Experiencing a game happens in the player’s mind. This is why understanding the human brain (especially its limitations) is paramount to offering the best experience possible and making the most efficient decisions during the development process.This workshop proposes to delve into how the human brain works in terms of perception, attention, memory, and learning principles and how they can impact the onboarding (FTUE) and overall enjoyment of your game. We will also touch on human motivation and the key principles to engage players meaningfully. 

Takeaways: 

• Understand the main characteristics and limitations of the human brain (in terms of perception, attention, and memory), and how they impact game development. 

• Understand the three main learning principles (conditioning, cognitive psychology, and constructivism) and how they impact the onboarding of a game. 

• Broad overview of human motivation and its impact on game engageability. 

• Understand the core concepts of game UX 

Hit points, damage, armor class – they all go up.  On the surface, designing vertical progression mechanics in games seems easy: the player starts with a number, then the number gets bigger.  In practice, it takes a lot of planning, poking at player psychology, and iteration to create a satisfying sense of growth that doesn’t collapse over time.  Spreadsheets will not save you! 

In this workshop, attendees will learn how to design and plan their own vertical progression systems, how to avoid common (and costly) mistakes in implementation, and how to account for different types of players in your mechanics.  Our goal is to move from being head down in design documents to having your eyes on a satisfying player experience. 

Games are a set of interesting decisions. These decisions may be directly planned and crafted by the designers, or they may arise from interactions between underlying systems. During this workshop, we will focus on the latter, exploring how elegant systems can provide a decision space much broader than any amount of static content can.  
What We Will Explore:  

• Decision spaces, the emergent gameplay spectrum, and game loops in the context of cognitive load.  

• Approaches to designing systems to foster emergent gameplay, starting from the game situations we aim to achieve.  

• The power of systems and context in supporting the player’s expression and the core game fantasy.  

For people who attend Embrace the Unexpected 1.0:  
This is an evolution of the first one. The theoretical part and structure of the workshop are similar. The whole thing is streamlined though, and the base game has been simplified and adapted to a new theme (wired and the eerie)    

Changes happen throughout the whole iterative process of making a game. Ideas are dropped, vision evolves, priorities shift. When the need for changes happens early, we have a lot of room to look for the best solution. However the closer we get to the release, the more constraints are put on us. Best practice would be to avoid the change, yet sometimes it is inevitable – and it’s within this confined space of can’ts and shouldn’ts we have to design something of quality. 
In this workshop we will look at the process of designing such changes in parts of a game that is already in the late stage of production, investigate the constraints that limit our options and look for methods and approaches that will allow us to make the best of what we have. Participants will then work in teams to redesign a piece of narrative content in a scenario simulating these conditions.