Has there ever been a game that teaches concepts of game design itself? Wouldn't that be a good tool to stimulate the imaginations of budding game designers? While we have a proliferation of games and tools that teach programming (codecademy, lightbot, treehouse, hack schools), and even more tools to express ourselves visually and guide artists (photoshop, instagram, wacom tablets, you name it) we have a complete dearth of easily accessible means to teach the basics of game design. We can hear Jimi Hendrix shred the Star Spangled Banner and know he's one of the greatest guitar players alive, but who is the greatest game designer alive?
There's no clear idea about what actual skills make a "rockstar game designer".
THE MAGIC CIRCLE GAME WALKTHROUGH HOW TO
What this means is that we clearly don't know how to separate the wheat from the chaff yet. A single hit can create a "rockstar" game designer like John Romero ("Ishmael Gilder") who is then given carte blanche. Triple A developers stick to the safety of iterative improvements on proven franchises while Indies struggle to really make a stand out game that hasn't been seen before due to the highly saturated market. Whereas technical development has come a long way to the point of being photorealistic, the actual discipline of game design itself has not evolved as quickly. The Magic Circle is primarily a satire instead of an educational tool, but I feel the game is definitely making a comment about the state of game development: it's entirely too easy for studios to to design and redesign games endlessly until they've become vaporware.
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For example, if the game had made the player's own code editable too, you could demonstrate object-inheritance since some of the NPC-unique properties wouldn't be able to be applied to the player. Need to cross a stream of lava? You can collect fireproof rocks and drop them one by one to create a bridge as the straightforward solution, OR you could edit out the Fireproof object property from the rock, graft it into your Armordillo minion, and then ride your Fireproof Armordillo over the lava.īut, puzzles aside, this mechanic is a wonderful way to teach concepts of object oriented programming. This mechanic allows for some seriously creative puzzles in this game, with a natural sandboxy style that lends itself to multiple emergent gameplay solutions for any one problem. You can see these edits in action at around the 60 second mark in the linked trailer. In The Magic Circle, the hacker has the ability to capture different objects/creatures/NPCs in the game and alter their coding in a limited way. Here's a trailer:īut what I really wanted to talk about was the game's unique mechanic. But otherwise I'd highly rate this game due to its unique game mechanics. Quite satirical in tone about the sometimes Sisyphean nature of game development, especially when creative primadonnas are in charge, the otherwise well-written story dips a bit in quality sometimes with some unnecessary melodrama. However, The Magic Circle is also ACTUALLY a video game, one that is quite good! It is about some mysterious hacker (the player) who has wound up inside a game under development through the influence of a discarded game AI known as "The Old Pro" who seeks to topple the influence of the "Sky Bastards" (the devs) by finally completing the game they're making and releasing it, with the help of the hacker. To play a game means entering into a magic circle, or perhaps creating one as a game begins." In game design, the concept of "The Magic Circle" is "the membrane that encloses virtual worlds", from Rules of Play: "In a very basic sense, the magic circle of a game is where the game takes place.
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