Over the last few years we have seen the rise of "serious games" to promote understanding of complex social and ecological challenges, and to create passion for solving them. This project-based course provides an introduction to game design principals while applying them to games that teach. Run as a hands-on studio class, students will design and prototype games for social change and civic engagement. We will learn the fundamentals of games design via lecture and extensive reading in order to make effective games to explore issues facing society today. The course culminates in an end-of- quarter open house to showcase our games. Prerequisite: CS147 or equivalent. 247G recommended, but not required.
A game I’ve been enjoying recently is ColorPlanet, which is a color by number puzzle game where you create beautiful photos from 50+ different colors. For this task, I’m considering the interaction arc when you tap a new number at the bottom of the screen and have to fill in all of the corresponding spaces.
Mental model: Once you tap on a number at the bottom of the screen, the corresponding areas in the picture will be highlighted which signifies that you need to tap them to paint them.
Decision: From here you can simply tap the highlighted spaces. Additionally, you have a limited number of hints you can use which will zoom in your screen to a remaining unpainted space.
Action: You paint a square.
Rules: The game will then paint in the highlighted space that you tapped on which the corresponding color, while internally keeping track of how many more you need to paint for that specific number.
Feedback: After the highlighted space is painted, you will see a small meter fill up around the number at the bottom of the screen to indicate that you’ve made progress. If you’ve painted the last remaining highlighted space for that number/color, the meter will fill up and you will see a checkmark on that number.
Now, you will see that more of the picture has been filled in and you will continue this process until you’ve completed the painting!