Game Design

top-down “mini-map” of the level being created, but the designer cannot actually change the level using that view, nor is the mi ...

cannot go can be quite useful as well. And again, each part of this functionality data should be easily toggled on or off via ho ...

world, aside from texture and lighting placement, while in this view. This was no doubt due to the speed of processors available ...

Editing the World............................. The best development tools for a game are composed of a delicate mix of off-the-s ...

tweak the geometry until it was perfect. The change in the quality of the levels was dra- matic. As always, time did not allow f ...

One great benefit of a properly designed scripting system is that it is completely portable to other systems. This means that wh ...

level editor not just a tool for modifying the game’s levels, but turns it into more of a gameplay editor, where the designer is ...

of all the commands available, and then further pop-ups show the designer all of the dif- ferent parameters that can be passed t ...

laziness that he throws his hands up in disgust and does not work on the level as much as he might otherwise. A good level desig ...

those transitions took a lot of designer time to set up. Once I added the auto-transitioning tool the designers were delighted, ...

editor as it is really used will be invaluable. Without actually having to sit down and fully use the application they are creat ...

total control of the game-world: of its architecture (where players can go), of its aes- thetic appearance (lighting, texturing, ...

Chapter 22 Interview: Will Wright ................. Chapter 22 Interview: Will Wright ................... It is hard to measure ...

of the very early games, such as the very first version ofFlight Simulatorwith the wire-frame graphics. You had to write your ow ...

game, and I felt bad that I didn’t use those last eight. And there are a lot of tricks you do when you’re running out of memory, ...

feature of the landscape like crime or pollution or land value. But the layers can interact on the third dimension. So the layer ...

So originallySimCitydidn’t have a mouse-based, point-and-click interface? No, actually it did. The Lisa had come out while I was ...

How would you distinguish between a software toy and a game? Toys can be used to build games. You can play games with toys. But ...

The biggest complaint I’ve seen aboutSimCity, and I’ve seen this mostly from other game developers, is that since it is not a ga ...

they spend all this time building up a family and running their lives for months, people really start to empathize with those ch ...