The GameStorm conceptualization tool in action during the Make Your Own Game activity

Games are like that. Everyone thinks because games are easy to play, they must be easy to make. The challenge of a making a game is significantly harder. When we design a utilitarian tool, we have to make a complex set of requirements simple and easy to use for the user. But when making a game, we have to take equal amounts of complexity and make it simple, easy to useand fun. If a game is not satisfying to play, people will put it down. If excel is not satisfying, people will soldier on because math is more unpleasant than excel.

The result is that the best games tend to be addictive, as playersare so strongly motivated to continue the play that they find it difficult to get back to their normalactivities (Grüsser, Thalemann, & Griffiths, 2006; Kim, Namkoong, Ku, & Kim, 2008).

The beauty of space science-fantasy adventure is to manually pilot or captain your own spaceship into the vast unknown. For exploration, combat and various other role-specific game mechanics, the cockpit view gives a sense of ownership and grounding to a player’s chosen ship purchases. This immersive first person, seated view will allow players to utilize equipment such as flightsticks, throttles, multi-functional button control panels, head tracking hardware, and most importantly, virtual reality head-mounted displays.

The first principle driving the entire economy of Star Atlas is the mining gameplay. The wealth derived from mining creates many other branching revenue streams for players to contribute to and establish a career. From trading raw and refined ore, to cargo hauling, to crafting retail components, there is a broad range of career choices a player can embody and advance within the specializations of that career.

To augment that grand strategy, Star Atlas enables players to captain deep-space, crewed spaceships to scan and discover celestial and terrestrial assets. Once discovered, rich claims that are staked can be mined, refined and traded through a network of commercial mining installations, refineries, and the Universal Marketplace. Exploration will lead to many other surprises in the outer limits of space. In this mode the player primarily interacts with a top down space view showing their spaceship exterior with the ability to go into an x-ray view to see the interior of the ship and the crew performing their individual tasks. Players can also captain and pilot the ship manually through the first person cockpit/bridge view. Cockpit view is also suitable for seated virtual reality gaming.

The grand strategy genre of video games encourages claim staking to expand your empire and install strategic trade routes using an offensive and defensive tactical plan of action. In this mode the player primarily interacts with a dynamic overview of the charted and uncharted regions of space via the map view aka the Star Atlas.

The way a blockchain network is designed closely mimics the basis for the genre of Star Atlas. Mining or staking is the core of how blockchain assets are proven to be legitimate and tangible. To discover mined assets requires exploration on the part of a miner to unlock value. People set up mining or staking nodes and plug them into the blockchain network to enhance the network while also earning value from it. The hybrid experience of Star Atlas closely mimics the nature of how blockchain technology functions.

Micromachines always focused on local multiplayer, and the fun their eccentric races of small toy vehicles competing on tracks made with everyday objects; and all that is present.

There's probably a thousand different directions you can go, but there just needs to be some kind of deeper hook to make this a full-fledged game.

A Game-design MasterpieceTake one simple game mechanic, and make the absolute most of it – that's exactly what the developers of Jim is Moving Out did, and it worked really well! The core of this game is stunningly simple: a few little boxes (furniture) inside a big box (Jim's house), one or two flying fellas (the players) and a physics engine. Think about the most creative ways you could make this into a game. Anything you think about, this game did it. What if you had to squeeze through narrow holes without breaking too much furniture? It's in the game. What if the room had wheels? Yep, it's there too. What if one of the walls was missing and you had to avoid losing the furniture? The whole co-op is about this. Zero gravity? Yes, even that is in the game.

games are low stakes, and they have an incredibly powerful and repeatable feedback mechanism. I don't know about you, but I hate to lose and love to win.

In a nutshell, the King's Keys deck started as an experiment to see what card games would be like if you rebuilt playing cards from the ground up. Instead of using ranks and suits, each card has a number (from one to four), one of four items, and one of four colors. The result is what I call a 4x4x4 deck where 64 playing cards each have a unique combination of these three parts.

12 Tenets of Board Game Design for Stonemaier Games

Each class that derives from UObject has a singleton UClass created for it that contains all of the meta data about the class instance. UObject and UClass together are at the root of everything that a gameplay object does during its lifetime. The best way to think of the difference between a UClass and a UObject is that the UClass describes what an instance of a UObject will look like, what properties are available for serialization, networking, etc. Most gameplay development does not involve directly deriving from UObjects, but instead from AActor and UActorComponent. You do not need to know the details of how UClass/UObject works in order to write gameplay code, but it is good to know that these systems exist.

We are using the term phygital as a way of emphasizing that these are a class of objects that have not simply had some digital functionality embedded within then but are connected devices whose functionality and operation is designed to exist simultaneously in both virtual and physical space.

this paper is speculating on a future in which creating game objects that link the physical and the digital presents an exciting and practical opportunity for game designers. However, such objects require interaction design approaches that not only utilise understandings from product design and graphical user interface but also how they might effectively be combined dynamically.

Example Game/Interaction Spaces for Game Objects used with Screens.

Dan Saffer suggests hidden affordances may actually be regarded as ‘discoverable’ (Saffer 2013) in recognition that designers may deliberately allow them to be revealed through accidental use or deliberate exploration. This is similar to the practice of game designers leaving hidden elements, or ‘easter eggs’, within their games that are discovered by accident, this practice hints at a possible interesting opportunity yet to be applied to game objects.

the interaction design of phygital objects for games requires games designers to not only fully understand the virtual aspects the affordances they are perhaps used to, but also to extend these to include the affordances we associate with physical objects to ensure their overall game design does not cause confusion for the player.

Interaction Design as defined by Verplank

mimetic interfaces

phygita

Internet of Things

games that use objects as physical game pieces to enhance the players’ interaction with virtual games.