Devlog #4 - Let's go sports team!!!!!

"GO TEAM!" is what I would say if I were more into traditional sports. In the past I have been known to, be a debbie downer on the "sports balls" field of entertainment. I like playing sports, but for whatever reason, never saw anything to enjoy out of watching them. That was until this past week, which was all about sports, and this is my devlog of these experiences.

At the start of the week we were tasked with watching by Bennet Foddy, a very eccentric game developer, wherein Mr. Foddy goes to great lengths to show why, we as game devs, should care about traditional sports. The first major call to action by Foddy is that we need to make our games have a level of "Performance" (5:40). What Foddy means by this is that, sports do not become a "sport" until it is performed for others, this act of performance creates stakes, creates embarassment for the loser and pride for the winner, in other words, it's making the act of play matter. The feeling of shame is important to Foddy, he references his own game "Clop" in which after a loss the player is insulted by a virtual heckler, the goal being to inspire the player to invest their focus into playing better. The idea being, with the stakes of shame on the line, players will believe their own gameplay matters (14:39).  The final major point I pulled from Foddys panel was his idea that in traditional sports, it is considered wrong to cheat, likewise players should A. not have the ability to cheat, whether that be in microtransactions or grind focused gameplay, and B. not be insentivized to utilize unintended gameplay mechanics, such as in QWOP: people claimed they had "beaten" the game when in reality they had just spammed two keys and merely crawled to the finish line (16:47). 

Using what I learned from Foddy, and taking the time to study the sport of Volleyball, my team and I created a tense rock paper scissors esque card game, in which players compete to outwit each other. We ran into some initial issues in development, such as having too broad of an idea to make a game at first, in which we did not have the experience, time or materials necessary to create such a game. In order to get past this hurdle we had to figure out a single part of volleyball to focus on, this being the most exciting part of the game, the spike. Now that we have a prototype version of this game, we still have kinks in the hose, such as turns feeling like they don't matter, and an element of clunkiness in this gameplay.  But I think that overtime we can use this experience, more than anything, to know how to paper prototype games in the future, and learn how to break an idea for a game, into a playable experience.