Allen Varney over at the Escapist just posted an interesting follow up article to my Lessons from Touring Band essay. He provides some solid number and lots of wonderful examples of village games. You can read it here. A hundred petri dishes I’m impressed that Allen tracked down so many great examples. One thing that I noted was the fragmented nature of the market. This market is nothing like the mainstream world (aka WoW land) […]
The Nintendo Wii has an inexplicably complex help system. A cat wanders onto the screen periodically. If you move your cursor quickly towards the cat, he’ll run away. However, if you are careful, you can sneak your cursor up on the cat, your cursor will turn into a hand and you can grab him. When you do, you get a tip about how to use the Wii dashboard. From a simple efficiency driven point of […]
I’ve been thinking lately about how game design applies to the broader topic of software development. Game design is all about creating pleasurable learning experiences and mastery of conceptual tools. Surely more traditional software could benefit from the design wisdom and theory that we’ve built up over the years in the game industry. The current state of the art technique for user experience design is the scenario-driven development. It isn’t all that good at creating […]
A little casual game design of mine called Sprawl finally made it out into the big wide world. I started building the graphics and brainstorming on the concept after playing an elegant board game called Hey, That’s My Fish at Project Horseshoe. Pete, my old compatriot from Anark, was looking for a game design concept to turn into sample game for the Microsoft WPF/E samples they launched this Monday. He actually made it work with […]
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