Ribbon Hero turns learning Office into a game. This post has two goals. One, I want to share with you something amazing; a thing that according to most views of the tech universe should not exist. Two, I want to talk about a coming revolution in application design. The amazing thingImagine Microsoft Office turned into a video game. One where learning a productivity app is a delight. It sounds a bit unlikely doesn’t it? Well, I’m happy to announce the availability of Ribbon Hero, a new download from Microsoft that turns using Office into a game. Go download it now. The coming revolutionRibbon Hero, in part, was born from a speech I gave back in October 2007 on applying the design lessons of Super Mario Bros. to application design. The foundations of user experience design are incompleteGames offer a very different value proposition than what you get from traditional usability design. This user model is well supported by empirical data. Yet, as applications grow, the “Don’t make me think” philosophy stumbles.
Users grow. Take careDanc. Lost Garden. The Declaration of Game Designer Independence. On a cool, clear Austin weekend, a group of experienced game designers gathered for their yearly retreat. At night they swapped stories of an industry in turmoil. As social games and mobile games rewrite the landscape, power struggles between business and design dominate and designers find themselves being sidelined or abused. And the products they work on suffer horribly as a result. It is a time when musty old assumptions are questioned.
It is also a rare opportunity to identify universal best practices that can help us navigate new platforms, new genres and new gaming experiences. So during the day, we asked ourselves some hard questions. To guide game designers and the profession forward we wrote down a Declaration of Game Designer Independence. The following is a code for how great, visionary designers should behave. 1.
You can get rid of visuals, music, business or technology and we will still make great games. 2. We are prime movers, not replaceable cogs. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. Danc. Michael Jungbluth's Blog - Adding Weight to Your Game Design Part 1: Squash & Stretch. The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.
Part 1 - Squash and Stretch : Part 2 - Anticipation : Part 3 - Staging Part 4 - Straight Ahead & Pose to Pose : Part 5 - Follow Through & Overlapping Action Part 6 - Slow In, Slow Out : Part 7 - Arcs : Part 8 - Secondary Action : Part 9 - Timing Part 10 - Exaggeration : Part 11 - Solid Drawing : Part 12 - Appeal Intro Weight is a physical and emotional sensation that people feel everyday. In fact, it needs to be, as many of these principles are sacrificed by the animator for the good of playability. Each part will lay out the 12 principles of animation, and how they are not only used in animation but how they directly relate to game design. It is how both can add an extra sense of weight and purpose to the game and the characters within it. Squash and Stretch Applied to Animation. The Game Maker's Companion. So here we are, about to embark on another journey into the world of game development. You may have joined us last time in The Game Maker’s Apprentice: Game Development for Beginners (Apress, 2006), or perhaps you taught yourself the basics of Game Maker under your own steam.
Either way, we invite you to dust off your trusty keyboard and loosen up your mouse-arm as you join us in The Game Maker’s Companion. The path ahead is an exciting one and we have a host of new challenges in store to enhance your skills as a game developer. Nonetheless, it would be foolish to undertake such a journey without making suitable preparations first. Each of you will bring your own unique skills to the journey ahead, but you won’t get very far without some level of background knowledge.
Resources Video games are made up of different kinds of digital resources such as animations, sounds, music, and backgrounds. Figure 1–1. Instances and Objects Figure 1–2. Variables Local Instance Variables Figure 1–3. GameDev.net. The No Twinkie Database! Significant Bits. Features - Lifting The Designer's Curse. [Relic Entertainment studio design director Alexandre Mandryka outlines a framework for looking at how game design is handled, which he argues will both allow the discipline to grow in value and expertise while ensuring it serves the needs of projects.]
Over my 10 years in the video game industry as a designer, including three years as studio design director for Ubisoft Montreal, I've had the opportunity to collaborate on numerous projects from different companies and cultures. While visuals and programming are better controlled, difficulty in anticipating, analyzing, and generally understanding the added value resulting from game design persists. While it is essential to game creation, this discipline is not clearly established and expertise is very rarely recognized. This puts designers under so much pressure and gives them so little opportunity for reward and growth that they are trapped in a vicious circle of being at the same time paramount and overlooked.
