Game Development - Zoos

Zoos, Gyms and Museums

I came a cross a video by Robin-Yann Storm which makes a case for documenting game elements interactively using Zoos, Museums and Gyms.

Each of the three are intended to document something different:

• Zoos - demonstrate various interactions
• Gyms - demonstrate movement to help inform level design
• Museums - show how different game elements work

Zoos

For my personal projects, I generally make games with a fixed development lifetime - usually between 1 week to 3 months.

Because of this, I don’t really worry about documenting too much.

However, I do have a very real need to test game elements quickly, especially in game jams. I don’t want to have to fight my way through a boss fight just to check a cutscene.

So I have used the ideas for all three zoos, gyms and museums, but with the following changes:

• I put them all under the category zoo, I like zoo because:
  • it’s a short name
  • it is never relevant to other game elements
  • it ends with z which places it firmly at the bottom of my folders
• The purpose of zoo is entirely test-driven
  • If putting something in a zoo speeds up testing, it goes in the zoo.

A good use case for zoos have been fonts. I can set up a zoo which quickly shows a bunch of fonts next to eachother so I can judge fit. Then if a new font comes up - it goes in the zoo and can be checked for fit.

Truly Madly Deeply

Truly Madly Deeply consists of several complex interactions, all of which are time consuming to reach in game:

• Cutscenes
• Mining Game
• Quest Game
• Mining Events
• Quest Events

Within the mining and quest games, there are many short dialog events which occur. Some occur randomly, others occur once specific conditions are met. For example, we probably want to know that when we kill a slime, Emcee doesn’t say “Ha, take that goblin!”.

Cutscene are especially useful to put into a zoo. In the last couple of days of making the game, new scenes were still being added to the game. The zoo allowed me to test and tweak the scenes immediately.

Additionally, the text engine was very involved and had a number of complex use cases such as animated movement, resizing, color, appearing, fonts etc.

Trick Shot II

In Trick Shot II, my zoos tested:

• keyboard input
• physics
• various obstacle interactions

As the game was developed, many of the zoos were removed as the game’s infrastructure evolved.