Best practices for VR, from seven devs working with the Oculus Rift. Best practices for VR, from seven devs working with the Oculus Rift By Kris Ligman Gamasutra's Kris Ligman speaks with seven leading developers who are making games for the Oculus Rift VR goggles, as part of our Advanced Input/Output Week. With the Oculus Rift serving as the forerunner in a new wave of interest in virtual reality technologies for games, Gamasutra sought out several developers who had managed to get their hands on a development kit -- and ask how their projects are coming along.
Julian Kantor (Groov), Lau Korsgaard (Spin the Bottle: Bumpie's Party), Robert Yang (Radiator) and E McNeill (Bombball) were among a select few chosen to exhibit their works from Oculus's VR Jam at IndieCade this October. Below, we asked these seven developers how they settled upon their concept, what they learned, and how they dealt with some of VR's biggest known issues. Julian Kantor (Elevator Music): As the start of the jam was approaching, I didn't have too clear of a concept. E McNeill's Ciess. David Frampton's Blog - Postmortem: The Blockheads. Postmortem: The Blockheads By David Frampton on 10/12/13 12:32:00 am The Blockheads is an exploration/mining/crafting massive world sandbox game released for iOS in January 2013 and only just launched for Android. To date it has had over 7 million downloads on iOS, and has a passionate and growing fan-base, rarely dipping below 100,000 daily active users since its launch 9 months ago. The Blockheads was entirely made by one guy - me, over the course of about a year, and since version 1.0 I've released 4 major updates.
Perhaps in part due to this constant evolution, I haven't felt I could write a postmortem until now. What Went Right 1. The Blockheads evolved very much organically from a number of fairly vague ideas. I'm also a huge fan of games like Civilization, The Sims, Starcraft, and other world builders like Sim CIty and Pharaoh. The only other major games I have made are the side scrolling helicopter games Chopper and Chopper 2. 2.
But overall the timing felt right. 3. 5. 1. 2. 'Imagination is the Only Escape' looks at the Holocaust through a child's eyes. World War II has been a staple setting for military shooters for years, dating back to seminal hits like John Carmack's Wolfenstein 3D. But a game that looks at the events of the Holocaust through the eyes of a child isn't something you see very often. In 2008, Luc Bernard made headlines with a title called Imagination is the Only Escape, a proposed Nintendo DS game that saw a young boy escape the horror of the Holocaust through fantasy. Imagination was never released, but five years later Bernard is returning to the idea with a crowdfunding campaign aimed at finally bringing it to market. The game stars a young boy named Samuel during the Nazi occupation of France in 1942.
When things take a turn for the worse during the Vel' d'Hiv roundup, Samuel spends much of his time in a nearby forest, and retreats into his own mind to shield himself from the reality of what's happening. In this fantasy world he befriends a talking fox named Renard who takes him on a series of adventures. When players buy your game before it's done: Expert tips on alpha funding.
On the face of it, alpha funding sounds like a relatively easy-to-implement ride. You develop part of your game, you put what you've created onto the internet with a price tag, and then use the money that comes in to fund the rest of the game's development. Of course, anyone with even the slightest idea of what this process entails knows that there's nothing simple about it. There's frequent updates to implment; there's multiple methods through which to offer your alpha; there's community interaction to keep them keen.
If anything, you have to wonder whether offering an alpha build of your game could potentially distract you from actually making the damn thing. But do the pros of alpha funding your game outweigh the cons? Dean "Rocket" Hall is best known as the creator of the DayZ mod for Arma II. Now Hall stands on the precipice of his second alpha-build launch in as many years, as the developer plans to also release this standalone version as a paid alpha. The Castle Doctrine. Portal 2 Level Design: Creating Puzzles to Challenge Your Players. Portal was one of the most distinctive puzzle games of the past few years, and its sequel Portal 2 showed us that lightning can strike twice. A little less than a year ago, Valve made waves once again by introducing a simple yet powerful level editing tool in Portal 2 itself. In this article I'm going to discuss how to design great puzzles that will challenge your players.
Thinking With Portals Designing levels for Portal 2 is very different to designing levels for other games. To design strong levels for Portal you need to have a strong understanding of the gameplay as a whole and of how the different gameplay elements interact with each other. Before sitting down with the level editor you should do some prep-work to get in the right frame of mind to be thinking about Portal levels.
