Center for Computational Experience

I planned and produced a game called Hungry Deer with Jaeho Moon (jmoon15@ucsc.edu) for two weeks in CMPS80K class. We chose deer among the four themes presented in the course, and decided to create this by considering which game to produce. Our development team liked the puzzle game genre and wanted to merge the theme of deer and the puzzle genre of the new way. So we decided on the main character, story and goal of the game in relation to deer and decided to use puzzle as a gameplay method. First, let's start with the story. As the title suggests, deer, the protagonist of our game, is very hungry. To survive, the deer must eat the fruits on the map. But there are many threats on the way to the fruit. If you leave the map, you can fall into the water or get trapped in the forest, or you can die by traps in the map. In stage 2, predators try to eat deer. Since bears and wolves move from side to side, deer should choose a way to avoid them. In this overall theme and story, we have added new elements. We did not want deer to use the player's physical to avoid a trap. We wanted the deer to avoid traps with smart heads and strategic planning, rather than through speed or fuselage vision. So we prepared arrows and pads, and drag and drop so that the user could plan all of the deer's movements in advance. After designing all the movements, pressing the go button will automatically move the deer to the user's intention without any user interaction. We hoped that the gameplay method would also allow users to have a deliberate thought. The goal of our game is to let the user learn the basics of coding through this idea. Through the familiar design of deer and forest, users are made to feel comfortable, and the user can think through the puzzle gameplay method. We hope that many children will learn to plan and think through this game. These gameplay rules using Arrows and pads, and the way we ask users to think new ways, make our games more innovative.   Our game satisfies class concept well. Among the factors that make up a game, nouns are objects that act in the game. In our game, nouns have deer, fruits, bears, wolves, other traps(thorns, rivers, trees), and lawns - which are neutral elements for the user. Deer are objects that move according to gameplay rules, and other objects interact with deer. Bears and wolves have their own verbs, which are actions moving from side to side. There are also nouns that define gameplay rules. Arrows and pads used for drag and drop, and an interpreter that moves when you press the go button. They interact with each other and determine the movement of the deer. Here we have an important grammar for our game. If you press the go button, the interpreter has a verb that moves sideways every 0.5 seconds. If there is an arrow at the interpreter, deer has a verb that moves in the direction indicated by the arrow. It has also a grammar that causes the player to fail the game. If the trap and wild animals mentioned above are in the same position as the deer on a particular turn, the deer is killed and the game is over. On the other hand, if the fruits are in the same position as the deer, the player wins. To summarize, our game has arrows, interpreters, pads, deer, fruits, wolves, bears, and nouns called nouns, which have a movement verb, and have a grammar that an interpreter and an arrow to move the deer, traps cause failure and fruits cause success.   In the playtest in the section we received various feedbacks. Most people were interested in an arrow-based puzzle game, and received good reviews. However, there was only one stage we made in the game, and people cleared all the stories in less than two minutes. They asked us to make another stage after clearing one stage, and in the Alpha version of the game, the thorns on the grass were the only traps that threatened the player, the players wanted more dynamic trap. We accepted this feedback and we made stage 2. In stage 2, a new type of trap appeared, making it more difficult to clear. An example is the bear and wolf that appear in the beta version. Our game controls the movement of the deer by dragging the arrows onto the pads. We thought that these game methods were new and unfamiliar to people, but people easily understood the method. People feedback that the arrows and pads we made on the left side of the game have an intuitive design. We knew that this design would help people understand the gameplay method, and we decided to take it right in the beta. And what we did not expect in the playtest was that the players did not understand the purpose of the game. We thought that if there were thorns and cherries on the map, it would be a natural goal for players represented by deer to eat the cherry. However, players did not notice this without a specific explanation. So what we thought was to include the goal of the game in the title of the game. In the alpha version, the title of the game was not set, but in the beta version it was titled 'Hungry Deer' and the player deer showed hunger in the title. Based on this title, players were immediately aware that hungry deer eating something in the game was the goal of the game.