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system. We began, therefore, by building our own progression planning tool based on
Refraction
's approach. We then adapted and extended our tool with a view to simul-
taneously servicing the specific needs of three game design case studies. These case
studies were all at the early progression design point of their design cycle. The games
have been under development by the primary author of this paper for between six
months and three years. The designs represent three game genres: a casual strategy
game, an adventure game and a top-down shooter. Usefully, these genres vary quite
markedly in the nature of their progression. Servicing these contrasting design needs
helps enforce a degree of universality in our tool design. Our games cannot be repre-
sentative of all game genres, however, and like
Refraction
's system, the design of our
tool was inevitably driven by the needs of specific games rather than the needs of all
possible games. Intuitively, the progression planning requirements of all three of our
games go beyond the concept-based progression units used for the
Refraction
game.
Most notably, unlike
Refraction
the games are all, to some degree, non-linear in their
progression structure. This feature invokes the challenge of how to plan progression
that does not take the form of linear sequence.
4
System Model
Here we describe our tool and how it builds upon, modifies and extends the model
used by Refraction's progression planning tool.
Fig. 1.
System model
Our system, inspired by
Refraction
's, comprises constraints, plan and idea reposi-
tory components (see Fig. 1). While our system performs a similar role, our differing
workflow approach is manifest in some important functional differences.
Refraction
's
system uses its simple constraints calculations to drive generative features and
analyze design moves, generating the progression plan and, optionally, the levels
themselves. Our system removes the generative features and much of the automated
analysis performed by their system, and instead focuses on presenting and organizing
the results of our calculations to the designer. Most notably, our system, created to
