The Capstone project is a place for you to develop your game idea into a fully-fleshed proposal. A game design document is your game bible, the go-to document that defines the genre of your game, its look and feel, and the evolution of gameplay. This four-part capstone project guides you to distill and improve the foundational aspects of your game so that you may express your ideas in a clear and productive way. Note: Only learners who have earned a certificate in the four previous courses in the Specialization are eligible to take the Capstone.
In Person: Sean Velasco
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From the course by California Institute of the Arts
Game Design Document: Define the Art & Concepts
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California Institute of the Arts
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Course 5 of 5 in the Specialization Game Design: Art and Concepts
From the lesson
Week 6: Presentation
Your finished, polished game design document is submitted for final review. Check out the bonus material later this week as well. Good luck!
Meet the Instructors
Dariush DerakhshaniFaculty, Character Animation
School of Film/Video
Théotime VaillantInstructor, Experimental Animation
School of Film/Video
You can present yourself and tell us who you are and what you do.
>> Okay, well my name is Sean Velasco and I'm a game designer and
generally I've been a game director.
And the kinds of things I've worked on have generally been platformers,
side scrolling games.
I used to work at a company called WayForward after
going to school in Northern California for game design.
I went to WayForward and they're a house that is in Valencia actually,
like right by Cal Arts.
And I did a lot of licensed games there because that's like their
bread and butter.
So I worked on everything from Contra to, jeez,
we did games that were kind of like revitalizing old franchises, right.
So I worked on Contra and Double Dragon,
but we also did a Batman game and we did Barbie games.
And so we really just ran the gamut for everything.
And yeah, when I was there I learned how to do games kind of on a schedule and
on a budget and honed my game design skills.
And yeah, and then we, some of us at WayForward broke off,
we formed Yacht Club games and Shovel Knight was our first project.
And here we are now.
>> How long did you stay at WayForward actually?
>> I was at WayForward for a long time, I was there from 2007, I was there for
seven years.
>> Okay.
>> Yeah.
>> Okay, and Yacht Club was founded in what year actually?
I also don't, I'm not quite sure about that.
>> Well, our Kickstarter launched in 2013,
it hasn't been too long.
But we were kind of developing the ideas or
percolating them a little bit earlier than that of course, but not that much earlier.
>> Can you actually just go a little more in depth with what motivated you to leave
WayForward and actually start your own studio?
Was it motivated by the idea behind Shovel Knight or
was it something you wanted to do anyways?
>> No, we knew that we wanted to kind of break off and
do our own thing before Shovel Knight was a game or anything.
We wanted to work as a team and
that's something that we couldn't really do in the other structure.
And Kickstarter had recently become the thing, right,
with double fine adventure [COUGH].
And it wasn't quite the gold rush that it is now or
it's not kind of like the big giant thing that it is now.
But it was like wow, there are people that are independent and they're developing
games on their own using Kickstarter and it's working for them.
So that was a big part of it and then also we just wanted to make our original games.
We wanted to make our, I mean that's the main thing, right.
We wanted to make cool, fun stuff and not necessarily do licenses and
not necessarily be bound by other constraints.
We wanted to be able to market our own games and
to decide what prices we wanted to sell them at.
And if our game was successful, then we wanted to reap the rewards from it, right.
It's just kind of we wanted to be masters of our own destiny.
So yeah, that was the, yeah.
>> No, that sounds great.
The first time I met you was actually when I'd just arrived in the US.
And I met you at Indiecade.
I remember Shovel Knight was still, I think the Kickstarter was over.
I'm not quite sure, but I remember it was already playable and
it was playable at the time exclusively on Nintendo consoles.
And I do remember you were actually telling us a little bit about the process
of getting an indie game out of an internal console and what a journey it is.
Can you tell us a little bit also about how it was
to actually get Shovel Knight not just funded on
Kickstarter but also to get published?
>> Okay, well, it was actually,
I mean it wasn't as arduous of a process as you might think.
That was partially because when I was at WayForward I made the acquaintance of
Dan Adleman who is the Nintendo indie development guy.
So when we started Shovel Knight he was one of the first people I called and
I just asked hey, we're making this game.
It's very much in tune with what Nintendo does.
We love Nintendo, we love Nintendo,
we want to put it on Nintendo, can we put it on Nintendo?
And [LAUGH] he was like okay, well yeah, that sounds great.
We'll get you some kits, your thing looks cool.
And it was really never a question.
From the beginning Nintendo's been really, really super cool with us.
They loaned us dev kits for our first year when that's something that
you have to plunk down a good chunk of change for.
And I mean of course, later we were at Indiecade in their booths,right.
We were there because of them.
They brought us around places.
