Category: Game Design (Page 15 of 22)

Another Game Nearly Destroyed By Obsessive Compulsiveness

July 24, 2005 / Damion Schubert

I was almost done with Psychonauts last week, perhaps two levels from the end, when I almost quit the game in disgust. You see, there was a power-up (A Psi Challenge Marker, to be precise) placed on a hard-to-reach pipe that you slid right off of if you landed. Failure required a fair amount of climbing to try again.

In no way did I need that power-up. I was far enough along that I knew I’d gain almost no benefit from it. But there’s something about me that has a ‘collect ‘em all’ vibe going through me – I just have to. This is evident in other games as well. When I play Civilization, I have to clear out all the black squares. When I play Diablo, I have to clear the whole map of critters. In this case, though, I spent about an hour trying to get this one powerup, and almost quit the game in disgust from the whole ordeal. Even though sidestepping this one powerup wouldn’t have slowed down my gameplay at all. Continue reading

Hello Mudda, Hello Fadda

July 23, 2005 / Damion Schubert

I drove down to help out a local summer camp for kids called GameCamp on Friday. It was actually my second stint helping the guys out. It was fun. The event was held in San Marcos, 30 minutes south of here, and involved a couple dozen kids who ranged from 13 to 18. Both trips resulted in sightings of a plethora of wonderfully snarkalicious geek-0riented T-shirts. Continue reading

Making Entertainment On The Cheap

July 17, 2005 / Damion Schubert

Fresh Hell pointed out a couple of good articles on ScriptSecrets.net which discusses an interesting topic – how to make movies on the cheap. It resonated with me since we have similar issues when building games as well. As much as we’d like everything to be the biggest and best, and as much as MMOs inherently invite the need of every feature under the sun, we constantly try to figure how to use and reuse art and code in order to keep costs manageable and testing under control. Continue reading

“Eh, We Changed The Rules”

July 15, 2005 / Damion Schubert

I like to read the articles on Magic: the Gathering’s website from time to time, since it’s nice to see how another industry happens to handle a ‘live’ game environment. I found this one amusing, since it talks about all of the different rules and platitudes we come up with, and how the Vision ™ can stray from day to day.

[S]o we changed our minds. We do that a lot. I know Mark Rosewater and I both like to write about all these little rules and guidelines that R&D makes for ourselves and how those rules guide our philosophies and decisions. Well, I’ll let you in on a little secret: those rules and guidelines tend to apply fully the day they were created, a little less the next day, then a little less, and so on, until we’ve changed our minds completely.

True, true. The end result is that my blog history is full of me contradicting myself.

People Are Easy To Offend

July 12, 2005 / Damion Schubert

The recent hullabaloo about a sex game in GTA: SA brings to mind an experience I had on Meridian 59. We got angry mail threatening to sue us because, and I stress I’m not making this up, someone decrypted a file in their Meridian 59 and found it was full of every possible profanity you can think of, stuff that’d make a sailor blush. The file, of course, was the index we used for the profanity filter. Continue reading

The Psychology of Price and Value

July 11, 2005 / Damion Schubert

It’s a common trend in games, nowadays, to figure out how to pick up the gamer and shake him for loose change. And I foresee a backlash. Among the recent news:

Everquest increased it’s price to $14.99 in June. Similarly, Ultima Online increased it’s price to $12.99 in 2003. Both were originally below the $10 dollar mark.
On Slashdot today, White Wolf has decided any Vampire games with a price tag owes WW a cut – even, some rules lawyers claim, if the ‘price tag’ is money collected for the pizza guy.
Emboldened by wacky Korean games, Microsoft and Sony are both jumping over themselves to make micropayments a key part of the next console generation – even though, if you listen to most of their plans, it sounds like they want to ship half a game for full price, and expect you to buy the other half.
The makers of Sin using the episodic format to create a game that would, once completed, possibly be the most expensive First Person Shooter ever.

The Value of IP

June 28, 2005 / Damion Schubert

Scott Miller (of Duke Nuke’m fame) recently re-iterated the value of creating and owning your IP (it’s one of his mantras). His reasons were all from the point of view of the developer, and were sound, although he’s a bit optimistic in how much negotiating power developers who aren’t 3D Realms have in the matter. Highlights:

Owning an IP…

Gives a studio clout and leverage.

The ability to better control their future.

Much better company value.

And a way to cash in on that value without having to sell the company.

This is in curious juxtaposition with Stuart Roch’s point of view. Stuart had recently read a snippet from David Jaffe’s blog. David was the Design Director for the recently released, bosom-heaving yet very excellent God of War. David let it slip in a throwaway comment that God of War has only sold 500K units so far, according to NPD. Continue reading

The Perfect Wargame

June 28, 2005 / Damion Schubert

Kotaku pointed out this oldie-but-goodie at Pointless Waste of Time: what a wargame based on the realities of modern politics and media would be like. A snippet:

I want that “Public Support” meter to rise and fall according to Troops Lost, Length of Conflict, Innocents Killed and Whether or Not There is Anything Else On TV That Week. I want to lose 200 Public Support points because, in a war where 8,000 units have been lost, one of my Mutalisks happened to be caught on video accidentally eating one clergyman. Then, later, my destruction of an entire enemy city goes unnoticed because the Nude Zero-Gravity Futureball championship went into overtime.

Original comments thread is here.