Systems within in games and researching two system for my second sprint (5th Nov)

This week we looked into systems and how systems within life are used as key artefacts/hooks for games. A system is a set of things working together as part of a mechanism. Another way to define a system is a structure of control in a world of chaos, This is the idea that I wanted to capitalize on in my research for a cultural system, I particularly like the link with systems with nature, as although nature/wildlife is chaotic and dangerous there is surprisingly a large amount of structure and organization within these eco systems e.g. Everything depends on each other in the wildlife for the eco systems to maintain themselves. We were also challenged this week to research a technical or aesthetic system that we were interested in and for which we wanted to develop our skills in. For me this was straight forward as I knew coming into this Masters that I wanted to develop my Level Designing and Environment Designing skills, with these skills in mind I went searching for peoples work that I was interested in. I came across a Level Designer called Tommy Norberg [1] https://www.tommynorberg.com

Image 1: Tom Norberg, Twitter, June 6th 2020, https://twitter.com/the_Norberg/status/1269341626951925765, Accessed 20th Oct 2020

I really like Tommy’s approach to level designing and how long he spends sketching and doing rough blockouts way before he starts properly jumping into the engine and building the level.. Along with this tweet he commented about the steps that are necessary when building a level, talking about things like playability, were enemies would spawn and the overall spacing between game objects. Was particularly interested in the way he goes into the game engine and doesn’t focus on planting game objects down put more focuses on setting up markers for the distances between game objects and creating/getting a feeling for the sense of space that the player will have, then later on in the process will then focus on the verticality and movement of the map. I really feel like I could have done this in some of my previous work, as I would usually just mark up a rough sketch then jump straight into designing the level in the engine. This would always lead to me feeling overwhelmed by the process of creating a level (in particular a big level), this is why I was so drawn to Tommy’s work as he deconstructs the problem into smaller chunks, slowly and methodically building up to a final level.

Photo by Pixabay, n/a , Available at: Pexels.com, Accessed on Nov 2020

Drawing these two ideas together, I was mostly thinking about what type of environments that I was interested in creating, then basing my game idea for sprint 2 upon this concept. I have also been interested in creating a tropical/jungle like environment, loving how these type of environments feel and behave. So then I drew on the idea of systems and what type of systems there are in jungles.

Photo by Ganta Srinivas, n/a, Available at: Pexels.com, Accessed on Nov 2020

This is where the thought of tribes came from and the systems that they have to keep themselves alive e.g. certain amounts of people have to go and hunt for the day while others have to collect water. And if these things aren’t done then the tribe will simply not survive.

This is were I thought it would be a cool concept to create a game like Far Cry Primal, where you slowly start to develop your technology in order to collect more food/resources for your tribe.

Ubisoft,2016,FarCry Primal, Available at: https://www.ubisoft.com/en-gb/game/far-cry/far-cry-primal, Accessed on Nov 2020

[1] Tom Norberg, work can be found here https://www.tommynorberg.com/ , Accessed 20th Oct 2020

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