From the Oddlabs blog: Many game developers, indie or not, view the Mac as a freak that no one cares for or wants to be associated with. They look at statistics that show only 5% of desktop machines are Macs and say: “Why waste a lot of time and money for only 5% of the…
Category: Game Design
Progress and updates on the game design process.
Although they are developed in software, games are not software
The title of this post is from this article: You Need $100,000. Users relate to them differently. Immersion matters. Balance matters. Drawing people into the world of the game in a way that doesn’t break their attention every few seconds matters. Any successful game weaves a web of illusion around the player to engage them…
Skirmish MP
Following on from my last post, I would posit that there is something missing from MP RTS (Multi Player Real Time Strategy) games and that would be the lack of a feeling that success has an impact. Left 4 Dead is my favourite FPS game because it encourages teamwork between players on both sides and…
Most RTS single player modes suck…
Josh Bycer writes: Honestly, most RTS single player modes… suck. The reason is that designers try to use it to teach the player about multiplayer which doesn’t work, as an AI is not a good substitute for a player … Over the years, the structure of mission design has changed and can be broken down…
Gliese 581
Of course, this is not the first time we have seen Gliese 581 (HO Librae). In 2214, we’ll send a Seedship.
QABAL: INTENT vs IMPLEMENTATION
This thread on rpg.net asks why secret magical settings in games tend to be dumb. My problem is, it’s never made any sense to me on an absolutely fundamental. The idea in most of these settings is that humans not only don’t believe in the supernatural, they’ll even go so far as to doubt their…
Frontier: A Changed Man
Kibwe had returned home a changed man. Kibwe had always wanted to be a pilot. From an early age he made airfoils from balsa and drove his parents to distraction with his attention to detail, his constant entreaties to be taken to the airport at Mtwara and, when he was older, his insistence on visiting…
Awesome bollywood movie trailer is awesome
I’m not sure I ever need to watch another action movie again. That said – anyone interested in making a t23L movie?
The Final Frontier. No, really.
Ian Sales writes on his blog: And sometimes those imaginations run a little too free. A lot of science fiction is set in outer space, or on worlds which orbit other stars. Or, indeed, other types of celestial objects, both natural and artificial. In these stories, much of the difficulties associated with space travel are…
Setting Riff: Oa versus Krypton
A thousand years ago, on the planet Krypton, there was a technologically advanced, cruel and nihilistic race which carved a vast stellar empire, subjugating thousands of civilisations under their regime. Only one planet managed to overthrow the grip of the empire, Oa, but their rebellion only served to free their own planet. Their thirst for…
The theft of the Book of Raziel
I’ve stolen the main text here from page 54 of the Smallville RPG but remodeled it on Qabal: Isaac’s player, James, says, “I step into the room from where I have been eavesdropping and accuse Rothschilde of stealing the Book of Raziel.” He then grabs his TRUTH die and his CIRCLE die. None of his…
OK, it’s no secret I’m just a big geek.
I got the Serenity book a few months ago from Sub City in Dublin and the Smallville book arrived today from Amazon. Both use derivatives of the Cortex system from Margaret Weiss Productions. While Serenity uses the Cortex systems in a “traditional” way, Smallville uses it in an interesting way. To perform an action, it’s…
Horror – Sids Story
I wanted to write a quick horror scenario which would fit in with pretty much any game and I figured that it couldn’t just be a magical teleporting serial killer, like Jason, Freddy or Leatherface. Inspiration for this one is “Sids Story” from the Captain Britain trade paperback. http://www.rambles.net/capbrit_88.html http://marvel.wikia.com/Captain_Britain_Vol_2_4 Summary: A local homeless man…
Here’s forty shillings on the drum, For those that volunteers do come
I’ve been on a little bit of a Napoleonics obsession recently. Part of it starts from reading the Bernard Cornwell ‘Sharpe’ novels and then following up by downloading the entire collection of TV movies from iTunes. At £14.99 for 15 episodes (each 140 minutes), it’s a bargain to me. And I’ve loaded them on computer,…
Frontier fiction: The Emotion Elective
AMARA would always marvel at the human capacity for self-deception; the ability to believe something even though the facts were plentiful for the contrary, even though nothing but faith supported the hypothesis. For some humans in the North, there was the ability to abdicate all responsibilities to an unseen mythical power. Around Kumbu, this was…
Frontier: Foreword, History of Mbaye Schools, page 23
[I am taking part in a weekly writing task with some friends. The first seed for this assignment was the opening line from Dune by Frank Herbert: “A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.”] The pump would need repaired. During the wet seasons the housings had…
Once, Twice, Three Times a Detective
Dolgion Chuluunbaatar of Gamasutra writes about non-linear adventure games: As I was on vacation, I picked up my sister’s copy of Sherlock Holmes stories, and quickly I got caught up in the really really beautifully narrated and well thought-out plots. As I had my phase of obsessively playing the classic LucasArts adventure games, the very…
Games in Education
I believe that my playing of games has contributed positively to my development as an individual. Traditionally advocacy for gaming has included the development of teamwork and leadership skills, understanding of competition, resource management and also a greater appreciation of geography, politics, religion and ‘alien’ cultures. Games, especially tabletop role-playing games, have been used in…
BLOC54 – GameStorming
Equally useful for the development of tabletop game ideas, this method was used tonight to brainstorm some ideas for videogames in our local game development cluster.
8 Bit Demakes
This article describes 8 bit de-makes – remaking some of todays popular games in 8 bit and 16 bit forms. Some of them still look amazing such as Little Big Planet and Mirrors Edge. All of them are great but these two – you can see why I like them – they’d work really well…