Take some time to play community-made maps such as Rendezvous, Only as Difficult as You make it, and Suspended. The Steam Community hub for Portal 2. Generating Ideas Building the Level Inherently Rewarding. Swap Adjacent Gems to Make Sets of Three: A History of Matching Tile Games. A History of Matching Tile Games Jesper Juul Juul, Jesper. "Swap Adjacent Gems to Make Sets of Three: A History of Matching Tile Games". Artifact journal. Volume 2, 2007. London: Routledge. This article aims to write the history of a video game genre. Figure 1. My interest here is in how matching tile games have developed during the past 21 years, in how new design and innovation has happened, and in the relation between game design and player experiences.
Matching tile games are today mostly sold via the distribution channel of casual, downloadable games, a channel that puts conflicting pressures on game developers: Innovate enough to differentiate, but make the game sufficiently like other games that players find it easy to pick up and play1. Video game history is everywhere, in the development of games, in the selling of games, in the consumption of games.
A popular genre with no vocal proponents Q. In fact, figure 2 shows the instructions of the game. Small teams and big ideas are key to Gree's new 'G-Lab' Tokyo, Japan-based Gree is a bona fide mobile game giant nowadays. And sometimes, giants need some extra motivation to get them to move them into new directions. That's where Gree's newly-launched "G-Lab" will step in. Headed up by VPs of engineering Andy Keidel and Ram Gudavalli at the company's San Francisco location, G-Lab will consist of small teams with lots of freedom that will prototype new games in short spans of time.
Think of it as a longer-running game jam within a company -- a format that's similar to R&D efforts in game companies ranging from Double Fine to EA. The company already has successful games like Modern War and Jackpot Slots, but Gree hopes the initiative will help the company expand its creative and financial horizons. Here's a Q&A we conducted with Keidel and Gudavalli, telling us more about the program. The G-Lab team will be made up of some of our top performers from art, engineering, and UI/UX. Gudavalli: The idea originated from our internal hackathons. Swap Adjacent Gems to Make Sets of Three: A History of Matching Tile Games. Peter Molyneux Dissects Telltale's The Walking Dead With Its Writer - Features.
Auntie pixelante › level design lesson: to the right, hold on tight. (also in spanish, french, portuguese and korean.) much of the following is informed by friend and comrade jeremy penner’s breakdown of design trends in super mario bros. for further reading, see his “breaking the law of miyamoto” in the gamer’s quarter issue seven. i’m also indebted to eric-jon rossel waugh for the metaphor of verbs.
“mario jumps into a block.” “mario jumps onto a goomba.” “mario jumps on top of a pipe.” “mario jumps across a pit.” this is why almost all of the doors in metroid are opened by gunfire, even though i’ve never encountered a door i had to shoot to open: samus aran, having a gun for an arm, interacts with her world primarily by shooting. it makes sense, within the context of that game, for doors to open upon being shot. the big question of level design – and i mean that every level design lesson i ever write will be a response to this question – is: how do i teach the player these rules?
How does it teach this? That flashing ? Significant Bits. MMObility: Are Glitch's Feats smart design or mindless grind? Live events are a funny thing. They can be some of the most exciting content and can possibly cost developers very little. Sure, there are massive big-budget events like anything building up to a World of Warcraft expansion, but there are also wonderful smaller events like welcoming new characters to Ryzom or tournaments in Illyriad.
Live events can be very, very simple but can also be absolutely thrilling to players. We don't need much to make us happy, and live events are a great way to do it. Glitch has been mad about live events for a while, although developer Tiny Speck and the players might refer to them as something else. Some see live events like Glitch's Feats as nothing more than excuses for overly passionate players to grind their way into virtual glory. What are Feats? Players participate in the Feats by performing different, often simple, tasks. But what about those players who felt as though the Feats were nothing but a cheap, fast bit of content to make them grind? Ex-Valve hardware expert shares uncommon look inside the company. Jeri Ellsworth is a woman with a considerable resume. An entrepreneur and self-taught computer chip designer, she's best known for developing the Commodore 30-in-1 emulator and for her technical articles for building DIY electronics.
She was also among Valve's early 2012 hardware hires, but was fired in February of this year. Now in a new video interview with Jenesee Grey of the Grey Area Podcast (above; beginning at 11:15), Ellsworth paints her former employer in a complicated light, casting doubt on the "flat management" structure Valve boasts, saying that the company is in actuality more hierarchical than it appears. "I should frame all of this with I have a lot of friends at Valve and there are lots of great people there," Ellsworth says at the outset of the interview. "My view is not one hundred percent true for all the different groups in there. " "We've all seen the Valve handbook, which offers a very idealized view. It was not for lack of money, says Ellsworth. The Psychology Behind Steam’s Summer Sale.
