Designing Interactive Characters Syllabus - The Multiplayer Classroom: Designing Coursework as a Game - page 149

that they can build the worlds of their games with any physical laws and rules
they want, but everything within their worlds should follow those laws and rules.
They should not be broken arbitrarily simply to provide a new gameplay
obstacle or a twist in the story. Anachronisms are terribly hard on immersion.

To teach the students the concept of consistency, I allowed them a lot of
freedom in their initial character designs deliberately so they might be forced to
change them. Game design is not static. It is a process. We

ll revisit these
concepts on Level 13, when we go into more detail on how games are designed.

'

There were other significant differences to the format of the game. As in role-
playing games, avatars would acquire new skills to help them in their quest. I
hoped these skills would help to at last give me a reasonable leveling system, as
we will see in a moment.

Finally, for the first time, instead of giving each guild a final concept document,
the entire class would build a playable version of the final level of the game. At
first, I envisioned this as the mage

s chamber at the top of that mysterious tower,
but when we had decided on how we would build the final level, and I realized
the skill level of the class with programming and art was quite high, I decided to
expand the assignment to include the entire tower with six doors that could only
be opened by solving puzzles, and the grounds surrounding it dotted by magical
fountains.
In the

'

section, I provided this class with a new version of
the leveling chart. The changes were these:

“ Grading Procedure �

n I dropped the explicit conversion to letter grades, although the
admonition that students needed to reach Level 10 to pass the course
was in bold type.
n There were 20 levels possible. This gave me a good range in which to
distribute the total basic XP of 1,000 points.
n The first 10 levels closely resembled standard RPG game levels with
increasing XP needed for each level.

I added a new column. Again much like characters in standard RPG
games, players would achieve new skills every few levels. At first I
considered actual skills that would help them in their game quest.

n