Sundays are about finding yourself awake in a child’s room, crawling downstairs to your friend’s computer knowing this is the best you’re going to feel all day and if you don’t post a list of interesting reading found from across the week while resisting linking to any music whatsoever now, it’s likely your brain will never handle it. Go! Go!
- Ex PC-Zone wunderwriter Log tells a story of improvised problem solving in Future Publishing’s toilets. Well done, Log.
- Kriss Daniels piece on the IGF Judges is more worth reading for the general point than the specifics of his argument. Putting aside the games journalist hate, he loses me on his determination to classify all designers as frustrated writers – which he compounds in the comments by being ignorant enough to argue that Jonathan Blow secretly would have preferred a book deal rather than doing Braid. Really? But as a general point – is the IGF judge selection criteria skewed enough influence the games which are hailed – it’s worth thinking about.
- This is old, but worth reading with the re-emergence of the Crunch-debate. Evan Robinson at IGDA about why Crunch is totally uneconomic and doesn’t bloody work.
- G4 interview Chris Taylor about Demi-God. We’ll be bringing a verdict on this relatively shortly. As in, when we get a copy. Man!
- Bit-Tech do a lengthy and articulate interview with Tale of Tales on the Path. Interestink!
- Soren Johnson writes on the hidden benefits of OnLive.
- Dan Curtis Johnson writes on the relative stability of the two big Icelandic currencies – their real one and Eve’s one.
- This is fun. Paul Barnett pointed me at this piece on eight legendary videogame prototypes. I love this kind of gaming cryptoarchaeology.
- Following on from our usability interview with Jason Schklar, Dan Gril pointed out Darwinia’s usability report. Ooh.
- Old comrade in arms Alex Torrance linked to the nearly-thirty-years-old Welcome (To Death Row) by Bernard Szajner saying it was amazing. He’s right. It’s totally amazing.
Failed. But at least I didn’t link to anything from the Queen Tribute band I saw last night, eh?
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That’s not really branding, it’s consistency. And consistency is very important. When a player learns stuff from one game, he/she should be able to carry it over to subsequent games he plays.
When I was working on DUOtrix (xbox community game) Microsoft provided a very basic TCR which was entirely optional, but I followed all the points anyway. Stuff like my menu system looking like every other Arcade game (with “Help & Options”, “How to play” within that, etc), “Press A to begin” to determine what the active controller was, B to go back up a menu (this isn’t as common as you’d think), etc, etc.
All of that doesn’t seem very important, but it all helps to create a consistent, frustration-free experience which can be carried across many games on a single platform.
The fact that Kriss Daniels’ believe Jonathon Blow would abandon games if given a juicy book deal shows his level of ignorance. Blow didn’t spend his life writing dense arthouse poetry then suddenly decide on a whim to develop games; he has been developing for over a decade. Raigan Burns also points out in the comments that none of the IGF winners are text-heavy games, and of them only Machinarium has a defined narrative.
Does Machinarium even have text in it?
Man, that prototypes article is missing the StarFox 2 prototype! It is not only awesome but features some really surprising features for a SNES game. There’s a whole meta-game strategy map thing going on, where you can encounter other ships for skirmishes or approach the various planets for missions.
Most surprisingly the game seems entirely complete aside from an end boss that’s just a cube. I can’t imagine why they didn’t release it, it would have been legendary. I guess a few of those features ended up in the DS game at least.
The BioShock prototype was the most underwhelming there. Basically: “they made some concepts they didn’t use and also they had some art that wasn’t in the final product.” Well, duh, that’s every game.
Although I do like a concept I saw of the little sisters as these hilarious little squirrel dudes in jumpsuits.
@Erlam:
While branding is indeed a waste of time (PLAYSTATION vs. PlayStation vs. Playstation minutiae, for example), I was really thinking about consistency, as Mo describes. I don’t know about you, but there’s a lot of stuff which apparently made it through the dev’s testing which I’d say is bloody stupid – just look at Fable 2’s potion system (and menu system in general). While the platform-owner obviously doesn’t catch all of these, they seem to catch enough that XBLA/PSN games don’t have niggles like this. Or what about the long-standing issue of X being “confirm selection” and O being “cancel” in Western games, while they have the opposite configuration in Japanese games? It’s a small change but it can make a big difference.
I will remove Apple from my earlier list – while they do have certification requirements, by not telling you what they are they’re basically shooting themselves in the foot. I can’t believe they’re that cack-handed about managing a fantastically successful digital distribution system…
In regards to Evan Robinson’s post, I would have liked more game industry examples, but I agree with his points all the same.
If I remember correctly Halo 2 was given roughly six months of bug fixing. This stage seems to be where crunch mode sets in for most games. Yet, with Halo 1, I heard someone go off record that Halo got half of everything done in the final month (probably when crunch started); short-term crunch. If my assumptions are anywhere in the ballpark, why did Halo 2 have perhaps as many bugs and maybe several bigger one that were never hammered out in time (the infamous cut-scene pop-ins, that map unlocking glitch)?
“First, a director may not start out as gaffer”
The gaffer doesn’t start out as the gaffer. A gaffer is head of the electrical dept for a production. But you are right that a director generally has an understanding of what the others do, or at least what the desired result should be.
One of the main problems with the term designer is it covers a huge range of jobs (level design, scripting, game systems design, balancing, etc etc etc) and isn’t applied consistently from company to company. We call the guys that build our levels level designers, Bioware calls them world builders, IW calls them designers. Here the scripting and encounters in the world are done by the script dept, at other places it’s the responsibility of those who build the levels. Where I work I’m a gameplay programmer, if I worked at Epic doing the exact same job I’d be a designer.