Shoot from the Hip or do a Pre-viz
— 1 March 2009
Working as a game designer is super fun, difficult, demanding and unlike anything else. In a recent article in Gamasutra, Matt Allmer writes:
Game design is like sailing a ship while still building the hull! Jump out of a plane while still sewing your parachute and you’ll get a good sense of pace in this business. The horse is never put before the cart. We race them side-by-side to see which one wins!
I think the above pretty much nails what this job is about. The article lays out a set of basic principles of game design (13 of them) and is well worth reading. I am, like Allmer, of the view that the game design process, albeit chaotic by nature, can and should be tamed by carefully applying process and principles. I won’t argue for or against the particular principles mentioned by Allmer, but instead talk a bit about what I have seen (or not seen) of intentional game design process within the industry and look at a very powerful tool.
I think that all projects I’ve been on has been initially approached from a design view in pretty much the same way. There’s been a period of brainstorming around features, environments, AI issues and whatnot (in the cases of “Riddick” and “Darkness”, a lot of thought went into finding suitable features to the existing IPs). Brainstorming is all great fun and valuable, but also s bit scary since the material and ideas produced will form the foundation for your work the upcoming couple of years. You don’t wanna go all wrong and you want to keep some leeway for future changes so you tend to not be too specific and detailed at this stage. Formulating the design vision and laying out the foundation for the project is more important. (But I do believe that there are methods and tools to do preliminary evaluation of your designs even at this stage. I’d really like to try one or two things some time) However, as the project moves along the team starts working on realizing the vision and trying out the design ideas. This process is often unnecessarily slow and cumbersome. Usually, it goes something like this:
Continue Reading...To Keep or not to Keep it Simple
— 9 December 2008Jeez, there’s been over a full year since I wrote anything here. The main reason is that I’ve been extremely busy working on a game. But things change – the games industry is very “agile” and you never know what lurks behind the next milestone. For good and bad.
In our case, what was lurking was bad. A couple of weeks ago, we got canceled due to the publisher having deep financial troubles (as many, many, many companies have nowadays). This is a huge setback for Avalanche and the fantastic team that has been working on this magnificent game for a year and a half has fallen into pieces. It’s all very, very sad. The material we created is awesome, the project had enormous potential, but now we can only hope that somehow the game can be revived. But given the financial state of the world, I’m not holding my breath too hard.
Chore Gaming
— 8 September 2007I attended the Develop Conference in Brighton this year and there were some interesting sessions. One of them was called “Emerging Issues in Game Design” and featured four very different presentations. Mark Eyles from the University of Portsmouth did, for example, talk about a genre of gaming that he calls “Ambient Games”. He browsed through a gazillion of slides (the man was bursting with energy) and ended up with a short demonstration of his research game “Ambient Quest”.
More...Out of Body Gaming
— 25 August 2007Yesterday, news reported of scientists artificially creating out of body exeriences. This is extremely cool! One interesting thing is that the newscast I watched approached the news from the gaming side. “A discovery that may revolutionize the gaming industry,” they called it.
More...Persuasive Dr. Kawashima
— 17 July 2007Persuasive games receives quite a lot of attention, and rightly so. The videogame “platform” is in many respects ideal for conveying messages in a powerful way. The idea, as I understand it, is this: if you could turn your message into an interactive experience, that will make your message more contagious. This is because games add interactivity to the power of ordinary video (sound and moving images) and interactivity done right engages us. This seems to be what people are doing with games such as “Fatworld” and “Airport Security”.
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