Posts Tagged ‘game mechanics’

Meet the users: Playtest Session at Baltan

Wednesday, October 13th, 2010

Today was a crucial and quite scary step for the project: playtesting.
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NIMk sprint day 3

Wednesday, September 1st, 2010

Today we worked on the map and quests situated at the beginning of the game. To prevent spoilers the words are blurred. We continued working with post-its, they are extremely handy during a brainstorm in which everything changes every 2 minutes. The whole map is color coded, blue for locations, green for situation, yellow for actions and pink for inventory (items, coins, etc.). The arrows and dotted lines are mostly there to confuse cause we kept moving notes around.

Zone II on post-its

At 16.00 we presented Naked on Pluto to the crew of NIMk and we were very happy Angela Plohman from BALTAN Laboratories came to join us (we’ll be at BALTAN in October for the next sprint). We discussed the project in its current state, and talked about the steps in development we’ve taken so far, the biggest problems we’ve encountered and the next steps. Explaining these things at this stage of the project was quite a test for us. We’ve been submerged in the game’s logic for 3 days now, and we’re starting to loose our sense of reality ever so slightly…

Can games change the world? Busting through to reality versus Escapism

Monday, July 19th, 2010

Online games are getting more and more popular and game mechanics are being applied everywhere in an attempt to trigger the same eager enthusiasm to participate in something, as gamers experience during gameplay. I’ve recently seen 2 talks that explore this phenomenon: Jesse Schell’s talk at DICE 2010, and Jane McGonigal’s talk at TED. Both talks touch upon the same topic, the power of games to change our (real world) behaviour, but take an opposite approach, here’s a short analysis:

Schell talks about the future of game design as it invades the real world. He analyses the immense success of Facebook games such as Farmville and Mafia wars. What do they have in common? (more…)