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 good AI [...]
Common sense is wonderful. It only ever gets applied in hindsight or the third person.
So when I tell you that games are at their most fun when your skills are in equilibrium with the Challenge you face you’ll scoff and claim that it’s just Common Sense.
Over There. by San Sharma
Continuity Level Design is a school of Level Design predominantly used by Single Player games.
Recent examples include Portal, Mirrors Edge and Call of Duty 4.
Now it’s worth pointing out that the phrase “Continuity Level Design” is something I’ve just made up (well at least as far as I’m aware).
I’ve chosen the [...]
February 25, 2009 – 2:49 pm
After a quick lunchtime session I can confirm that right now I don’t think the stun effect is Overpowered at all. The difficulty of actually pulling it off versus the lost utility by carrying the Sandman has pretty much balanced it out.
It is however Annoying.
February 23, 2009 – 7:41 pm
So knowing that your players will leave you it’s important that you replace them. Constantly.
How do you replace these players? Advertising. Marketting. Special Offers. Anything. You need to keep your game constantly at the front of the media.
February 21, 2009 – 12:03 am
One thing I’ve learnt in my career is that the best books to read to learn about Game Design are rarely ever books about Game Design. Books about Game Design are a bit like mobile phones; sure they have a camera but when you want to take proper photo you need to reach for something [...]
February 17, 2009 – 1:41 pm
If you buy Gears of War then Epics bottom line isn’t going to be affected by you deciding to watch the football instead.
February 2, 2009 – 1:07 pm
There have been a few attempts to use Videogames for Political reasons. There was that game around the 2004 presidential election where you were John Kerry (Maybe) and you jumped around and generally had your character besmirched or something. I don’t remember it was a long time ago now and 5 minutes of google reveals [...]
