This may be the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. (YouTube link)
Category: Game Design (Page 11 of 22)
A lot of blogworthy news in a short amount of time, and no time to give them the full writeup they deserve.
The Frag Dolls are protesting the Miss World Series Video Games beauty contest. Next week, I hear David Caruso will be protesting ridiculous overacting. Continue reading
Rampant Coyote has an excellent blurb discussing his view hopping through meadows and picking flowers — as an assassin.
My character class, determined early in the game from my tendency to hide when bad guys show up and strike from behind, is an ASSASSIN. That’s right, a bloodthirsty, amoral killer assassin. One of his key skills, which needs to be increased through in-game practice, is alchemy. For making all those vile poisons to coat his arrows and knives with, of course. To get enough materials together for constant alchemy practice, I take the ’scenic route’ from place to place so I can take time to … pick flowers.
Another of the assassin’s key abilities is Acrobatics, which is increased over time by hitting the jump key. So long as endurance doesn’t run out, I find myself hopping around as I go from place to place to increase that ability. Which means that as the vile, evil, bloodthirsty assassin, I am spending MUCH of my time hopping and skipping through meadows picking flowers.
From this Gamasutra article about his return to the industry, Al Lowe (creator of the original Leisure Suit Larry) challenges us thusly:
Let me put this way, the shelf is full of racing games and shooters, RPGs and action games. Where are the comedies? Look at Blockbuster in the video section and compare it to Blockbuster’s game rentals section. There’s a huge hole on that shelf, and we’re not going to try to fill it so much as try to start it, and I hope that at some point comedy games will be as common as comedy movies are in the movie section.
Here’s the real measure of the success of Guitar Hero – bands have started giving Harmonix the real tracks to make the game from (previously, Harmonix used soundalike cover bands). From, of all people, Wil Wheaton:
Well, it turns out that Les Claypool, bass player and lead singer for Primus, is a huge Guitar Hero fan. When he found out they were doing Guitar Hero 2, he gave the team permission to include Primus’ first single John the Fisherman in the game. He also gave them the master tracks as recorded for their album Fizzle Fry, so when you play John the Fisherman in Guitar Hero 2, you’ll be playing along with Les, Larry “Ler” Lamond, and Tim “Herb” Alexander, just like you were with them in the studio in 1989.
Coooool.
A Shadowrun game has been announced! There’s just one problem:
when we decided to do Shadowrun we realized there was a ton of baggage that came with it. We had been through it with our BattleTech games (MechWarrior, MechCommander, MechAssault) for years and had the battle scars of trying to please hardcore fans and new players at the same time. It’s a rough road to travel and it usually ends in tears. Fans got pissed because we weren’t “following the rules” or “keeping to canon”. New players felt like outsiders because so much had gone on before it was like starting to watch LOST in season three…
So what should we do? Satisfy fans of the paper and pencil game? The novels? The SNES and Genesis games? It wasn’t a long debate, really. We decided to restart the Shadowrun timeline and grow the fiction over a series of games, allowing the world we loved to unfold over time.
And who can blame them? There is a whole bunch of people who have been waiting faithfully for a Shadowrun game to become a reality (I am one of them). I feel somewhat like I did when early reports of the new Superman movie reported that the director didn’t think the Man of Steel should fly. It will be interesting to see if a similar fan revolt will occur, and if so, if it will result in similar results.
The Rampant Coyote posted a good article that talks about escaping the genre, and actually getting to the root of what your game should be about. Needless to say, we’ve been talking a lot about genres and licenses here in the office as we try to figure out what we’re doing next, and one thing that comes up a lot is actually ensuring that the game feels like it’s theme.
Earth and Beyond and Eve were both space shooters. E&B tried to be Everquest in space. Eve was more true to what the idea behind a space trading game should be. Guess which one is still around? Continue reading
Every now and then, I try to convince a producer that “Billing model” is one of the next great design challenges. It usually takes more convincing than you would think. There’s an old line of thinking in this industry that billing is a business decision, not a design one. In fact, in no company that I’ve worked for have the designers sat at the table with the business guys to decide what to charge players for a monthly fee.
This is pretty classical thoery inside of the business world. Marketing students are taught ‘the four P’s’ – pricing, promotion, product and placement – as the primary decisions to make when marketing your item. The inference is clear – pricing what you’re selling is very different than deciding what you’re going to sell. Of course, even in the classic world, the business strategy is more unified than that. Netflix and Budget Rent-A-Car are two companies that compete on price in unique ways – and both companies built a product specifically with that in mind. Continue reading
A WoW April Fool’s Day joke some time ago purported that Blizzard was adding Two Headed Giants as a playable race, where two different players played each head. Apparently, the guys at Carpe Diem saw that as a challenge. Continue reading
So Jamie and Jason are talking about game production issues, specifically Jason’s recent Escapist article on the matter.
I think they’re both right, although I think Jamie’s heart is closer to mine when he says that he’s tired of hearing how we’re all fuckups. Jamie’s money quote:
Game development is one of the most difficult endeavors known to man – it combines the unpredictability of software engineering with the unpredictability of film-making and the unpredictability of creating an interactive experience that’s different for every user…unpredictability cubed.
Recent Comments