play.