Poetry for the blood

Another week of teaching goes by. This one went fine although I seem to overestimate the time it takes me to talk about stuff like design practices, production and technical aspects.
I've taught the discipline of Tiles this week, why Tiles make up the foundation of 2D gaming and how it can benefit the 8 or so groups who will be producing excellent flash games in 5 points of University Studies.

I've also taught a 2-hour and very brief lesson in how to organize your small game project with "Milestones", "Deadlines", "Producers" and so on. I'm fairly surprised how easy everyone took in the idea of planning alot, since it was one of the things it took us most to grasp and actually put to good use.
And then I taught some design principles, which was a mix of interface-article one-liners, design principles from famous designers and a few things I've noticed myself, such as the lack of people actually emphasizing survival as opposed to playing for more riches. Survival is one of the keys to the golden room of fun.

It's really not exciting to play the mini-game of commodity-trading in RPG's. Nor is it exciting to be overly powerful, when you can strip down the amount of rewards so that your game is a constant struggle for survival. Of course, at some point, players will probably want to feel the immense power they've fought for, but that need not come until the very last hours of gaming. Giving it away after two levels just forces you to make the opponents unreasonably powerful. My idea boils down to keeping the player with one foot in the grave at all times. One idiotic outburst of resourcewasting and the player goes "boom". Old classics do this all the time. Classics might Just Not Make It to the triple-A-shelf. Nor did they succeed in attracting a large audience, but I hardly blaim the games themselves. Come on, there's still a whole industry full of nuts in marketing and publishing who still ruin marketshares and potential customers by stupid decisions. In one of my favourites, the Dungeonquest boardgame, the player's avatar could enter the first room of the dungeon, fall down through a trapdoor into the underground and be attacked by rats. Player's avatar dead on first turn. Hahaha.

Player learns from the mistakes and makes it through the dungeon. Then on the last move, the player is torn, beaten, tired and bleeding, ready to escape the dungeon to freedom. But, suddenly, the roof falls down on the player's avatar's head and the avatar is dead again. Hahahha. That's tension, compared to silly Computer RPG's (Roleplaying according to current titles labaled so, aren't really more than getting to choose what attribute to improve when you level up, but that's another rant.) where players, late in the game, sport thousands of hitpoints, while a normal being has but 15.