Archive for the ‘game design’ Category

Spore reviewed by scientists: EA is spouting pseudo-scientific bullshit

Friday, October 24th, 2008

I've played about 5 mins of Spore in a games store, so I'm in no position to review it. Draconian DRM issues aside, I wasn't all that impressed with my brief time in the Cell stage, although I was distracted by the gross-out slimy controllers, caked in grease from the ...

Some game design quotes

Thursday, May 1st, 2008

Some game design quotes at RandomTerrian. There are some pearls of wisdom here, eg: For me the retrogaming movement is more than just nostalgia of misty eyed Gen X'ers. It's a reaction to the current graphical overkill, the simulation obsessed gaming environment of the late 90s. In our quest for absolute graphical ...

400 game design rules

Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008

The 400 Project is an expanding list of "400 game design rules". I suspect the project may have stalled at rule #112 .. still, there's some juicy stuff in there. I also suspect that for at least half these 'rules' there is at least one professional developer somewhere who would ...

Super Mario Demystified (with source code !)

Sunday, March 30th, 2008

There's a nice little writeup on Gamasutra describing how the crazy gravity in Super Mario Galaxy was implemented, including demo sourcecode. It's not 'real' physics (no surprises there ....). Essentially, Mario's orientation is corrected to smoothly align with the surface normal of the closest 'ground' polygon. This is the first in ...