game-design
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Wii Warm Up: More freeform game design
We enjoyed reading your ideas last time, so we thought we'd have another brainstorming session. Let's hear your pitches for possible Wii games. Get creative, and see if you can come up with something totally new! The only rule is that it has to be completely awesome, or not.
Video: Unity, the game dev tool for Macs
Click To Play We've covered Unity before, but video speaks louder than words, so we were happy to have a demo of some incredible features in the latest version. Unity is a game dev tool, only for Macintosh, that allows you to create Mac games, Dashboard widget games, PC games, web games embedded on a page and (eventually) Wii games. What's really impressive about Unity is the ease-of-use. The FPS you'll see in the video was created by a 15-year-old with no previous programming experience-- using an eMac. Also, be sure to stay tuned on Monday for another video with team Unity as they unveil some amazing new features.Again, here's the .mov version for everyone to enjoy in stutter-free format.
Cryptic G4 ads promote animated game design comedy
If you've been watching G4 lately (and if so, may we ask why?) you've probably seen a couple thousand 30-second spots promoting a mysterious, retro-stylized game company called GameAVision. The viral marketing got even weirder yesterday with an e-mailed press release that touts the two advertised games, Crosswalk and Bar Fight, as "featur[ing] movable character, sound, and several exciting colors." The ads and the release both direct players to the GameAVision web site, which includes some unplayable, Atari 2600-style Flash games and some amusing help wanted ads, among other things.What's going on here? Turns out the cryptic campaign is for an upcoming animated series that G4 commissioned last year. According to the October 2006 press release, the show will feature "Dave and Jerry, two video-game programmers whose lives are turned upside down when GameAVision, the freewheeling company at which they've spent their whole careers, is purchased by Bob Larrity, a crazed Texan businessman who knows nothing about video games except that they 'sell good.'"The premise actually sounds interesting, and the involvement of Minoriteam creator Adam de La Pena is encouraging. It's also nice to see G4 filling its schedule with some new, vaguely game-related programming instead of more reruns of Cops or something. Here's hoping the show lives up to its promise.
Ohio Game Jam asks: can you make a game in 24 hours?
Ohio University's Post Online brings us a story on the Ohio Game Jam, a competition among amateur designers who try to create the best game possible in only 24 hours. The winning title was developed in only two hours, which is still a longer development cycle than some commercial products seem to have.Says "Event Overlord" Ian Schreiber: "You don't end up with Shakespeare, but you have some high levels of creativity because of the time constraints." By most accounts, you don't end up with Shakespeare even if you spend years on a game, so that's okay. And a quick-and-dirty contest like this is bound to result in ideas you'd never see in a game developed over three years by a committee. For instance, one of the Jam games used Chuck Norris's head as a projectile. We'd love to play that. But then, we'd also love to be called "Event Overlord."
A numerical history, and future, of flOw dev That Game Company
On the first floor of Moscone's North hall last Friday, flOw developer That Game Company presented their storied origins. Co-founders Jenova Chen, who took a brief recess from the company to help on the DS version of Will Wright's Spore, and Kellee Santiago, met at the University of Southern California. "I don't see [video games] as being any different [than other interactive media], it's all story telling," Santiago said. Chen, who affirms that his proudest work is flOw and Cloud, explained their place in gaming with an ever-popular culinary allegory. Think of Gears of War as steak and World of Warcraft as chicken. Let's give lettuce a relation to Nintendogs and fish can be Brain Age. "Let's say you focus on chicken, but somehow you find a way to make it accessible and customizable," said Chen. The according Power Point slide shows the chicken transition into a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. "That also expands the audience or customers. How can you make existing games more accessible to wider audiences?" Does that mean flOw is a bowl of cereal? All we know now is that we're quite famished.
Patrick Curry completes his 52 game ideas
With all the New Year's celebration we forgot to check in on Patrick Curry (Stubbs the Zombie, John Woo's Stranglehold), who set out to make 52 new game ideas, one per week, for the entirety of 2006. On January 1, Curry finished his project with Swordplay, a fighting card game.The last time we checked in on him, we selected our top picks of the initial 24, but this time we can't narrow down our favorite game ideas. Go peruse his proposals and let us know your favorite ideas.[Thanks, tony]
Microsoft releases XNA Game Studio Express
Microsoft's been talking this one up for some time now, but XNA Game Studio Express, the so-called "YouTube for games," has finally hit the big 1.0 and is now available for would-be game designers everywhere to get their hands dirty with. The software is a trimmed down version of the company's full-fledged XNA game devleopment platform, based on Visual C# Express and able to run on a standard Windows PC (XP for now, Vista later). The YouTube analogy is, of course, a bit of an overstatement as you'll need some honest-to-goodness programming skills to actually create something resembling a game. While the core software is available as a free download, to get the most out of it you'll have to sign up for the XNA Creators Club, which will run you $49 for a four month subscription or $99 for an annual sub through Xbox Live Marketplace. In addition to letting you play user-created games on an Xbox 360, it'll also give you access to a library of game assests, as well as sample products, white papers, and technical support. If you need an added incentive, Microsoft's also announced the "Dream-Build-Play" game design competition, though the only details they're providing at the moment are that you can win "fantastic prizes" and "global envy." Funny, we thought you needed a PS3 for that.
Under the hood: game mechanics
Lost Garden has posted a very interesting article about game mechanics and how they work. The core belief that they are trying to impart is taken from Ralph Koster's book A Theory of Fun, "Game mechanics are rule based systems / simulations that facilitate and encourage a user to explore and learn the properties of their possibility space through the use of feedback mechanisms."The article explains how feedback loops work in a game-related environment, and what makes them particularly useful in designing a space that also has to be educational on a fundamental level. For instance, how do I get up to that ledge to grab the rocket launcher? How can I open this door to keep progressing through this level? The gamespace and elements have to provide feedback to the user, to let them know how things work so that they can keep playing and hopefully have fun along the way.One of our favorite quotes -- "I can put a black box on the table with a hidden button. Unbeknownst to a potential user, pressing the button enough times and the black box will spew out a thousand shiny silver coins. This is not a game. This is a bizarre gizmo." It goes on to explain how a designer would take this and turn it into a game by encouraging discovery and exploration, and by hinting that something useful (the coins) will be a result. A lot of things in this article are simple enough to make you smack your forehead, but it's really interesting to see how they work together in a game design context, and to understand the work that goes into something as simple as trying to present a path to a player.Oh, and we want one of those black boxes with the coins inside.
A better way to die?
Blogger Tuebit over at WorldIV riffs on a great thread going on at the MMO Round Table forum. The central question: how to handle death in massively multiplayer games? Using Tolkien's universe as a template, Tuebit argues that death should come rarely (if at all). Maybe. The discussion feels too narrow. Have ludologists compiled a comprehensive list of all of the different ways that a player can die (or be set back) in video games (and RPGs in particular)? Has consensus emerged on the best and worst ways to punish player mistakes? With the 60th anniversary of the invention of video games approaching, isn't it just a little bit embarrassing that many of today's most commercially successful games use such rudimentary "death" mechanisms to communicate failure? [Image source]
Picture it: top secret game design manual found in dumpster outside big game publisher's HQ
A: Lara Croft Tomb Raider B: Ridge Racer C: Auto Assault D: $mad profit$
