Understanding Games

Through Raph Koster: German Pixelate have developed a series of flash games (or animations with game cut-scenes )  about games titled “Understanding Games” (part 1-3). The idea is to make a game like Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, which is a comic discussing comics.  Good basic stuff about what makes digital games tick, I  surely will consider using these  as part of introduction to game research and game design to relevant audiences.

Sun’s Darkstar Online Game Platform to be Published as Open Source

As reported by Raph Koster: Sun’s flexible online game platform, Project Darkstar, is going to be released as open source. Early release binaries are already available and the source code for version 1 will be released in May. The platform seems to have potential; it is reported that you can implement clients easily with the technology that you prefer and even the server-side is not restricted to Java. From a quick look the main platform seems very well thought out and flexible so that it supports the development of many kinds of games.

GD Event Recap

There was a game design event at our university last weekend as I mentioned before the holidays. For me, the event was a huge success. The main function of the event was give a forum to game designers to present their games, get feedback and be able to playtest the games. This function was fulfilled very well. Many thanks to the main organizers, Arto and Antti and also to everyone who participated.

My experiences of the event was as follows:

• the size of the crowd (about 20) was pretty optimal for a first-time event where there were no routines or set ways
• the mix of role-playing game, board game and computer game people was very good and people were in the most part able to benefit from the mix of genres
• the attendees really made the event the success it was: they provided quality feedback, discussion etc.
• the games that were presented were very interesting: I can envision myself playing most of them again with pleasure

Gamasutra: Gameplay Progression

Here’s a link to a very down-to-earth and practical article about designing gameplay progression by Mike Lopez in Gamasutra. Useful, concrete stuff. And the various gameplay progression models (the charts) fit right into the whole models for game design theme which will be one of the main themes in my thesis.

Gamasutra: Automated Test Systems

Mark Cooke of Nihilistic Software has written an article on build and test systems for console games for Gamasutra. The article in itself is fairly interesting. What is more important is the basic premise: game development project should have tools and processes of making builds and especially testing the game software. Automated builds with unit tests are a good way of making sure that the code is and stays free of errors during the course of development. The next project in AGL in my opinion should peruse test-driven development as a light-weight practice to test its feasibility in game development. Here’s another article that shows some promise.

Independent Games Festival Student Showcases

The student entries for Independent Games Festival are now available for download on the IGF website. Actually they have been already available for about a week, but I just noticed it now. So, check out some of the more groundbreaking indie games made by students.

What is IGF? From the IGF website: “…established the Independent Games Festival in 1998 to encourage innovation in game development and to recognize the best independent game developers. We saw how the Sundance Film Festival benefited the independent film community, and we wanted to create a similar event for independent game developers.” The IGF Awards Ceremony is part of the Games Development Conference which is held in beginning of March 2007 in San Francisco.

Old Nintendo games via Browser

vNintendo is a web Java applet that allows you to play old NES games on a web browser. They’ve got 472 games right now. I’m sure there are copyright issues with this one, especially if and when Nintendo wants to offer customers repackaged old game compilations for Wii. Let’s see what happens. Anyway, it’s a good site to go and look up some of those old but good games and maybe learn something about designing quality arcade games as well. (Found through Download Squad)

Vocational edugames project in Jkl, Finland

Got this from the University website. The Jyväskylä Vocational Institute in co-operation with the Institute of Educational Research of our university and Korento Oy have been developing 3D games for vocational education for over a year now. They launched their first game, SECURE, last spring and the second one, VOLTAGE, is due this fall. SECURE is about work security in construction sites and VOLTAGE is about small house electricity. There are demonstration videos of the games on the project web site. The project ends next spring.