Introduction Another story – The (Former) General – has been released as part of Penguin/STS’s current ARG, We Tell Stories. This story, and the website it comes from, is all part of an ARG, from two of the key people (Dan and Adrian Hon) behind Perplex City (PXC). So … […]
games design
168 posts
Using a custom font renderer that lets me position text exactly where I want it, I put together a simple game that teaches you to count from 1 to 10 in Korean characters. First, you HAVE to manually download the Korean font I’m using (because I don’t think I can […]
…according to Ed Castranova’s snippet that Scott J posted from the MDY vs Blizzard trial notes. Courtesy of Scott, here’s a hosted copy of the source documents. Ed writes a nice little explanation of why / how bots damage an in-game economy. I liked that. Good stuff – go read […]
Massively Multiplayer Entity Systems: Introduction So, what’s the connection between ES and MMO, that I’ve so tantalisingly been dangling in the title of the last three posts? (start here if you haven’t read them yet). The short answer is: it’s all about data. And data is a lot harder than […]
Web 2.0 strategies often say “we can’t compete with our users, there’s too many hundreds of millions of them, and actually – collectively – they outmatch us in almost everything we do. So we’re going to bring them into our company, we’re going to let them develop the products, we’re […]
Summary Speakers: Daniel James, Three Rings; Matt Mihaly, Iron Realms Entertainment Very brief notes…
Summary Speaker: Jeremy Irish, Groundspeak Entertaining, with a lot of very small anecdotes, but nothing non-obvious in this talk. Everything he gave as advice you’d probably work out for yourself within your first project without losing time from doing so.
Summary Speaker: Eyjolfur Gudmundsson, CCP I want a full-time economist working for MY company. And: CCP staff should give more of the GDC talks, they’re good. And entertaining. In the midst of a week of depressingly dumb comments (on the topic of economy: what possessed Matt Miller to argue against […]
Summary Speaker: Lesley Matthieson, High Impact I didn’t find this talk at all useful, not because it was badly given (it wasn’t) but because the speaker seemed to be coming from such a rarefied environment that the ideas and suggestions would only work for a narrow set of people/projects that […]
Summary Speaker: Michael Smith, MindCandy Another half-hour-long introductory topic talk from the Worlds In Motion summit. Short but sweet. A nice overview of lots of different things going on in the use (and sales) of real-world goods as part of online games / virtual worlds. Misses out plenty of things, […]
In case it’s not obvious enough, I’m tagging all my session-writeups this week with “GDC 2008” (HTML | RSS). Mostly I’m covering online-related and social-networking related topics, but jumping around between GDC Mobile, Serious Games, Worlds In Motion summit, Independent Games, and the Game Design, Production, and Business tracks.
Summary Speaker: Jeffrey Steefel, Turbine IMHO, Jeffrey hereby strengthens the weight of evidence that Turbine is genuinely turning the corner from making poorly-guided foolish games to doing cutting-edge stuff and doing it well. Lord of the Rings Online (LotRO) has gone some considerable way to burying the failings of Asheron’s […]
Summary Speaker: Peter Marx, Analog Protocol/MTV Good to hear about virtual worlds and MMOs from the perspective of a mega content / media company. Several interesting ideas and explanations that are well worth reading if you haven’t already been tracking the way that Viacom et al have been approaching the […]
Summary A very broad range of ideas on what should shape game design at a fundamental level. I greatly enjoyed this for the way it jumped to a bunch of related but competing ideals and perspectives. Also very interesting for including a 20-minute section on How to Design for Alternate […]
Summary A very broad range of ideas on what should shape game design at a fundamental level. I greatly enjoyed this for the way it jumped to a bunch of related but competing ideals and perspectives. Also very interesting for including a 20-minute section on How to Design for Alternate […]
Summary A very broad range of ideas on what should shape game design at a fundamental level. I greatly enjoyed this for the way it jumped to a bunch of related but competing ideals and perspectives. Also very interesting for including a 20-minute section on How to Design for Alternate […]
Also known as: Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! (because I’m now deviating from the original schedule I outlined in Part 1; what the heck, it was only a rough agenda anyway…) Questions, questions… First of all, there’s a bunch of good questions that have been raised in response to the […]
Andrew Chen has a great post on how people use Facebook and why MySpace pages are so ugly I particularly liked the straightforward comparison between the opposing viewpoints on design, i.e.: Facebook / Google / “modern” web companies: Simple, Functional, Easy Myspace / GeoCities / “poorly designed” web presences: Lots […]
Part 2 – What is an Entity System? (Part 1 is here) Sadly, there’s some disagreement about what exactly an Entity System (ES) is. For some people, it’s the same as a Component System (CS) and even Component-Oriented Programming (COP). For others, it means something substantially different. To keep things […]
Another couple of days since the first one-day effort, and SFE single player is now working, albeit with a seriously crap AI: