Andrew Chen has a nice essay up on how Technology always changes, but people always stay the same, with a bunch of pics of old nickelodeon style amusement machines, with extrapolations to what their modern day entertainment equivalent is. It’s a great reminder that human nature and the sorts of entertainment we seek don’t really change.
“The third guy from the left, along the trestle board,
Who drank a bit more mead than strictly needed… Him,
The one with orange hair and braids all down to here.
Yeah, that’s the guy. He slept through the whole thing, the jerk.
When Grendel came and ripped our arms and popped our skulls,
He slid, plain drunk, right under the roast pig, and snored.
I want his saga privileges revoked. I won’t
Put up with crap like this. Last time we slew a drake,
He tripped. What sort of hero trips on dragon tails?
He makes us all look bad. So yank him from the books.
Declare him warg, or extirpate him from the band.
We’ve got our quest to finish; he just holds us back.”
Poor Wulfric, all Valhalla will not sing his name.
But grandkids might.
From a comment in the last post :
Is there an outline somewhere that one of you professional game people can point to that describes, in general terms, the people involved (by title/position) and what they actually do in a game-production team? What does a ‘designer’ do? And I’m sure that varies a great deal with individual projects and particularly with team size, but I’d love to be able to follow along with these conversations.
Sure. Note, lots of variation here, but this is the gist of it. Roles often get combined.
The latest game dev debate around the blogosphere is about designer scripting. Joe Ludwig says,
On the gameplay side we use a rich data-drive system that lets designers define an arbitrary list of “requirements” with which they are able to test most any condition. When a trigger fires, object is used, or skill is activated, an arbitrary list of “results” is activated which is capable of modifying just about any state in the game. The designers also have a few ways of maintaining persistent state on the characters depending on the circumstances. This system is working pretty well for us and eliminates the need for any designer-written scripts.
No, it doesn’t. Because it means that implementing designers are nothing more than content creators, and that is not what the core job of game design is.
Gemini: A virtual mobile world wakes to life | Tech news blog – CNET News.com
Not much comment to add to this one. It was inevitable.
