Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Where this blog is going

I think over time I'll be moving to a format which is a bit less negative and more constructive. To that end I'll work on posting some good design principles or heuristics in the future.

Maybe we could get to something like 100 commandments of game design. So the WTF#'s should become heuristics where I'll illustrate what the offending game has done, why it's bad, and what could potentially be done to fix it.

Future posts will also look at things that games have done well.

2 comments:

Sparky said...

It might be more interesting to focus on particular issues and how they are or should be handled, rather than savaging an individual game. Anybody can make a bad decision in some particular context; what's interesting are problems that recur in many development cycles. These sorts of pathological defects in design typically result from an unresolved tension of goals. Motion discontinuities in fixed-camera games, for instance, speak to a trade-off between framing and control. What choices can be made in presentation and design to alleviate or sidestep these issues?

That type of question seems (to me, at any rate) to speak more to the heart of design than any dissection of an individual game. Of course, some particular designs involve decisions that are just plain bad, like the gamma issue you mention in Turok, and they should be called on it. The question is whether you want to make a blog about WTF is wrong with game X, or WTF is wrong with a particular kind of decision.

Anonymous said...

Your blog sucks ass and you know nothing about game design. Unless you work in the industry and ARE a game developer for a large company, don't even bother having a fuckin' blog on the net. It's not going to get you in the business and make you look smart.