Balancing Act Over the past couple of years I have been working on character-based competitive games. These are the kind of games where the word “balance” is repeated ad nauseam. As a (somewhat) competitive fighting game player myself, I have strived tirelessly to make our games as balanced as possible. I have created complex tables to value character abilities, poured over win/loss […]
Project Exonaut CN Games Studio’s newest game, Project Exonaut, has launched! This is the biggest game our studio has ever built. This is our first 3D game as well, though the gameplay is in 2D. If you played our previous shooter, Ben 10 Bounty Hunters, you may recognize the core gameplay but Exonaut is amped […]
This morning I read that my friend Steve Stamatiadis’s game studio, Krome, is closing. I met Steve through Livejournal back in maybe 2000. We finally got to meet and hang out A-Kon in Dallas. We immediately shunned everyone else (including my wife) to talk about video games for 3 days straight. Him, the working professional […]
Austin GDC was last week and it was great. I haven’t been to a conference in 2 years and I have never been to Austin so I was very much looking forward to the trip. Sessions The longer you go to conferences, the less sessions you go to. At least that’s how most people approach […]
TKO Update Last week there was a huge update for TKO. To support the Ben 10 10/10/10 promotion, we made 4 Ben 10 Ultimate Aliens (Rath, Armadrillo, Ultimate Echo Echo, Ultimate Big Chill) and unlocked Ultimate Humungousaur, who previously required a player to be logged in a have a certain number of wins to play. […]
Evolution has provided life on Earth with advantageous behaviors. Sometimes these behaviors that are beneficial in most situations can lead to certain death in others. For example, earthworms sense vibrations in the soil around them and quickly head towards this surface. This allows them to evade their most deadly predators, moles. However, when it rains […]
I have been involved with a number of educational institutions that have created game design curriculum in recent years. I have seen a dependency on game design documents (GDD) as the hammer of game design eduction. As if having a GDD written, regardless of the quality of its content, has given a student what they […]
Game-grape Obviously, gaming is popular. As a result people want to leverage the power of game design in whatever product they might have. You have a social site? Add some XP bars and it’s a game-like social site! You got a sports news site? Add some missions and it’s a game-like sports news site! Game […]
I believe it was Chris Crawford who pioneered the ideas of “verbs” in game design. The idea is this, the more verbs in your game design, the more things the player can do. Unfortunately many, many game designs are just “Dodge X and collect Y.” This is especially true of Flash games. If you hold […]
What TO-DO Managing a game project is a daunting task. Contrary to what you may have heard, it’s not simply saying the word “SCRUMM” 4oo times a day. The mechanations of managing a large game project are herculean and would quite frankly grind me to chum in its gears. However, I have a method for […]