Achievements Considered Harmful? - Chris Hecker's Website. "The intrinsic reward for knifing dudes is knifing dudes. " I waded into the debate on game achievements with my lecture at the 2010 Game Developers Conference titled Achievements Considered Harmful? , with a strong emphasis on the "? ". Since the game industry seems to be careening head first into a future of larding points and medals and cute titles on players for just starting up a video game, I wanted to raise awareness of the large body of research studying the impact on motivation from various types of rewards. Trying to be "fair and balanced", I delved into what the data show and what they don't show. Sadly, there is a contentious debate amongst psychologists about how rewards affect motivation, and I spend a bunch of time in the talk discussing this debate.
Highlights To hack my way out of the thicket, I focused on the two results that both sides seem to begrudgingly agree are true. I define all these terms in the slides below, and I'll fill out this page more as time goes on. The Art of Writing - Today’s Game Scribes Are Ushering In A New Era Of Interactive Storytelling - News - GameInformer.com. Creators Club Online - home. Analysis: Portal and the Deconstruction of the Institution. [In this in-depth analysis, Daniel Johnson discusses games, language and sociology with regard to Valve's Portal - please note that the article contains story spoilers for the game.] In 1959 Erving Goffman released The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life; a book that went on to heavily influence future understanding of social interactions within the sociology discipline.
In it, he discusses social intercourse under the metaphor of actors performing on a stage. Specifically, in the second chapter he shares the idea of a front and backstage to social interaction. As with the theater, we have a place where we manage the performance and a place where we give that performance. As social interlocutors engaged in interaction, we are presenting an impression of ourselves to an audience; we're acting out a role that requires constant management at the whim of the interaction. The front stage is the grounds of the performance. All institutions have a backstage that mask their inner workings. Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling. Essential ActionScript 3.0. ActionScript 3.0 is a huge upgrade to Flash's programming language. The enhancements to ActionScript's performance, feature set, ease of use, cleanliness, and sophistication are considerable.
Essential ActionScript 3.0 focuses on the core language and object-oriented programming, along with the Flash Player API. Essential ActionScript has become the #1 resource for the Flash and ActionScript development community, and the reason is the author, Colin Moock. Many people even refer to it simply as "The Colin Moock book. " And for good reason: No one is better at turning ActionScript inside out, learning its nuances and capabilities, and then explaining everything in such an accessible way. Essential ActionScript 3.0 is a radically overhauled update to Essential ActionScript 2.0. The ActionScript 3.0 revolution is here, and Essential ActionScript 3.0's steady hand is waiting to guide you through it. Home : Inform. Side-Scroller Tutorial. NG BBS — As: Platform Game Basics. 40 Free and Essential Web Design and Development Books from Goog. Google Books is perhaps one of the most untapped design and development resources…time to change all that.
In this post there are over 40 web design and development books freely available from Google, they range from CSS, HTML, XHTML, DHTML, Actioscript, Javascript, Ajax, Perl, Ruby, MooTools, jQuery, Firefox and evem iPhone development. Not all books are complete, but offer plenty of information to help with your development. CSS Cookbook CSS Cookbook » By Christopher Schmitt The CSS Cookbook provides more than quick code solutions to pressing problems. The explanation that accompanies each recipe enables readers to customize the formatting for their specific purposes, and shows why the solution works, so you can adapt these techniques to other situations. CSS Pocket Reference CSS Pocket Reference » By Eric A. Head first HTML with CSS & XHTML HTML, XHTML, and CSS Bible HTML, XHTML, and CSS Bible » By Bryan Pfaffenberger, Steven M. Beginning CSS: Cascading Style Sheets for Web Design.
The Game Narrative Triangle.