Nov 042007
 

“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.

Typical game dev teams

 Posted by (Visited 18841 times)  Game talk
Nov 022007
 

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.

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Using scripting languages

 Posted by (Visited 15349 times)  Game talk
Nov 022007
 

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.

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Nov 012007
 

More evidence that video games can control your braaaiiinss. In a good way.

Basically, a comaprison study between two groups. One group played a game which made them click on smiley faces among frowns, and the other didn’t have the smiley faces in their game.

At the end of the study, the folks who clicked on smiley faces had lower cortisol levels. Less stress.

The result was actually the creation of a new company, Mindhabits, to commercialize this. Very cool. 🙂

So, if the f13 people played more games with fluffy bunnies, would they be less cynical and bitter?*

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*Not that I want to change them. I like them this way. 🙂