A Jedi Saga

 Posted by (Visited 47822 times)  Game talk, Gamemaking  Tagged with: , , , ,
Apr 162015
 

SWG postmortem series:

  1. Temporary Enemy Flagging in SWG
  2. A Jedi Saga
  3. SWG’s Dynamic World
  4. Designing a Living Society, part one
  5. Designing a Living Society Part Two
  6. Did it fail?

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Continuing here with the questions that were sent in by Jason Yates! Yesterday it was the TEF system… today it’s Jedi! Some of this stuff has been told before, but it’s actually kind of hard to find it all in one continuous tale. I have to preface this with a huge huge disclaimer, though: it’s been fifteen years since this particular story started, and a dozen since it ended. My memory may well be faulty on many details.

#2 What were the thoughts on Jedi and why were such drastic changes made in patch 9 to the entire system?

-Jason Yates

Yoda_TPM_RotS

Well, my opinion is Jedi are evil. Heh.

You see, Jedi are an immense attractant to players, readers, viewers. As a kid, I too waved around plastic lightsabers (we kept bending them as we struck one another, I am pretty sure my mom got really sick of buying new ones). Who can resist the fantasy of having this awesome sword, effectively magical powers — mind control, telekinesis, telepathy, and more — and of course, the classic Hero’s Journey? I mean, it’s basically an ideal play scenario.

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The Game Design section

 Posted by (Visited 5281 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Feb 122015
 

Slide1It has taken me almost a year, but the Game Design section of the site has seen truly massive revisions.

Among other things, I have managed to find several presentations which were never on the site:

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Working on Crowfall!

 Posted by (Visited 10229 times)  Gamemaking  Tagged with: ,
Jan 222015
 

Crowfall_CaravanBanner

Those of you who follow me on Twitter may have seen me mention that after a couple of years of being fairly quiet, a lot of game announcements would be hitting soon. Well, one of them hit today! I am very happy to be able to tell the world (finally!) that I have been working with Todd Coleman and my other friends at ArtCraft on Crowfall!

I’ve been hopping on Skype every couple of weeks to go over game designs with Todd & crew for almost a year now. It started out as general brainstorming stuff, and as the team grew, we’ve been able to move on to working directly on designs and even picking apart UIs. I’ve helped out on everything from economics and materials design to yeah, dipping my toes into Todd’s bloodthirstiness and the warfare design that is embodied in “play to crush.” 🙂 (If there was any doubt this is Todd’s game, that should be a hefty clue!)

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Practicing the creativity habit

 Posted by (Visited 9104 times)  Art, Game talk, Music, Writing  Tagged with: ,
Dec 032014
 

In the wake of posting up the video of my talk on “Practical Creativity,” I got this:

What a great question.

First, I have to admit I slack off a lot. 🙂 But, here are some ways in which I practice, or have practiced it. You might notice some commonalities across media.

Hope you’ll bear with me, because I will get to games last.

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GDCNext Video: Practical Creativity

 Posted by (Visited 7075 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , ,
Dec 012014
 

Slide20I know it seems like most all I post on this blog lately is stuff about speaking one place or another, and you always get three posts in a row: I will speak here, I spoke and here’s the slides… and a little while later, here’s the video.

Well, not to be redundant, but here’s the video! Gamasutra – Video: Practical Creativity – A way to invent new kinds of video games.

This was the session I did at GDCNext about treating (game design) creativity as a skill that can be practiced, offering up tips and tricks on how to be creative.

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