Game Design

will be too hard for 90 percent of the players out there. The first comment testers will often make is, “This game is too hard.” ...

When designer Jason Jones was balancing theMarathongames, he had an interest- ing technique for making sure the game was not too ...

while the second, it is hoped, is interested in producing compelling and stimulating games. Of course, the two motives need not ...

more risky proposition for the game designer, since if the game fails he will be the one largely to blame. At the same time, if ...

Chapter 26 Interview: Doug Church ................ Chapter 26 Interview: Doug Church .................. In an industry increasin ...

What was your driving motivation to get into game development? I worked on some little games in college with some friends, and s ...

halfway through the project, and then in the final quarter he started coming up to Boston a lot. Origin wasn’t overly protective ...

X-TrekandNet Hackand things, but I hadn’t played a PC game in five years or some- thing. So we just said, “Let’s do a really coo ...

Warren, here’s what I’m thinking, I’m trying to do this, this, and this...” in ourweekly phone call, or once a month when he wou ...

lighting or anything; it was just a very simple wall texture, something that we did in three and a half weeks or something, so i ...

leader your job is to get the eight or ten managers all seeing vaguely the same thing. Because what you have to do is get those ...

around, and I think Paul came down for a couple of days, and then Paul and I came back up to Boston, and Paul, Austin, and I bou ...

System Shockbe an exploration as well, and that’s why it’s all in the logs and the data, so then it’s very tied into your moveme ...

It’s interesting you used the game minute technique, since that lays out just one way events can take place in a given location. ...

she could lock doors or sabotage you. And that helped the story a lot. The voice-over was nice, especially when you actually had ...

cool. But by the timeWolfhad come out we were pretty much done withUnderworldso it wasn’t like we were looking at them to get id ...

cut-scene. To us, giving players the ability, even if they don’t think of it as such, to go their own way is where they’re going ...

worked pretty well. There’s obviously stuff one would change in retrospect, like with anything one ever does, but I think we did ...

when the machines could actually do it was probably them being a little smarter about the market, and us being a little dippier. ...

want. But if I get to do another game that I find interesting, that’s pretty hard to com- plain about. People certainly discusse ...