Search

GameIntrospection

Love and Hate for Gaming @GIntrospection

Open Search

More Money for a Better Entertainment Ride? (Movies vs Gaming costs)

As anyone in the industry should be telling you, graphics doesn’t equal fun and some of the most costly things about a game are graphics. Large teams of artists, designers, story writer, motion capture crews and voice actors, all working together to make a large-scale game what it is. Not just the graphics. Graphics aren’t a substitute for fun, but it can help amplify it. We don’t necessarily go into every game looking to have fun the whole time, but to think, to experience a different world and to get lost in a well told story for a while. It’s our form of escapism that we choose to occupy our reality with. One that is interactive and one that isn’t necessarily possible in our own reality.

Large scale productions don’t necessarily give you fun, but they give you opportunity. Opportunity to develop a mature design, develop detailed backdrops and sceneries, get the best voice actors in the market to bring all the characters outside of their reality and accepted in ours.

I will preface this with not every big budget game does this well, and I prefer indie games because they have a better sense of identity with how the product should be. That being said, there are sources of entertainment to be had in both the big-budget market and the small-budget one.

Continue reading “More Money for a Better Entertainment Ride? (Movies vs Gaming costs)” →

0

Game Idea: Hide Your Porn (Classic Edition)

Game Idea: Hide your porn (Classic edition)

The Premise:

Having your own personal space means that we tend to accumulate things that pique our interest. Games, Toys, Movies, everything gets littered around our space because we tend to use them. But what about the things that embarrass us? When guests come over, then we start scrambling for places to hide our little secrets in hopes that they won’t embarrass us to people we’d rather not have knowing.

But in the age of the computer and online pornography, we don’t have hard copies lying around unless we prefer living in the stone-age with a dvd/vhs remote in our offhand instead of a mouse. Because of this, let’s roll the clock back to, say, 1998. If you want a video of 2 fine ladies and a donkey, or men with frozen bananas, you need to have a hard copy of it. But of course, you don’t want any of these things being found.

This might even be more embarrassing. Nickelback vs Donkey Porn. tough choice.
This might even be more embarrassing. Nickelback vs Donkey Porn. tough choice.

Continue reading “Game Idea: Hide Your Porn (Classic Edition)” →

2

Game Idea: Where I’ve Been (Suspense Adventure)

Game Idea: Where I’ve been (Suspense adventure)

The Start:

The premise is easy, it starts out as an adventure game with a dash of tedium but only for a short time. You’re running errands for people, say 10 errands total around a city. It’s a bright day, you know where to go, probably takes about 15-20 minutes to complete while building some sort of character story in-between. The whole of the city should take probably 5-10 minutes to run through in broad daylight.

Continue reading “Game Idea: Where I’ve Been (Suspense Adventure)” →

1

Steady Status Auto-Balancing of Games

Steady State Auto-Balancing

Idea

Looking at the scale of some of the online multiplayer games, it’s always fascinating to see how people always complain that only a small subset of things are usable in competitive play. In Halo or Counter-Strike, only a handful of weapons are considered good and the rest are never touched unless you’re in very constricted situations and the less-preferred weapon is the only option. League of Legends has over 100 champions to select from, but you only see about 30-40 played the majority of the time. Player-vs-player (PVP) in World of Warcraft tends to have the same team layout in their 2v2 and 3v3 arenas making the meta-game predictable after playing for so many iterations.

Developers do try and balance these problems, but re-balancing takes a long time to complete. When you make something (gun, character, class) weaker or stronger, it changes many other aspects of other classes. Which character’s are good to support them, who does the original character do well against, who does well against this character. Many aspects change because of small changes that the developers make to try and re-balance the game, making things that were perceptively weaker -> better and making things that seemed overpowering -> weaker.

Continue reading “Steady Status Auto-Balancing of Games” →

4

Game Idea: Transfer Powers from Strong Allies to your Character

Game Idea: To get stronger, you have to take the power of you allies (power transfer)

Game:

The mechanics are simple. For your main character to get stronger, e.g. better stats, higher level, more weapons or abilities, your allies in combat have to get weaker. You start with a level 1 sack of potatoes with little ability of his own but is accompanied by one or two bad ass no-McGuffin types. As you play through the game, the player gets chances to steal the powers of his allies to make himself stronger. You can balance this out by requiring the use of each character throughout the game, so you have choice of power-transfer but you make parts of the game harder for yourself.

