Game Development

Game Design: Always with the Family Issues

Load up a game, any one that is story driven, and find yourself in a world where your main character is either a mercenary/soldier, a camera vehicle for a larger story, or a single white male father/ex-father figure type.

Call of the Battlefield is a vehicle for set pieces.

Ambiguous man is a vehicle for some story that you’re just a bystander in, watching the main actors propel the story forward. You go from scene to scene where the other actors talk to you, but are giving you the plot points that they’ve enacted at this point in the story. Sometimes you impose some driving force, but the story isn’t necessarily centered around you.

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November 7, 2014 0

(YT) Game Design: Dissociative Camera (Electric Super Joy)

November 5, 2014 0

This is your Gaming on Data: League of Legends and Selecting a Champion

It’s not about your potential power, but the power that you display.

Selecting which character you want to spend your gaming life with is a difficult choice, no matter how temporary the experience. You choose your character depending on what you think looks cool, what role you want to play as, what you think will get the job done when push comes to shove, how well you can synergize with your teammates. You’ll be spending the next game life becoming accustomed to your character and your team’s characters so you want to choose someone that you won’t regret spending that life as.

League of Legends is no exception to this, and with over 100 characters to choose from, 5 roles and a number of different play styles for each character and role, a player has a lot of choices to make in deciding how their next gaming-lifespan will be experienced. Not all play-styles work so some people take up the task of writing up guides on how they play, what works for them, what items to pick up and contingencies based on who you are playing with or who you are playing against. Sites like Champion Select, Solomid and Mobafire where guide writers impart their wisdom with certain characters and prospective new comers learn and rank what guides work best.

I’m not here to talk about which guides are better than others, but to research and impart knowledge of which characters the League Community likes best.

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October 25, 2014 2

Game Design: Enemy Agency Changing Player Agency

Broad agency is important to have in a video game. The ability to change your environment and change how you interact with it helps to set the game apart from how the player will experience one game over other games. That’s not to say that agency is the ultimate goal in all games. Plenty of games have very minimal agency and are still fun, ala Super Mario Bros. Agency is just another vector to follow in the pursuit of why we enjoy certain games. But the point of this isn’t to write about the player’s agency because that gets entirely too much focus. The agency of those that the player interacts with is equally important to focus on because it determines how the player will interact with the environment as well. The agency of the NPCs (non-playable characters) changes the agency of the player by changing the rules of interaction within the game.

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October 11, 2014 0

Game Idea: Quick, turn the lights on

The Backstory

I don’t know if many of you can relate, but I remember when I was much younger being asked to grab something from the basement/garage. Aside from these rooms being the least occupied for the house’s lifespan, they were also the most cluttered of the house. So walking into the basement, you are already pretty unfamiliar with the room, but now you have to go looking for something in there. After rummaging around the shelves and boxes, you find whatever you were looking for and you need to leave the place. The problem is the light switch was at the bottom of the stairs and once you turn it off, the security of light was gone. The security of knowing what could be around you in an unfamiliar room was gone. The security of awareness vanishes and you’re left with your paranoia and hypervigilance to anything that could be living in the basement.

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October 4, 2014 0

Let’s Talk About: PAX Impressions – Dreadnought and Speedrunners

Dreadnought

The boring stuff: Dreadnought is an online-multiplayer starship arena game for PC, blah blah blah.

The interesting: The pacing for Dreadnought is much different than traditional online-multiplayer games. You have your fast-paced and hectic, aka Call of Duty; you’re always running and scoping out the next area while calling in for backup, aka Battlefield and Counter-Strike; or you’re always running from place to place to find the next person to force-feed bullets aka Halo. Dreadnought, however, fluctuates considerably while playing. Because you’re controlling such colossal ships, it’s not like you won’t be spotted from time to time, but the stages are massive enough that you aren’t constantly in a struggle against a constant barrage of laser fire.

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August 31, 2014 0

Player’s Agency and Lack of it for Suspense Games

After watching a few streamers play through Five Nights at Freddy’s it reminded me that the player’s agency, their ability to control their actions to elicit outcomes, is extremely important to create a consonance (harmony) between the player and the game. And it is when that agency is reduced or limited is when cognitive dissonance sets in. You’re playing a game and you aren’t jiving with it. The actions that you want to do and the reactions that you’re getting on screen aren’t connecting. In psychological terms, you have multiple mental beliefs that are conflicting with one another causing discomfort – cognitive dissonance. The actions that you want to do and the actions that you’re allowed to do are in conflict, causing the anxiety and discomfort. But in a game like Five Nights at Freddy’s (FNAF) or any other suspense game designed to instill paranoia and anxiety, it’s the lack of agency that helps to inspire these emotions.

We can always look back on games the past games like Resident Evil where Jill Valentine moved like a Old 70s Buick, or Panzer Artillery Tank, which actually worked as a benefit to the game. The lack of mobility took away any agility that we could have had and made even the slightest danger – zombie, hound, Lisa Trevor – much more tension-rising than normal because we knew maneuvering pass them was a chore and a half.

Maybe Jill can finally be the "Master of Lockpicking" — This isn’t entirely accurate. The character in the image can probably control better than Jill.

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August 28, 2014 0

Growing Up with Gaming (short essay)

It occurred to me just before I sat down to write that people in my generation are the first to grow up not knowing what life was like before gaming (as we know it) was a thing. Being born between 1984 and 1990 when the NES reigned supreme over the gaming masses, those of us born in this era grew up with names like Mario, Link and Megaman as a constant throughout our lives. Just like us from the past, those born around the 2001 will never know of an age without the name Master Chief in their gaming vernacular. Or kids the were born in the mid-90s never knowing a time before the Internet in every household, or 2007-ish without a smartphone or tablet in your household.

What’s important to remember is that while many game designers were around and developing games while we were growing up, there is a fresh generation of minds that have been exposed to a rich history of game design, good and bad. This might be an incestuous relationship because our ideas tend to be anchored to past experiences so our inspirations are “borrowed” from ideas that we’ve played in the past instead of coming up with something completely original. Regardless, our game-design parents and mentors helped to foster our experiences, our morals, our social dilemmas, our peaks and pits through our gaming experiences. Our games were growing up while we were growing up.

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

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August 27, 2014 0

Game Idea: Draw your enemies away – RTS (Controller: Wii U Pad)

Game Idea: Draw your enemies away – RTS (Wii U Pad)

The Game:

The idea is this: you’re doing the standard “make + build + kill” deployable units thing that Real-Time-Strategy games do (RTS) or even TTS (Turn-based Strategy games. To make things interesting you have a “draw”-ability that is limited use per game, but it allows you to set the stage in your favor when you’re on the offense or defense.

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August 25, 2014 0

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