As promised, I’m here today to talk about the Instinct system that I glossed over at the end of yesterday’s post. Before I get into the nitty-gritty of exactly what the system does, I feel it’s beneficial to give a bit of background for comparison, as the final system (at least as far as I’ve [...]
Archive for the ‘Design’ Category
Basic Instinct
Sunday, October 18th, 2009Dancing with the details
Saturday, October 17th, 2009Emergence, the concept of several small systems interacting to form a complex system that is “larger than the sum of its parts” is something we’ve discussed briefly before, but which I’d like to bring up for discussion once again, today. I find emergence to be one of the most fundamental elements of game design theory; [...]
The many faces of battle
Sunday, October 11th, 2009There’s one thing (well, there are several, but one which I’ll talk about right now) that’s always bothered me a good deal about most MMO combat systems, which is that character position and movement are only very rarely an influential factor. There are a few games that do some interesting things: Aion takes into account [...]
Judge a book
Saturday, October 10th, 2009What strange alternate dimension have I wound up in, in which it is apparently unacceptable for a game reviewer to review an MMO based on their experience for the first 10 levels of play? There’s a problem that exists somewhere in the gulf between the game design philosophy for your standard MMO and the expectations [...]
Sprightly Sprites: Bringing game worlds to life
Friday, October 2nd, 2009Today we’ll be shifting gears a bit, and exploring some of the more technical aspects of creating and animating a two-dimensional world. At the heart of two-dimensional animation is the concept of a sprite, a graphic image which can move and change within a larger image. Assuming that your “larger image” might be something along [...]