Was in The Arcade in Melbourne during the Melbourne International Games Week, and Ben Britten, Technical Director of Mighty Games Group was more than happy to show his workplace.
Seeing that wall of animated gameplay in the background, I asked what it was.
Hearing his answer…. I had to ask him for a video interview. It was that mindblowing.
Richard Wnuk is a veteran Game Business executive, having served in various high-level positions in Konami Digital Entertainment, Majesco, Jaleco and Red Storm Entertainment. He was giving lectures in KDU for the past four weeks – giving out stories on Rainbow Six, Metal Gear Solid 2 and Dance Dance Revolution – so had the pleasure to hold this quick interview with him.
Here, he was addressing a question he heard from a student. He chose to address it here as the question reflected a student concern he wanted to settle.
4) Hungry
5) Sad
6) Hidden
Inktober 2016 was a bust. Even though I started the first Ink on the 1st, there was too much to last month – including two overseas conferences – to focus on an Ink a day. I could have if I went simpler, but I realized the investment is part of what makes the inking fun. Doesn’t meet the goal of Inktober though.
Nevertheless, the prompts for this year are useful; had an idea just from a cursory glance through the words. So let’s see if I can take it further.
So, 1-3:
1) Fast
2) Noisy
3) Collect
Procedural city generation is one of my main interests, and this article is a record of how I developed my own version from late 2016 till now.
The initial version was an adaptation of Unity’s Roll-a-ball tutorial. I started learning Unity on 2016, so with my limited understanding, I simply tried creating single Gameobject blocks with window textures, and tested the ability to randomly place the Gameobjects.
ConceptArt.org’s challenge was to redesign Charlemagne’s sword, Joyeuse. The sword is real, so the task is to reimagine it as a fantasy weapon.
The key features to the sword was that it changes color multiple times in a day, and it represented joyousness. More of a mass media weapon than a slaying device.
For the color feature, I settled on using opal as a material source. Opal was reputed to be a gemstone that changes color, even when the owner dies. The change of light throughout the day would change the refracted light from the sword, so it explains the color-changing feature. Continue reading
Photobash – with the bash elements composed of mostly textures – of one of the waterworld designs.
Character design fleshouts from the game world designs of Game World Creation batch sem2 2016. Two students made water-based worlds, so compiling them into a set.
Images in circles are refs provided in the World Design Docs.
Previously I posted on the prototypes my game design students did for their game design classes. This post is on one of the processes we used to improve the design of their prototypes: usability testing.
The research and application started in 2013 where I was looking into the best ways to teach design for design students. As cited, one of the strongest feedback received was to get the design students to create prototypes. The second strongest feedback I got was to train them to design based on feedback. That is, to collect data from users, and to create a design that would respond to the issues pointed out by said data.
I recognized the application; it’s what online games do when they track user behavior and adapt their game to maximize wanted behavior. It’s a process used by Facebook games in the late 2000s and being used now on data collected from users on mobile games. The feedback made sense in terms of keeping designers relevant.
That means figuring out how to do playtesting for designers in order for them to collect data to analyze. Continue reading
Did three upgraded characters over the past two days. They definitely ain’t perfect, but I can see now what details I noticed as opposed to 6 years back.