Continue reading “Game Idea: Transfer Powers from Strong Allies to your Character” →

0

Our lives on a Hard Drive

Just how much of our life can fit on a hard drive? (2 TB)

If you’re a writer, then your hard drive will fail long before you ever fill it up. At 1000 words per hour, with each word being on average 6 letters, and chugging mouth loads of caffeine trying to write until your fingers whither and die,  that means you’ll fill up a drive in roughly 3e8 hours or 38000 years. Considering the average lifespan of a hard drive is roughly 10 years, good luck writing. Thankfully, you don’t have to pass your Hard Drive off to the next 600 generations of offspring as their birthright to fill up the family hard drive with some sort of writing. Since they can’t actually go out and experience anything because of their need to type, it’s probably better off that they don’t write all day and night.

You see this? This is what you'll be doing when I die.
You see this, son? This is what you’ll be doing when I die.

Continue reading “Our lives on a Hard Drive” →

0

Gaming Experiences: Bonding over Single Player

Every one should check out Zac Gormon at http://magicalgametime.com/ His work hits so many feels buttons, it's not even fair
Every one should check out Zac Gormon at http://magicalgametime.com/ His work hits so many feels buttons, it’s not even fair

Sitting down in front of the couch, friends by your side. One of you pops in a game and everyone’s voice gets hoarse as the chatter escalates to yells and cheers because someone just got a clutch head-shot from across the map just as the countdown reaches 0. There are games design for multiplayer and those designed for single player. Goldeneye, Halo, Mario Party, Unreal Tournament, League of Legends. Many games and franchises build their fan base around single player experiences and multiplayer experiences, but that doesn’t mean that those socializing bonding moments can’t be found in single player games.

Continue reading “Gaming Experiences: Bonding over Single Player” →

0

New Controllers Brings New Interactions in Games

Yes, yes. Bad, we get it. Christ, that joke is older than the internet.
Yes, yes. Bad, we get it. Christ, that joke is older than the internet.

Remember when the Powerglove was supposed to be revolutionary? A kids imagination running wild with fantasies about moving Link or Mario around with just a flick of the wrist , an attack with a finger twitch, and a jump with a twist it. But this was still not as intuitive partly because the Powerglove was an elephant’s turd, but also because the games weren’t built for controls other than the native controller. This is also why the gimmicks of the Wii and all of its peripherals seemed like gimmicks, because they felt like after-thoughts to the game instead of being involved in the initial inspiration of the game.

Arcade games had a better potential with these kinds of non-directional pad controllers because they had a game in mind where non-d-pad interaction was part of the core design. Light-gun games where you shoot the screen, punching games where you hit a physical pad, dancing games where you mash buttons on the floor. Having the space for peripherals outside of the d-pad helped inspire completely different genres of games or, at the very least, re-interpret the genre in a different way to help spawn different types of games.

Continue reading “New Controllers Brings New Interactions in Games” →

0

Game Idea: Computer-Pandemic

Game Idea: Computer Anti-Rx (Computer Virus Pandemic)

Game:

The game pandemic is about creating a type of infection (bacteria, fungal or viral) and designing it in a way that will cause the world’s population to become infected and die from it. As your infection spreads through more of the population, you can upgrade the infection to be more resilient to the weather, easier to spread, or more severe symptoms and side-effects after caught. The more people you infect and the easier the symptoms are to notice, the quicker people start to find treatments for and treat the symptoms. So the upgrades need to start moving towards defenses against antivirals (and the like).

Compu-geddon takes a similar approach, but instead you engineer a computer exploit (worm, virus, web-hack) to infect as many computers as possible. As the exploit becomes more permissive throughout the ecosystem, the easier it might be discovered. But the more people who you can infect, the more valuable your exploit becomes.

Continue reading “Game Idea: Computer-Pandemic” →

0

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