GameTruth

Periodically over at Game Career Guide they have a guest come in and create a game design challenge.  About a month ago I entered into one of the challenges and I was an honorable mention.  The info on the challenge I entered is below:

The Challenge
Design a one-button first-person shooter game.

Assignment Details
This design challenge comes from Brandon Sheffield of Game Developer magazine and Gamasutra.com, and his assignment details are extremely minimal.

Design a one-button FPS game. Describe

* the game idea
* the game mechanic
* the platform
* the target audience
* why your game will be addictively fun.

That’s it.

Succinct ideas will be highly favored! Can you describe all this in only a few sentences? Remember, the businessmen and women in the game industry don’t want to read a hundred-page design document. Get to the point.

Sheffield will weigh in on the results. (Hint: Search out his name to find out what kinds of themes and styles he might be into.)

So with my success in this challenge I may very well be entering into some more.

-Mark

I am reporting in from GLS2008 in Madison, Wisconsin (It is currently downpouring outside).  This is my second year here at GLS and having presented The Winds of Orbis yesterday I truly get to relax and take in some good talks.  One of the highlights of yesterday was Drew Davidson’s talk about Portal that focused on the storytelling and analysis of the game from a more standard literary standpoint.  Drew proposed some very interesting ideas about the game design itself and did an excellent job explaining how Portal teaches the player to play.

Today there will surely be plenty of other outstanding talks.  I sat in on a fireside chat this morning that was about building virtual worlds and discussed the idea of Constant Nieuwenhuis’s New Babylon.   I think the idea is really fascinating and Iplan to read more about it andmaybe I will post more later.

Expect more updates from both Mark and me as we try to get back into the swing of this again.

-Seth

So I went to my first WoW trading card game event, and I totally got my ass kicked.  It was pretty fun to play the sealed format.  There is a big draw for me because you are given a set of random cards and need to make the best of it.  As far as card games go I have always found creating the decks being the most fun thing to do, while actually playing them comes in second.  Anyway, I plan to keep playing the WoW TCG so I will try to keep this updated.

-Seth

So I have been messing around with this card game for a while. I plan to play in some tournaments coming up and I will put up the reports here. Also I am going to do some number crunching and playtesting so that will be available as well. Hopefully will have a chance to do some analysis on the metagame in the current state just before the release of the new expansion Hunt for Illidan.

-Seth

I think Seth and I try on purpose to leave most of the game legislation and censoring garbage off this site because we do not know any lawyers and its always found unconstitutional. However, I am posting this link to the Game Politics blog where there are some posted pieces of actual testimony against Jack Thompson. The Florida Bar is trying to disbar him on ethic and other violations, I am not a lawyer so I do not care much for the details. What I did find fascinating is how insane Thompson actually is and I think this testimony shows it well. The testimony of the Judge in the Alabama case is coming I believe on Thursday. If you have some down time I really recommend giving this stuff a read.

-Mark

Its been a while since we have sent out a question.  We have had spring breaks and other things going on recently.  Anyway, in the news there is an article about Atari using Steam to distribute games.  I think this is awesome because I believe Steam solves so many PC gaming problems.  The best part about Steam for the industry is the security it provides against piracy.  The other awesome aspect of Steam is that it will allow multiplayer games to have a standard when creating a multiplayer experience through Steam’s matchmaking.

The thing I believe Steam is missing most is a casual portal.  When Steam releases a casual games section I think it could easily rival Popcap and Pogo for the casual audience.  I see Steam becoming the Xbox Live Arcade for the PC, it already has over 15 million users.  I realize that there is already some casual games available but I would like to see free games available to play on Steam that are multiplayer in nature.  Even if it is only a demo and the real version can be purchased.

The question is, will Steam become the dominate form of digital distribution on the PC, therefore making digital distribution viable for indie games?  I totally think that it will.  I think there is going to be a shift in digital distribution with the support of Steam that will allow independent studios to go around big name publishers for PC games and release directly to the audience.

-Seth

Since I am not at GDC I have been reading coverage of it from many different sources. This question comes from a blog post on Terra Nova, which can be seen here. It is the summary of a panel discussion about the future of Massive Multiplayer Games. The second question down asks if MMOs are headed for consoles and there is a unanimous “yes” from the panel.

This is something Seth and I have discussed this before. I cannot wait for MMOs to hit the console for many reasons. The first reason is that moving MMOs to the console will force them to be simpler. There is no reason that in World of Warcraft each class has over 40 different spells, I would like to see it go more the way of Guild Wars with tons of spells but only being able to carry 8 at any time. Reason 2 is that I prefer playing games on my couch, using my TV over sitting at my desk staring at my screen, may just be my preference. Reason 3 is that the current gen of consoles has the ability to patch and send out episodic content just as well as the PC so there is really no reason to not them on consoles.

The whole panel summary was good. Seth said he was actually at the talk so maybe he can comment some more.

-Mark

Over on Kotaku they have an extremely interesting article about the creation of the story and world in Bioshock. It specifically discusses the creation of the dystopian society based on the the beliefs of the people who would live there. The use of objectivism in the story helps to build a believable feel for a society that would choose to live in underwater isolation.

So the question is how far do designers really need to go to create a believable world? It seems that in Bioshock the entire story was hinged upon creating an beautiful environment that felt alive. It seems that by taking the extra time to think not only about your environment, but the society and the individuals that will inhabit it will obvious help complete your world. I would argue that this could be taken further and should be used by any game that is trying to create believable characters with interesting relationships and complex motivations.

Either way, read that article, it is really awesome.

- Seth

P.S. GDC is this week, so be ready for some really interesting questions.

This question has two parts, I will start with the first. Its a pretty simple question: if you could make a new IP into a game what would it be? I am bringing this up because of this. Go ahead and click on the link and then give it a try, the game has a 5 minute duration and it is worth your time. In an industry saturated with sequels and licensed IP I love seeing whacky, edgy, and completely different IPs bursting forth. So what would mine be? Seth knows this, probably sick of hearing about it but I want to make a survivor game. A game where the player is forced to survive, you know make fire, a shelter, get food, etc. The main reason I want to do this is because I think it would be fun and also because Les Stroud is my hero. I would also make a survivor game based on his IP (Survivorman) but I would rather do the survivor game as a new IP, in light of that thought is the second part of the question.

That second part being: what established IP do you want to see made into a game? A while back a Ghostbusters game was announced, also just last week an Ender’s Game game was announced. So which IP would I pick? I am a huge Battletech/Mechwarrior fan, huge, HUGE fan. I want to see an MMO. I want to get with a group a friends and not be some girly elf or ugly orc in some sewer, I want to be stomping around piloting a robot the size of a building in the open air showing fools the business end of my shoulder mounted missle launchers. The Battletech universe is more than diverse enough for an MMO and has tons of rabid fans of everything from the books to the tabletop games.  I would love to see it done because it would not be just another fantasy DPS/dungeon based MMO.

-Mark

I wrote an article for the Escapist and it was published today. Head over and check out Dreamcraft 101, it is all about my experiences at the Entertainment Technology Center and a specific class called Building Virtual Worlds.

- Seth