Typical game dev teams

 Posted by (Visited 18847 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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Video games can affect cortisol levels

 Posted by (Visited 8118 times)  Game talk
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. 🙂

ActiveWorlds embeds on Facebook

 Posted by (Visited 8231 times)  Game talk
Nov 012007
 

This is cool news — Activeworlds has a Facebook app now.

They’re best known for AlphaWorld, of course, but ActiveWorlds hasn’t been inactive since then. They switched over to a browser plugin model for their client a very long time ago. I’ve often commented that Second Life is clearly a descendant of AlphaWorld, even if SL doesn’t actually draw direct inspiration from it. For example, in ActiveWorlds you build by cloning objects — not exactly prims, but similar. One cute difference is that you claim land in ActiveWorlds by laying objects on it. As in, completely covering it up. 🙂

There’s a sizable library of stuff made for ActiveWorlds already… and you can run your own servers. But it’s certainly orders of magnitude more complex than what a Facebook user typically encounters. It’ll be interesting to see what the adoption is like given that the most popular “virtual space” app on Facebook is this.

(I also note that “open standards” is the latest buzzword — it gets mentioned in this press release, and it’s not exactly relevant).

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