Davegray on gamestorming

Davegray on gamestorming

For our studio game that my group created has to do with a Russian nurse intern that has to help patients in a hospital located at a nearby reactor. When an explosion occurs, the whole of the hospital was in ruins, and a bio-hazard gas leaked and killed everyone accept for the Intern nurse. All the dead bodies start coming back to live due to the biohazard poisoning and she has to on the air-filtration system for the first floor in order to escape through the exit. With the help of the some axe, flare sticks and light sticks, she has to protect herself and escape the dangerous place safely.

Open: Our group members group together to think of many ideas, we had a large piece of mah-jong paper that allows us to come out with many drawings and points. Everyone has an amount of space to produce several good game ideas. We took a look at each of our groups member ideas; remove those games which we might cause any problem. We then keep only the best ten ideas. These ideas are then further discuss to see which game would be the most creative and the favourite among everyone. Some conflict might occur to save individual’s idea, hence an approach to others to give go critiques and votes for the better idea. After an idea is form, the goal has to be set. So our goal is to leave the hospital safely from zombies.

Explore: After that we try out by making the players just running away from the zombies with an unlimited among of flare sticks. There is a question that has been troubling us; are zombies afraid of the light or attracted to it. We act out the scene of it, and make a conclusion. If zombies were to be attracted to light, player will have hard time playing the game and there is too much advantages to the zombie than to the player. So we decided that the zombies should be afraid of the lights. The second issue was that; is unlimited amount of flare a good idea? We tried out the game with a prototype, and it’s too easy to win if we kept spamming the flare key. So now, players are to find the flares and also to use it wisely and not to use up the only lighting tool. Problems like can flares and axe kill the zombies also been solve by playing it with a prototype, without killing the zombies there would not be any fun and it would be boring just by hitting on the same key continuously and running away.

Close: the game has slowly form and it is almost complete, the weapons and item have settled, player issue to seizure during games has been opened, so we decided to increase brightness to the game so that even without the flare stick, players are able to see a little. Types of flares decrease to only one as we only need one type of flare. Then map has also been finalized and the game is completed.

Other uses and ways the game could be used

The game could be a safety tip to people who might come across to a blackout. When they play the game, the know that finding a light source is important, looking at maps, familiarising and seeking for the shortest route and also to look out for the exit sign to escape from collapse building from any disaster like earth quake or during a bombing attack. Another use was to also educate the young children the importance of light and without light, how inconvenient it would be for us humans.

Dave Grey’s Gamestorming

Dave Grey’s gamestorming starts from how we work together as a team. He showed that if designers work together, like how office men work together in a cubical, our creativity would not increase. So he suggested that we have to gather together working and keep giving ideas to one another, our ideas should be stick on a board where everyone could see it and modify the ideas. We should always understand that all these ideas should be tested out in order to find problems to it, and then we can solve the problems to make the idea better. When having an idea, we have to socialize with one another talk about it then sort it by voting or writing down on post-it about the good and the bad ideas. After that, synthesising, by drawing the characters, the map, making prototype and model to have a clearer view of the game.