I like to point out the following thread in the Indie Gamer.com forums. It’s about the current state of the indie industry:

http://forums.indiegamer.com/showthread.php?t=11302

i also like to take the opportunity to point out, that managing the german “free” unterhaltungs software forum together with some others at www.usf.de, i really love the forums at indiegamer. i often hate the feeling and level of talks we germans have in the usf or other official german game-dev / indie discussion boards.

the level of quality people (quality in mind, kindness and being able to express their thoughts in a usefull manner) in this forum is realy high.

i think i will try to use this game design scrapbook “page” for further posting comments with interestint threads in the indiegamer (or similiar) forums.

A question that bugs me is: why should we be making games? What are games good for? Should we be making games at all? I think this question is fundamental for game design. After all games could be just a waste of time for game designers and players. The relevance and value our your work as a game designers is directly related to how well and convincing we are able to answer this simple question. “Because it is fun and entertaining” is not an answer, mind you, just like the reason for why food is important is not just “because it tastes good”.

Recently, I saw this Will Wright presentation of Spore at TED. I guess we have all seen Spore already so it’s not that big deal. However, what I find extremely important is what Will says about WHY he is doing Spore.

To quote him from 12:16 in the Video:

(…) we actually mapping, using the game to remap our intuition. It’s almost like in the same way telescope or a microscope recalibrates your eyesight. I think computer simulations can recalibrate your instinct across vast scales both, space and time.

I like that point of view although I think you can break it down even further: Continue reading “What are games good for?”

Recently, Daniel Cook aka Danc from Lost Garden wrote another essay on Gamasutra. It is very interesting. Danc compares Game Design to alchemy and urges to develop a more systematic approach akin to chemistry. I certainly agree that we need to work on a theory of game design. However I am a bit concerned that the model he proposes might have some flaws. Here is a list of comments on his essay:

Continue reading “Critique: The Chemistry of Game Design”

Yet, another indie game. This one is very short and quite nice. It is called Sprout and made by Jeff Nusz. It is about the journey of a seed. Quite creative!

I’m fond of all the little sound effects and the parallax scrolling. Gameplay-wise I like how you even get new abilities and how effectively it enriches the experience. It’s almost Metroid in a nutshell. My only remark would be that there is not much game here. It’s a series of very few and very simple choices. Compared to that, there is a lot graphics and sound effects involved. Little interactivity, lots of assets. It seems a bit inefficient and unbalanced.

Still, it’s short, innovative and I enjoyed it very much.

5 hours into the game (yeah I know. 5 hours in almost a week is not much. Am I a casual now?)

Anyway, so far I find the pacing a little odd. After a couple of short, introductory quests in and around the first big city (can’t remember the name), I commenced a moderately long quest (long for the early phase I’m still in).

Although the game warned me that I couldn’t go back for a while, I find it strange that Squarenix decided to put such a part at this point in game. During this quest I’m still in, there’s no possibility to buy new stuff, making all the License Points pretty much useless – unless you knew what upgrades you want beforehand. And asking uninformed decisions from the player is never a good idea. But even if I knew, i didn’t have enough money, plus leveling/saving was not an option so early on.

Short explanation on how the License system works. In order to upgrade, you need to 1) own the object to use and 2) have enough LPs to activate the corresponding tile on the License Board. You need to monetary buy magic spells, weapons, equipments etc in a shop (or find them in treasure boxes), then buy the “right” to use it on the License Board.

In RPGs it is essential to upgrade in a certain rhythm (today, the genre is defined not by playing out personalities of characters, but by having multiple, growing stats) and especially in the early phase when the player needs low hanging fruits, and also to better grasp the concept of License board and gambit. In the last 2 or so hours, I didn’t have any meaningful new growth.

I’m guessing that the learning phase for the License Board is over when I entered this first long quest. During this quest I got introduced to the Gambit System. Maybe the game is trying to keep the Licensing low right now so the player can concentrate on the Gambit. But the Gambit options so far are few and so there wasn’t much to accommodate to.

Fighting has been rather arbitary, mainly due to the lack of new skills. All I can do now is to physical attack the hell out of enemies. Trading hitpoints, no strategies, even with bosses. The only difference would be: I needed to manually heal and revive my group.

Maybe a couple of nice words: Top notch production value. Nice cinematography and just stunning graphics for the 7 year old PS2. But this you heard enough from your other gaming sources.