game design

  • If your architect were a game designer…

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 24 Comments

    Let’s say you were wealthy and lived in New York City, and hired an arhcitect to redo your new apartment. And you dropped a single, small hint that you liked playfulness — that you wanted a poem you had written for your kids to be embedded in the wall somewhere.

    A whole year later, you realized that what the architect gave you was an apartment that was an adventure game, rich and deep with fiction and characters and mysteries…

    In any case, the finale involved, in part, removing decorative door knockers from two hallway panels, which fit together to make a crank, which in turn opened hidden panels in a credenza in the dining room, which displayed multiple keys and keyholes, which, when the correct ones were used, yielded drawers containing acrylic letters and a table-size cloth imprinted with the beginnings of a crossword puzzle, the answers to which led to one of the rectangular panels lining the tiny den, which concealed a chamfered magnetic cube, which could be used to open the 24 remaining panels, revealing, in large type, the poem written by Mr. Klinsky.

    If there is any justice in the world, this apartment should be preserved as a museum and as a testament to human creativity. 🙂

  • Another list: eminent game designers

    Hours Categories Game talk

    Greg Costikyan over at Play This Thing! has a list of “eminent game designers” that refreshingly crosses over into boardgames, ARGs, and other areas of the field. No bios or justification given — not even some short credits, alas — so looking up the folks you don’t know may prove a tad challenging. The comment thread is gathering more names and suggestions — go participate!

  • Snap-together games

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 7 Comments

    This is certainly turning into a booming segment. The latest is Microsoft’s Popfly for Silverlight, which has been out for a while but didn’t have any game stuff. But now there’s Popfly Game Creator.

    Today we’re adding something special to Popfly: an early version of our Popfly Game Creator. That’s right: Popfly is about more than mashups and web pages. It’s about making it fun to build things and share them with your friends. And one of the things we’ve heard loud and clear is that games are the kinds of things that people would like to try to build.

    What kinds of games can you create? Just about any kind of two-dimensional game, a category that includes things like the original Super Mario™, Frogger™, Asteroids™, and a host of other old arcade games. To make it easy, Popfly is still focused on getting as much done as possible without having to write any code. The game creator has over 15 pre-built game templates for you to try, hundreds of images, animations, backgrounds, and sounds for you to use in the games you create, and, of course, a way for you to write code if you reach the limits of what the user interface can do for you. Since this is Popfly, you can still save, share, and embed your creations everywhere from your blog to your Facebook page to your Windows Vista Sidebar.

    Just in the last few months we’ve seen this, and Gamebrix, and Sims Carnival…

  • Interdependent systems

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 49 Comments

    Next Generation has an informative email from Russell Williams, the CEO of Flying Lab, giving the reasons why they are having to merge servers. It’s a great insight into the complex equation involved in estimating how many servers to have.

    One of the items in particular caught my eye:

    Game systems
    Pirates’ gameplay is very organic, designed in such a way that the different systems feed into one another. In a PvE-only game, focusing mainly on content, this isn’t a big deal. But in Pirates of the Burning Sea we have systems that require a minimum number of players to function correctly, such as our economy, and they break other systems if they’re not working correctly (such as PvP). If we didn’t have these kinds of interdependent systems, we wouldn’t even be considering server merges.

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