Music game lawsuit chain

 Posted by (Visited 14857 times)  Game talk  Tagged with:
Jul 112008
 

Just to keep things straight…

Konami is suing Harmonix over music game patents. Harmonix is owned by Viacom, which bought them because they owned patents on music games themselves, which everyone thought made Activision’s purchase of Red Octane, which published Guitar Hero, kind of funny since they got the brand but not the underlying IP, though then Activision accused Harmonix of being imitative of… itself when Rock Band was announced; and proceeded to have a different developer make the game. Naturally, Konami started out by having patents on Guitar Freaks, though in fact MTV (Viacom) also owned patents on drum games themselves already, and Konami is now also making their own full-band game. Activision apparently has a license on the Konami stuff (did Red Octane?), but they’re getting sued by Gibson who have a patent on music games as well, even though the Gibson guitars were in Guitar Hero based on a licensing deal. Activision did buy a bunch of other patents, and lists them in the game’s docs, though. No word on whether the dispute over royalties supposedly owed to Harmonix, now Viacom, by Red Octane, now Activision Blizzard, over whether the Guitar Hero sequels are new games or the same game with new content, has been resolved. There was a lawsuit about that too, but they decided to negotiate instead.

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Golemizer!

 Posted by (Visited 8934 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Jul 092008
 

Blog regular Over00 writes,

Like many people, I always wanted to be able to bring some of my MMOs ideas to reality. Of course, ideas are cheap and everybody got THE good one. So I thought enough dreaming and more doing.

So about a year ago, I started to work on a framework with the same tools I’m using for my day job: .NET, SQL and Javascript. After a month of design/planning and another one of coding, I had a prototype ready.

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A game designer’s core skills

 Posted by (Visited 19819 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Jul 092008
 

The two hardest and most critical skills for a game designer (IMHO):

  • Be able to see the game with no hint of artwork, music, sound, anything — the bare rules, bare mechanics, bare actions, stats, feedback loops. The skeleton, the core, the bone and sinew of it, without any dressing, as a shifting, moving mechanical construct of guy wires and rigid struts. It’s not an attack, it’s force projection, it’s territory control in a graph. And you can see it in your head, and when a feature gets proposed, you can see where it slots in — or not, and know whether the whole construct will tip over.
  • Be able to see the game without any mechanics, any rules, any knowledge of how it should play — to approach it as a user experience, the magical moment of immersion, the confusion, the dazzle and colors, the sheer sense of possibility and play. The skin, the surface, the way the music will swell when you step through that door, the way that moving will FEEL, the way the possibilities unfold. To know where someone would be confused, to know where they will be led, to see the whole construct as an innocent.

And a great designer? They should be able to see both in their head at once.

Metaplace – Transition Tile Maker

 Posted by (Visited 7298 times)  Gamemaking  Tagged with: ,
Jul 082008
 

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

 Posted by (Visited 21888 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , , , ,
Jul 082008
 

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.”

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