For those who have been reading the blog for a year and remember The Reiser Story post (which I did after reading a Wired article), the end of the story has finally come, as Reiser led police to the grave of his murdered wife.
I finally got my recording setup sorted out. It was the stupid webcam. The control panels all said that my soundcard was selected as the input, but guess what — when I unplugged it, the issues went away.
Anyway, I wrote a weird little instrumental thing this morning, which didn’t really go anywhere. But I kept noodling with it first on the acoustic, then on the electric when my fingers got sore. Then I went back to the acoustic and started to build this up in layers. I called it “Midsummer” because I didn’t have any clever ideas for a title.
This is played in standard tuning with a partial capo at strings 3-4-5 on the second fret. There’s two acoustics and two electrics on there.
Video has been posted of the “All the World’s a Game” panel at Supernova from a few weeks back. (I previously blogged about a summary written by The UpTake Blog). Now you too can see the arguments over dorodango…
At this point, everyone is talking about the Age of Conan issue with DPS. In short, they tied doing damage to a trigger in the animation sequence, which meant that slower animations would do damage at a different rate than faster ones. And all the female combat anims are slower, so all the female characters do less damage per second.
From a game grammar point of view, this is a clear example of getting the wrong end of the stick. Recall the distinctions between the “salad” and the “dressing” of a game — the “salad” is the actual game, and it can be represented in many different ways.
In particular, you can certainly take the typical MMO combat game, even the realtime varieties, and model the game proper with cards, dice, or numeric outputs. In fact, hardcore players often do the latter in order to analyze how they are doing, because it’s easier to run statistical analysis on text logs than on 3d graphics.
As I have said before, if you get the “salad” right, then the dressing — the storyline, art, music, characters, setting, theme — can only serve to enhance. Start with the experience design, and if your core is rotten or an afterthought, you’ll be putting lipstick on a pig.
Folks working on teams tend to push for the primacy of their own discipline, and these days, with so many games being primarily about experience design and not about game design, it’s easy to put experience design at a higher priority than the mechanics. An animator is not going to want to be told that his carefully crafted ten second animation may be sped up and played in one second. He will rightly point out that a human being making a motion in one second versus ten stands very differently, and distributes weight in a different way, and that therefore the animation.
But the only reason to do the animation in the first place is to convey that the action happened. It is a piece of systemic feedback, comparable to turning a Magic card 90 degrees, or tipping over the king in a game of chess. You might as well light up a green light over the stick figure’s head. For that matter, the question of whether or not the character is female or not is also purely an aesthetic choice. They could be red or black checkers and play the same.
Just yesterday, I was commenting that there are two rare and vital skills a game designer needs to acquire: the ability to see the game in their head with no dressing at all; and then the ability to see the game in their head with no mechanics at all, as a player sees it.
