Game Design

So you didn’t have any trouble communicating your vision for the design to the engineering team? There were problems, but not fo ...

and started working on the traffic code. In most of the cases, it was, “How does the Ger- man distributor feel about this produc ...

the art assets and everything. We reprogrammed most of them, to some degree. But still we had this large content pool that was a ...

Was that a problem you tried to solve? There were things we did, but we couldn’t get around the central fact that every- body wa ...

decisions it was decided we should be building an online persistent world with a monthly subscription. So about six or eight mon ...

design documents for players to read. And then the last one was “This is about to be deployed.” So we had three levels of design ...

lot of metrics on the players that we would study every day. And we would study the trends on these metrics, in terms of which o ...

that was opposing them. That became this big power struggle in the game. We had these friendship webs, and as one of the things ...

people would say they hated an idea, but then you put it in the game and all of a sudden...Games are so emergent sometimes that ...

maxima in the game design space, and occasionally I’ll find a nice maxima likeSimCity orThe Sims. And then of course the company ...

Your games always seem to have this strong educational component. I was wondering, how do you balance that with making the game ...

things. She was drilling this into me years ago, that playtesting is probably the most undervalued thing that any game designer ...

my track record, I don’t know if I’m the one to be offering advice there. Whenever something unusual comes out likeThe Sims,Ilik ...

Chapter 23 Level Design ...................... Chapter 23 Level Design........................ “My policy always rises from the ...

The number of level designers required for a project is directly proportional to the complexity of the levels to be used in that ...

a campaign- based strategy game such asStarCraft,the levels or scenarios are defined by maps accompanied by objectives players m ...

which places further importance on the end of a level as the completion of a unit of gameplay. A level can function like an act ...

managed this feat after the investment of a large amount of development time, though the payoff seems to have been worth it. Lev ...

The Components of a Level......................... Once the levels a game needs have been decided on, possibly with some idea of ...

another month of architecture construction time to rework a level because it is not playing well. Therefore understanding ahead ...