They helped us a lot with our marketing when the game actually came out,
and it's really just been a great partnership.
I think in a lot of ways Nintendo kind of saw us as
we were going to be the poster child for indies on the e-shop.
And so they put effort into us in the hopes that it would be like hey look,
games can be really successful in the e-shop.
So other indies, you should put your games on the e-shop too, right.
So I think we were kind of the pilot program in some ways.
And yeah, I mean, it's went really swimmingly.
>> Yeah, no definitely.
I mean, that's one way of saying it.
I mean you guys were, yeah, definitely advocating for
e-shopping and digital releases on the Wii U.
>> Yeah.
>> You managed to get in and release some bucks which is also something that.
Amy Bow and everything just sort of exploded.
I mean coming back to also something, it's one thing that interests me as well.
Shovel Knight, and you said you wanted it to be on Nintendo consoles because you
had this desire to create something that would fit the Nintendo.
Sort of should I say fit the Nintendo classic era of of gaming,
that type of platform by Mega Man and so forth.
And I remember you were saying that Shovel Knight is very,
it's just classic like visually in term of game play.
But it couldn't have been made obviously on Super Nintendo.
>> Right.
>> And can you actually tell me a little bit more about that aspect of the-
>> Do you mean just technically and
kind of like- >> Yeah, I mean, what it is to try to
transpose classic, really loved cult video game design,
but transpose that on modern machines and still keep them flowing.
>> Sure. Yeah, it's kind of like a,
I would say it's kind of a two-pronged problem, right.
One is the technological differences and
the other one is the game play and the way that players have changed.
And the way that players are now versus the way the players
used to be way back when.
When we approached the design of Shovel Knight it was very,
it was like we wanted to do something classic.
We wanted to build a game around one central mechanic, right,
which is what all the great NES games did.
In Contra you can jump and you can shoot in eight directions.
In Zelda II you can jump and you can do your sword attack and you can down thrust.
Mario just has his jump.
It's like there is so few things you can do that you
really start to intuit what your character can do.
And so then you start looking at the things in the environment and
kind of putting your idea,
you're already having ideas what is going to be able to work in the environment.
So it's because you know Mario jumps and that's all he does,
you're thinking, well what happens when I jump when I hit this?
It's like a guy with a hammer, everything looks like a nail, right.
So you're already kind of thinking about it.
We wanted to make something like that where it's really intuitive.
And so we wanted the, and so we thought about it would be fun to do like a bounce,
like in Zelda II style down thrust bounce.
And we, Mega Man is my favorite game series by far, so
we were like we want to do something with Mega Man influence,
something with Zelda II influence, something with, I don't know, Castlevania,
Mario 3, all the classics that we played, and just kind of put them all together.
But of course, that had a lot of issues, right.
[COUGH] Like in Mega Man, there's no ramp because you can
play versus any of the bosses all at the same time, you can choose anyone first.
So we introduced a ramp with our level map so there were easier
stages then there were more difficult stages, finally the most difficult.
Mega Man and a lot of those games were based on lives which is a concept that,
I mean lives are cool but that's just not something we wanted to do for this game.
And so we decided we wanted to give the player infinite lives, but
with that comes another problem which is how do you make the difficulty something
that feels tough still but it feels fair.
We don't want to have checkpoints every five seconds.
[COUGH] And if we do, it'll make things too easy.
And so we kind of thought about checkpoints and we eventually came up with
a checkpoint system where you could break them in order to be a dare devil, right.
And it was just really thinking about every concept that we have from shops,
to upgrades, to the way that screen transitions work,
in the way that enemies spawn and don't spawn.
In Ninja Gaiden for the NES there will be like a bird that flies in from the side
and he'll knock you back and you run forward and he spawns again, right.
And you're just fighting the same bird for half an hour and that's something,
do we want to have that?
We have the ability to flag whether those enemies spawn over and over or not.
So it's just from little tiny tweaks to big giant things,
we just kind of looked at it from top to bottom and developed it as a group.
>> Great. No, that's no,
that's extremely interesting to hear about all that.
And actually jumping on that, you also talked I remember about I wish
to play test and debug and get all these mechanics working as smoothly as possible.
Can you talk a little bit about what was to maybe train and
change and tweak along the way?
And also the other question is did the community,
because of the Kickstarter community, did the community add any impacts
on some of the mechanics, some of the full design of the game itself?
>> Yeah, sorry, what was the first question again?
>> The first question was how do you manage to refine all these mechanics and
all against all- >> Right, and
then did the public have an influence on it?
Yeah, I mean we did beta tests, we brought people in.
I think early on we just brought people in.
So I brought in my sister.
We brought in our friends from WayForward.
We brought in people that knew game design.
