– “Dead Cheerleaders” (mp3 download)
See below for guitar chords! No offense meant to any present, former, living, or dead cheerleaders.
Cheerleaders came to the door selling cookies
They were raising money for crazy acrobatics
But I told them I could not support their evil cause
So many cheerleaders fall and break their necks
I occasionally think that Dan Cook and I share some brain. Fortunately, the parts we don’t share are wonderful and varied, and it means that there are new games he makes that I would not have thought of.
In this case, it isn’t so much the new game as it is the essay about the game that I want to point you towards. He’s got a new piece up that sounds like mostly an ad: Triple Town released for the Amazon Kindle. But what it is actually about is puzzles, methods of game invention and constraints.
His three core points are ones that resonate with me, albeit presented with his usual awesome diagrams and sheer clarity (unlike my own verbal wanderings and big wordage).
I suspect that these are difficult lessons for budding designers, based on watching people who are newer to the field struggle with them. I likewise think that most veterans take them for granted, jumping straight to ways to alter simple three-rule-three-variable game atoms into something new with little more to prototype with than a pencil and a couple of items from their desks.
But either way, they are common underpinnings. Something that everyone in the field confronts and then has to master. And periodically be reminded of, for that matter, because they are awfully easy to forget.
The beautiful thing about these common elements being so fundamental is that then everything that is built upon them can blossom in so many unexpected and fascinating directions.
Which is why despite Dan’s post being more of an essay than an ad, this post is more of an ad than an essay… Triple Town sounds fascinating, and I want to play it.
But I don’t own a Kindle. Dan, did you do any prototypes on other devices? *shameless begging* 😉
While I was at GDC, I once again spent an enjoyable time on the air with Gary Gannon of Gamebreaker.tv. You can click the link below or watch the embed after the break:
I got a request via Twitter for this old essay which had fallen off the Internet, so I am posting it here. This was originally written for Metaplace users… there is nothing here new to anyone who has followed the blog for a while, but since it was requested, here it is. 🙂
The fundamentals of game design
Starting out creating an interactive experience, of any sort really, can be rather daunting. In this tutorial, we’ll run through the basic components of a game, so we can get a handle on what the next steps are when you make the jump from the training tutorials to your own projects.
Often people have trouble when conceptualizing a game. The idea, after all, is often the easy part. It’s actually making it, and figuring out where to start, that is the hard part.
A friendly warning, though! Just like writers have different ways of working, and some composers write music in their head and others at an instrument, different game designers are going to have different ways of working. Some work better “in the code” and others like doing everything on paper beforehand. Some think in terms of story and narrative, and others are systems designers first and foremost. So this tutorial may actually run a bit against the grain for you, depending on your natural temperament.
In what follows, I am going to use the language of games, but really, every piece of advice in this article applies equally if you are designing any sort of interactive project whatsoever. So just because I say “game” in what follows doesn’t mean this article won’t be useful to you when you start making a classroom experience or a chat room or some other application. Continue reading »
The intent of this talk was to do a “powers of ten” sort of look at multiplayer mechanics… not really to describe anything new, but instead to try to take the whole big spectrum of what we think of as multiplayer game design, and do a cross-disciplinary look at it. I covered a bit of game theory, a bit of psychology, a bit of evolutionary biology, a touch of history, a heavy dose of sociology, a dash of social networking theory, and of course, game design stuff.
My hope was that when done, it would both serve as a good context for thinking about multiplayer games of several sorts, and also as just a plain old reference, something to point at when discussing things like what the impact of gifts and wall posts are in social games, or why some MMOs have longer retention cycles.
So here it is as a PDF, for your perusal. I tried to make the slides stand on their own as much as I could, but of course, the actual voiceover would make many slides more comprehensible. For that, look for the actual session recording to appear on the GDC Vault.
Long-time readers will notice that there are bits here that reference and repeat elements of much older presentations. I recommend following up this one with the math-heavy but extremely related presentation on social network theory Small Worlds: Competitive and Cooperative Structures in Online Worlds (PDF), if you have not seen it before… I gave it back in 2003, a year before Facebook launched. 🙂 It digs a lot deeper specifically into many of the characteristics of large scale-free networks in games.
