The Conclusions are very convincing and I finished the book happier in the knowledge that I could apply what I had just learnt not just to my work (more on that in a moment) but to my everyday life.
In most MMO’s the idea of fixing a bug is a very simple thing. Bugs are bad and there to be squashed. However as soon as you have an economy that pushes roughly $450m a year around the world you start to get into all sorts of problems.
Normally it’s the other way around. You lay out a level and a concept artist will create an impression of what it might look like for the Enviroment artists to work from. However Damnation are apparently going a different way and basing their Level Designs on Concept art.
This fanmade video representing a key part of Eve Onlines large backstory (essentially the start of the Caldari/Gallente war) is absolutely amazing. It was made possible by one very dedicated player and CCP’s immense support by allowing him access to their own machinma tools. Day of Darkness II from Dire Lauthris on Vimeo. It is [...]
There is a belief that a good game never punishes players and only rewards them. It’s a belief that often causes debate amongst Designers because the phrase is usually reinterpreted to mean “The player must never fail.” and this couldn’t be more wrong. Failure does not equal Punishment and in fact Failure is an intrinsic [...]
March 20, 2009 – 10:44 am
This managed to pass me by when it first appeared but Andreas Zecher made a series of Flash Games called Understanding Games which try to explain the fundamentals of Game Design via Game Play. It is to Games as Understanding Comics is to Comics. The games clearly take alot from Raph’s Theory of Fun and is a cool grounding for anybody [...]
March 18, 2009 – 11:05 am
I’m always keeping an eye out for good Level Design resources to recommend to people as I believe that it is a hideously under-documented topic and what documentation does exist is often buried deep in forums, wikis or blogs. The remainder I find isn’t actually useful documentation that Designers can learn from. A large part [...]
I am currently reading Gut Feelings: Short Cuts to Better Decision Making by Gerd Gigerenzer. If you’ve ever Read Blink (or even if you haven’t) then I recommend this book as it deals with the concept of intuition, instinct and the unconscious in a much more detailed way. I’d argue that you can completely bypass Blink [...]
Prompted by this article over at Bit-Tech on How AI in Games works it made me want to blog about some of the ways you can make your enemy AI appear smarter without having to re-write your AI back end or invest in expensive middleware. SCRIPTING A huge amount of what convinces us a game has [...]
It’s Friday and frankly I’m too tired to post anything too thoughtful. The week has been an interesting one with RPS linking to my Level Design piece on Sunday which made a complete mess of my my stats graph by putting a big spike in the middle. However this is a link round-up so here [...]
