Game talk

This is the catch-all category for stuff about games and game design. It easily makes up the vast majority of the site’s content. If you are looking for something specific, I highly recommend looking into the tags used on the site instead. They can narrow down the hunt immensely.

  • Metaplace – Transition Tile Maker

    Hours Categories Gamemaking
    Comments 2 Comments

    Another day, another little tool release over at the Metaplace site. This one is a little helper that assists in making transition textures between different terrain tiles. Sure, some engines do blending for you, but some don’t. And some effects really require handmade transitions. Well, the Transition Tile Maker lets you make your own blend masks and share them, or use the premade ones for making transitions. We figure there’s art tasks for UGC that are kind of tedious, so why not help the process along?

    You can grab it for Windows or for Intel Mac…

  • Google’s Lively

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 38 Comments

    So at this point, I imagine everyone has seen the news about Google finally decloaking off the virtual bow with Lively.

    The coverage showed up in both the gaming press, where Google shared a bunch of tidbits that seemed to indicate a PR outreach to the gaming community, and also of course in the tech press, where commenters seemed overall less than impressed, questioning how Lively relates to Google’s avowed purpose of “organizing the world’s information.”

    Read More “Google’s Lively”

  • Some misc links

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 11 Comments
    • Oh look, another 3d engine in Flash.
    • EA and Hasbro have gotten around to launching a legit Scrabble on Facebook. But Scrabulous appears undaunted.
    • Once in a long ago, I half-heartedly suggested to Gordon Walton that the way to fix the SWG Correspondents program was to have them be player-elected. We never pursued it; the concern was always that they would feel that they would have the right to dictate policy and development priorities, thus taking away control from the dev team. Today, we see that EVE’s council gets covered in the New York Times. As a curiosity, for now — can the day when equivalent deliberations generate mainstream news be far behind?

  • Game grammar in action: AOC’s DPS bug

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 42 Comments

    At this point, everyone is talking about the Age of Conan issue with DPS. In short, they tied doing damage to a trigger in the animation sequence, which meant that slower animations would do damage at a different rate than faster ones. And all the female combat anims are slower, so all the female characters do less damage per second.

    From a game grammar point of view, this is a clear example of getting the wrong end of the stick. Recall the distinctions between the “salad” and the “dressing” of a game — the “salad” is the actual game, and it can be represented in many different ways.

    In particular, you can certainly take the typical MMO combat game, even the realtime varieties, and model the game proper with cards, dice, or numeric outputs. In fact, hardcore players often do the latter in order to analyze how they are doing, because it’s easier to run statistical analysis on text logs than on 3d graphics.

    As I have said before, if you get the “salad” right, then the dressing — the storyline, art, music, characters, setting, theme — can only serve to enhance. Start with the experience design, and if your core is rotten or an afterthought, you’ll be putting lipstick on a pig.

    Folks working on teams tend to push for the primacy of their own discipline, and these days, with so many games being primarily about experience design and not about game design, it’s easy to put experience design at a higher priority than the mechanics. An animator is not going to want to be told that his carefully crafted ten second animation may be sped up and played in one second. He will rightly point out that a human being making a motion in one second versus ten stands very differently, and distributes weight in a different way, and that therefore the animation.

    But the only reason to do the animation in the first place is to convey that the action happened. It is a piece of systemic feedback, comparable to turning a Magic card 90 degrees, or tipping over the king in a game of chess. You might as well light up a green light over the stick figure’s head. For that matter, the question of whether or not the character is female or not is also purely an aesthetic choice. They could be red or black checkers and play the same.

    Just yesterday, I was commenting that there are two rare and vital skills a game designer needs to acquire: the ability to see the game in their head with no dressing at all; and then the ability to see the game in their head with no mechanics at all, as a player sees it.