Week 11 - Why I made a Mech game for three months

Senior Team Week 10 (11/9-11/15)

First off, our game finally has a name! Our Mech game is now called Korku, the Turkish word for fear. I'm not one hundred percent sold on the name but it does sound cool and not everything can be Tommy Falcon Hoverboard Simulator 2015.

A suprise challenge under our belt, we didn't find out until Friday whether or not we'd passed. The presentation suffered from a lack of preparation since we started it on Friday but we had finally hit the nail on the head with regards to content. With most of the work on the presentation occuring between Friday and Monday we hurried forward with game.

The most frustrating part of this week was the number of bugs that sprang into view just as we set about preparing to show off our game. Many of these bugs were low priority issues earlier in the semester that had slid under the radar as the team concentrated on implementing features and practicing presentations. This week we implemented something approaching a test plan which exposed many of these bugs.  For each night spent tracking down and fixing a bug another night was spent speeding through the unexpectedly simple refining of a system or feature. All in all it was a good if stressful week.

Up to this point, my reflections have been on how my team has been doing and how I've felt about that. With the end of the semester and the project approaching quickly, perhaps a look back and a deeper examination of the whys of this project is in order.  When we chose which game to go forward with we knew that none of our game ideas was going to be easy going forward with. I had wanted to go forward with The Finnish game because I dearly wanted to share my love of history and explore a mostly forgotten and unknown section of history. One of the things that the teachers at Champlain look for in our games is innovation and potential uses outside of gaming for fun.

Our vote was deadlocked when it came to which game to go forward with, two votes for the Finnish game and two for Korku, our designer ended up being the deciding vote.  Both of the votes against going forward with Korku came from the Mech enthusiasts in the team.  I had many reasons for voting against Korku. The ones that stand out to me were my worry about the scope of the project and that we would get halfway done with the game and I would hate it because it wasn't a good Mech game. 

A FPS Mech game is nothing new in the game industry, but its also not a genre that is over saturated with games. Each game in the genre is noteworthy and offers something different.  Mechwarrior 4 and it's expansions explored the brutality that comes with all civil wars and the cycle of violence inherent in war. Multiplayer Mech games such as Mechwarrior Online and Hawken don't offer such a in depth look at humanity but they provide a place for people who enjoy the same sort of game to get together and have fun.  Korku is trying to combine the ability to explore complex issues and stories of single player Mech games with the sense of community and ability to hang out with friends of multiplayer games. To top this all off Korku puts a spotlight on one of the lesser known battles of World War One (to Americans) and exposes gamers to something more than the well-tread battles of the Second World War.

*Warning* Major Biases Ahead *Warning*
Somehow despite the common saying about how those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it few people put any real effort into learning even their own history. Everyone knows that the Nazis were horrible and about as close to evil as you can get in a subjective world, but in many ways the First World War falls through the cracks. Especially in America the main concern in high school history books is to let the student know that without America the war would have gone on much longer and that the end of the war set up the Second World War.  Time changes how we view events, even written records change and are revised.  Games are no more permanent than paper but they are interactive and just as practice is more effective than memorization, games can stick in your memory more than other forms of media.
*Warning* End Major Biases * Warning*

Outside of history Korku is a co-op game, focused on cooperation between the two players. The role of the second player is intended to encourage non-gamers to still themselves while hanging out with a gamer friend instead of hanging around being bored or resenting the game for intruding on time together.

Games have the potential to be an important teaching tool, getting students involved in the topics they are studying rather than repeating by rote the datum from their textbooks.  Korku would not be an appropriate game to use to teach anybody younger than high schoolers. A World War One game that completely sanitized the brutality of the war would be doing a major disservice to it's players and students. Korku should be asking the player to explore the idea of good guys and bad guys in war. Was Gavrilo Princep a hero, a fool, a monster or a young man?