Plotting Talk
I gave a talk on plotting last night at a meeting of York Writers. I was pretty nervous, as many of the writers have been published, and wondered how they
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Interaction Density I came up with the term “Interaction Density” when I was part of a long forum discussion on the way there are no adventures targeted at 8-13 year
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Back-Story No, this isn’t the story of how I’m in constant pain with my bad back. But now that I’ve brought it up, I wonder how much sympathy I can
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Character Profiles Part of my current job involves creating the character profiles for my client’s project. Now, I can’t go into the specific details of what I’m doing (for obvious
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Obstacles of Desire One of my favourite obstacles in a game was in Beneath a Steel Sky. Though I worked on this game, I didn’t contribute to the gameplay design;
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Puzzling Through the Obstacles One of the criticisms levelled at Adventure Games these days is that they can feel a little old fashioned. I’m increasingly of the opinion that this
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Shall we interface? Have you ever picked up your joypad or approached your keyboard and found that you struggled to play the game that’s in the machine because the interface
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Level 17 Made Me Cry This may seem like I’m being a little slow on the uptake, but I wanted to finish off my two-part piece on mechanics design before
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Gameplay Mechanics part 2 So, it’s a week later and we’ve called the design team together to discuss the results of the brainstorming session. We’ve all typed up our thoughts
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Gameplay Mechanics About eight years ago, I was sent a game design handwritten on two sheets of A4 paper with one very small map drawn in pencil. Most of the
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Motivation and Conflict Like many other aspects of game development, motivation is two-pronged. Not only do you need to consider the motivation of what drives the player character through the
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Dialogue? What dialogue?Part Three That this subject had stretched itself to a third column shows the importance I feel that dialogue plays in story and character driven games. As I