5 posts tagged “readings”
Softimage XSI: Building Metal Gear Solid 4. This is for the die hard 3D artist but it's an amazing look into how MGS 4's graphics were built.
Bitterman's XNA Development Blog. I'm not a programmer, but I'm highly interested in XNA. After my bitter, angry experiences with C, I'm quite curious about picking up C#. As a consumer, I enjoy XBLA even if I've ranted about how stupidly it's put together.
Castle Crashers Original Sound Track. Download it now. You should have yesterday.
Breaking from the Tyranny of Game Publishers. This generation of consoles is making that possible. XNA and Wiiware are certainly venues for developers to access the Xbox360 and Nintendo Wii ourselves. There are some QA outsourcing houses out there, and who knows, you might be able to find some decent private beta testers. But realistically you should have QA in well before beta.
Cave Story Piano Collection. If there ever was a little freeware game that deserves massive amounts of attention for being amazing in every way imaginable, it's Cave Story. Daisuke "Pixel" Amaya's Metroid-esque 2D platformer was a 5 year 1-man odyssey for him but the results are amazing. Go grab it here.
Talk about updating play mechanics, most of these awards feel like hardware advances by video game standards(introducing tilt, flippers, electronic components) but it was still a pretty decent read. One thing worthy of mention is how pinball got started. "Early pinball machines, which became immensely popular in a Depression-scourged America looking for cheap entertainment," states the article.
Found a site that has a nice sample of how Japanese game kikaku-sho or planning documents are divvied up. I've been meaning to translate basic ones I've done into Japanese for quite sometime.
Link here. And yes, it is all in Japanese.
Just to warn everyone ahead of time, I'm looking into moving this blog. I won't take this site down, but I want to bring Random Encounters to a more interaction-friendly blog format. After all, I'm in the interactivity business.
I mainly started this blog to keep track of my design thoughts but also interesting articles. That, and at times, I don't always feel up to writing.
I'll kick it off with an article on Responsiveness by Mick West and 1000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly. Oh, and Dashboard 2.0 by mik at Platform Nation.
Designing control systems that are consistent and something that the player can rely on is extremely important to me. Knowing what's going on technically under the hood certainly provides the rest of the team with how to handle animations(length, procedures for breaking between animations) and some gameplay systems(when designing any puzzles or twitch objectives, allow for control system lag.)
The 1000 True Fans feels more relevant to marketing, but as a designer, finding what your 1000 true fans like about your stuff and being careful when adjusting those attributes is something to watch for.
Yeah, I suddenly threw in the Dashboard 2.0 here. I thought about including it in yet another dashboard makeover rant, but I think that one's taking back seat to a few other things I have in mind. Plus, I concede that mik had my rant beat in every way possible, especially the illustrations. I am very impressed by mik's analysis of the use of space. The sheer amount of screen area devoted to non-interactive, non-informative space is rather disappointing.
Mik's re-design of the marketplace is spot on. It shows user average, ESRB rating and price next to colorful logos of the game. As a gamer, I love the decreased amount of space devoted to advertising in mik's design. As an advertiser, I suppose I might feel a bit miffed. It's a bit sad that as an Xbox Live Gold ie paying subscriber, I see ads. Showing a banner for what new games are on the horizon can come across as being informative. Hey look, new releases, as opposed to some new obnoxious adverts.
