Bibliography

For all our academic writings on the course we need to include a bibliography. This shows anyone who reads the article where exactly all quotes have come from and is a great tool for looking up references used, here is one created with the help of Zotero to show what a bibliography looks like

Books

Rosenzweig, G., 2007. ActionScript 3.0 Game Programming University, Indianapolis: Que Publishing.

Hague, J.V., 2006. Flash 3D Animation, Interactivity, and Games, Amsterdam: Elsevier Focal Press.

Journals/Articles

Wertheim, M., Evolving Out of the Virtual Mud: An Interview with Ed Burton.

Baker, R., An Interactive Computer Video Game for the Design Museum: Using Technology to Teach Technology.

Contribution

Caillois R, 1962, The Definition of Play: The Classification of games, Salen, K, The game design reader: A rules of play anthology, Cambridge, MIT Press, pp 122-155.

Folmer E, 2007, Component based games development - A solution to escalating costs and expanding deadlines, G, Schmidt, H, Component-based software engineering: 10th international symposium, Medford, MA, page 66 - 73.

New Games Journalism

New games journalism (NGJ) is an offshoot of a style started in the 1960's by Tom Wolfe called 'New Journalism' (NJ). This style was different to all those that came before it in the sense that normal journalism focuses on the facts and reporting a case whereas NJ draws from the writers personal experiences of what they are reporting on. This is not to say that NJ has no facts at all, just that they are incorporated into the story of the piece rather than the main focus. The only downside to this approach however is that you lose objectivity, the piece will always be heavily biased in the writers opinion.

In terms of games journalism, it has aways been a focus on rating the separate parts (graphics, game play, story etc.) and then 'scoring' the summation of these parts. NGJ is a story of the writers experience within the game and discussing the things that happened while occasionally referencing these different parts.

Examples of this would be 'Bow Nigga' by Ian Shanahan (aka Always Black) or the 'Zero Punctuation' videos that are on escapistmagazine.com that are made by Ben 'Yahtzee' Crenshaw which personally I would recommend anyone interested to watch all of these and browse the rest of the site too, specifically the 'Shamus Plays' posts. Both are a perfect example of NGJ and are also hilarious.

Videos anyone in the games industry should watch

I recently was trawling through one of my favourtie games sites called escapistmagazine.com and came across a weekly series of vidoes on there called Extra Credits, near enough every one seems to be a video version of the themes and topics we been learning about on our weekly readings and i really think it would be helpful to everyone learning about or in the games industry to watch these and feed off the ideas that they discuss.
The link below takes you to the start of the videos, just begin with the oldest and work your way through, you wont regret it.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/extra-credits?page=2

Creating Art

Over the last few weeks I have gotten a tatto that I have wanted for a very long time. One thing that struck me throught getting it was how amazing the design process was so I thought that I would share it with the world.

I walked into the shop with two pictures as reference which are shown below



This is Shenron the dragon from an anime called DragonBall Z



These are the dragonballs used to summon Shenron

I handed these over to the tattooist and told hiw where i wanted it and what I wanted it to look like, he then printed the first picture and adapted it to make it into a better tatto for where it was positioned (my back)
Three and a half hours later the first part was over, here is the result.

This shows the outlining and shading of the design

Two weeks later when this part had healed i returned for another two hours to have the colours and powerlining (making specific outlines thicker to emphasize areas) finished. This was the final result:

Scared and amazed

Last week I took a trip out to Thorpe Park for the day. I was looking forward to the SAW licened rides and the atmosphere as I haven't been to a large theme park in a while and rollercoasters are a big passion of mine.
The day went fantastically with all the rides meeting expectations and especially the Sa Alive horror maze scaring the hell out of me and my family.
What most impressed me however was once it became dark, the whole atmosphere of the park changes due to the fantastic lighting and sound used throught the park. I thought I would post a few pictures to better show what I mean.

 This shows how high the rollercoaster 'Stealth' is (205ft) it just dwarfs everything else around it.

 This is the aptly named 'Tidal Wave' which has the biggest splash pool of all water rides in the UK, lit up at night it is amazing to see.

 This is the 'SAW' rollercoaster, dimly lit to aid with the frightening, operessive feel of the ride

This coaster is called 'Collosus' and this is my favourite picture of the bunch. In the day it looks like any other generic rollercoaster but when the sun goes down the green and red lights really make this stand out in the park.

Game tools to 'hook' the player

We have been reading works recently talking about different tools used in games (FADT's) and certain techniques games designers use to keep the player interested in playing their games for a long length of time.

We looked at things such as Intention which is where the player can analyse the game world and make a plan what to do next. Perceivable Consequence was another thing we looked at which is when the player does something wrong in a game (e.g. dies) they know exactly why that was wrong and how to change what they did before.

We also looked at the idea of how movement impetus (how motivated the player is to continue forward in the game) and the space of possibility (how many possible choices the player can make at any given time) can effect pacing.

For example if you give the player a huge space of possibility then they will take longer to decide their next move and the pacing of the game will drop, or they will make the wrong move but not realise what they did wrong, become frustrated and stop playing, so there is no movement impetus. On the other hand, is the space of possibility is too small then the time it takes for a player to decide their move is shortened, speeding up the pacing, but the player may master the game quicker, being able to instinctively know the best move to make at all times and this may make a game boring fast and therefore they wont continue to play, also halting movement impetus.

The trick seems to be gaging the perfect balance of the space of possibility so that the player never becomes frustrated or bored, but motivated to move on and this can be further increased of the game introduces new mechanics at regular intervals for the player to learn and master which keeps the game feeling fresh at all times.

Iterations

We have been recently looking at the process of iterating a game. This means to tweak the original concept to improve the game in a number of ways. This could be to change the flow of the game, make it more or less challenging, to add the ability for more or less people to play the game or just to make it more fun.

The process of iteration is a simple one, first the designer picks one thing about the game to change, implements that change, tests it either themselves or with others and then evaluates what happened to determine if the change should be kept or dropped. Then they move on to any other iterations they wish to do. This process saves a lot of time and money and is a fast, effective way of prototyping a game because it prevents the designer from committing a lot of effort to one idea only to have it not be worth it in the end.

When looking at my board game concept I designed in the first week, the biggest problem was that there were too many spaces on my board in which there was no effect to the player, this reduced the game down to just the luck of a dice roll which was boring. Therefore the first iteration I made was to shorten the board so that more spaces were interactive, when this was tested it found it made a faster paced and more enjoyable game. The second iteration I made was that since I have shortened the board, that games finished very quickly, because of this I decided to make the players have to get from one end of the board to the other and then back again, effectively doubling the playing time. This seemed to work for the time sense but it also added an unexpected strategic element when players met one another going opposite directions due to my rules on players landing on the same space.

My final iteration was that it was possible to have more than one player finish the game in the winning condition (having the highest life points) so I decided to introduce the element of bonus points for players depending on the order they finished the game (10 for first, 5 for second, etc). This seemed to solve the problem of players finishing on the same points and added another element of trying to get finished first to get the biggest bonus.