Summer is here! Time to pump up your video game backlog until it’s bloated, gurgling, and making vaguely taunting motions from over in the corner. In other words, the Steam Summer Sale has begun. I just bought Hotline Miami, Fez, and The Swapper for like 14 cents while typing that. Like last time, Steam is offering discounted digital downloads in the form of daily sales that change every 24 hours, plus “flash deals” that change every 8 hours.
And there are community choice deals where users vote on which of three titles should get its price slashed next. But this time there’s something new: Steam is tying its summer sale in with its trading card system. Let me be clear: I love Valve, I love Steam, and I especially love Steam sales. Artificial Scarcity The research is pretty clear that “available for a limited time” is a super effective sales pitch because we value things more that have limited availability. Psychological Reactance The Endowed Progress Effect Commitment and Consistency 2. The reality of developing web games with Flash, HTML5 and Unity. The reality of developing web games with Flash, HTML5 and Unity Update: Lots of new links added at the bottom and feedback from comments inserted into the article body. Today was a black day for Flash developers world-wide.
Adobe announced it will drop Flash support for mobile browsers. This came the day after announcing mass redundancies across the company. On the face of it that doesn’t seem like a significant problem. But it has got the whole “Flash hate wagon” on the roll again, so I felt it was time to finally commit my thoughts to this blog. First of all: I am only concerned about game development for the web. I compare Flash, HTML5 and Unity, as they are the only viable web gaming platforms today. Workflow – How easy is it to actually create a game?
These are all areas that I feel game developers ought to be aware of when evaluating new platforms. Technology break-down 1. Flash: Making games in Flash is easy. HTML5: Editors such as JetBrains Astella are making coding less painful. 5 Simple Techniques To Add Polish To Your Game - Jesse Freeman - Microsoft Technology Evangelist Focusing On Windows 8 Game Development. Building games is not really that difficult once you have a few under your belt but it’s the last 10% that will usually give you the hardest time. So many games have probably been abandoned simply because the list of things needed to get it ready for publishing seem monumental. Usually this comes down to cleaning up the artwork, building out UI and performance issues that are hard to track down. To help you get over that hump I wanted to talk about 5 things you can do to add some extra polish to your game.
This is probably the most important thing you can ever do in a game, or any app for that matter. Animation – usually the player has the most detail and other entities get rushed or you add in last minute elements that don’t feel right. One of the best examples of inaccurate marketing material would be the box art on Mega Man 2. While this isn’t enough to tank a game’s success, it is something you really shouldn’t ignore. Photo credit by Lars Sundström from free stock photos. Orcun Nisli's Blog - The Path to Monochroma: Platformer Design Elements. 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. Monochroma, a cinematic puzzle-platformer game, is the first big project out of Nowhere Studios and has been in development for 18 months.
As the creative director and designer, it was my job to search for articles that could help us understand the core gameplay mechanics in pre-production. However, I couldn’t find materials that focused solely on puzzle-platformers. This gap gave me the perfect opportunity to investigate core design choices of other puzzle-platformers. The main part of my research was to define puzzle-platformer elements. Since most of the platformers include some puzzle elements, it is very hard to define which platformers are puzzle-platformer games. I will provide examples from a number of platformers to categorize gameplay mechanics and their respective sub-elements. Knack Devs Created PS4 Jumbo Controller To See How Kids Play. Veteran game designer Mark Cerny, who's also lead architect on the PlayStation 4's hardware, says he faced a decision in 2008. Should he continue to develop games or focus solely on hardware design?
He decided to do both. Speaking at Develop Brighton, Cerny outlined his experience in working on the PS4 game Knack, which included a specially designed controller. As Cerny explains in the video below, he approached Akira Sato, former chairman of Sony Computer Entertainment with the question of continuing game development. Sato told him that his experience as a designer made him more desirable, and that it also would give him more practical experience he could use when working with other developers.
One of the major challenges Cerny says he faced was the controller itself. [Source: Develop, image via Shuhei Yoshida] Our TakeBuilding a jumbo controller was a clever way for adult developers to remind themselves what it was like to have smaller hands. Respecting the player's wallet. Ramin Shokrizade's Blog - The Top F2P Monetization Tricks. Game Design: Splash Screen - Jesse Freeman - Microsoft Technology Evangelist Focusing On Windows 8 Game Development.