We brought in moms and people that had never played a game, or
moms that really kicked ass at games, right.
And saw how everyone did because we wanted to make it something that worked kind of
along the whole line from [COUGH] excuse me.
From younger people to older people to
nostalgia fueled Mega Man fans that have been missing something like this
to young kids that have never seen an 8-bit style game before.
So we had to try it out with everyone.
I mean that was, we didn't know if it was going to work at all, right.
That was something that we were worried about.
Will an eight year old that's never played an NES game be interested
in something that looks so weird, right, or technologically outdated?
And by bringing the game to things like Pax and
sending our demo around to press people and to friends and family and everything,
bringing people in and watching them play the game, watching them get frustrated on
it and taking their feedback to heart, we improved it.
And then, as we went further, we also did a Steam beta branch,
and we had a list of maybe 200 Internet people, maybe people we've never met in
person before, and we had them play through the game and send us feedback.
And sometimes the feedback was unanimous.
For instance, in the first beta we sent out you
were not allowed to return to levels to go and grind gold or to get the song scrolls.
They were just permanently, it was just not possible.
And so we thought, well Shovel Knight is run based game.
You're going to play it multiple times,
you can get the song scrolls the next time you play the game.
We don't want you to be able to grind the game for gold, because then you could just
play the first level ten times and get all the gold you need.
But everyone just hated it, right.
They just hated it.
And so it was like okay, right,
you got to listen to people even if you have strong convictions about it.
If everyone is telling you that it's wrong then you should probably listen, right.
>> Yes.
Yes. It sounds obvious but that's the number
one core thing that indeed developers should ask, sync to.
>> Yeah. >> We like listening community and
obviously doing bit ads and stuff.
>> And on the subject of community,
because you asked about the community, too.
We also had with the Kickstarter,
we had design like Google Hangouts, like Google design hang outs.
In a situation like this, right, be up at the white board back here pointing at
things and asking for, we're going to have a guy name Tinker Knight and
he's going to be knight with a wrench that does a lot of engineering kind of work.
So what would we want to have on his level?
I mean a lot of the objects and enemies and
ideas from Shovel Knight were brainstormed in meetings like that.
So I mean of course we have to take the mechanics and refine them and
kind of coal everything, but a lot of those initial ideas did come from
Kickstarter backers and people outside of the studio.
Just like the original Mega Man games, right,
where they would have design contests in Japan where
they'd determine who the robot masters were going to be.
Imagine being the ten year old that drew the robot master
that actually got put in the game, right.
I would love to do that for a Shovel Knight 2.
That'd be so cool.
>> That's something that is kind of lost.
You know, you're right.
I remember that in Japan being in the 90s there was so much,
they were also doing that for new mangas and whatever, doing some new contests.
Here I am I was doing that a lot for Darius and all the other.
The other question is what advice would you give to someone young,
not, but someone who is starting, not just this company, but
starting to design video games?
Someone who has a lot of ideas and
is trying to figure out where exactly to start.
>> Right. Well I guess If you want to make games and
you don't know what discipline you're going to go into,
then I guess the best way to do it is just to start making games, right.
Make them on your own, or do mods for games, or
if you're interested purely in design I mean you could do things like edit levels
or even do something like Mario Maker or
Mega Man Powered Up which has great level creation tools, right.
Yeah, just to start making games is the best way to
start making them I think, right.
And having, I think working in a team is really important.
Learning to listen to what other people have to say.
Everyone has all these great ideas for a game, everyone does.
And sometimes you really believe strongly in them.
But I feel like by listening to everyone and
working through it then you can make your ideas even more strong.
And a lot of the problems that I've seen on game projects that I've
either been on or worked with people that have been on,
it's because someone's big ego gets in the way or because it's an issue of,
well I'm in charge here, I'm the artier or it's a leadership thing.
And so I think just by everyone really working together, having respect for
one another and giving harsh criticism but also being able to take it.
I mean that's, if you can do that then you are already so so far ahead.
And from a business standpoint, I don't know.
I mean [LAUGH] I feel like it changes every year, right.
>> No, it's great.
It's the right answer, because we are not going into business at all.
>> Okay.
>> We really designed the class to what the artistic,
from an artistic point of view, from a earlier site, so that's great.
That's exactly what we think as well.
It's just the way it works, I think.
So yeah.
That's great.
I think this is helping a lot and this is exactly what we had in mind.
In the class, in terms of text or other videos, all the way from introduction to
game design, storytelling, and world design, the class I did.
It goes to exactly what you just described and explained.
So that was, nothing to say.
Thank you so much.
>> Sure, yeah, you're welcome.
>> Cool. Thank you so much.
>> Appreciate it.
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