Month: February 2009

Where I'm headed

Posted on by Steven

Here’s a brief overview of where I’m looking to go with my career.  I’m interested in game design: experimental and innovate game design.  My previous game design hobby work has been board, card, and party games.  I would like to add digital media to these genres and bridge the gap between the real world and digital media.  So many games are forcing you to hide in the corner and play only at your computer.  I want to make it so you can play those games out in the real world.

Okay, maybe not first person shooters.  But there are many games, such as the Adventure Racers (think Amazing Race) that could use digital media to make their games so much more with much less work (once the initial infrastructure is in place)  I want to leverage digital media and help people realize it in a way where it’s integrated with the real world and isn’t holing people up in virtual worlds while they let the real world go to wreck and ruin.  That’s important to me.

It all has to begin with casual games.  Because casual games reach the masses.  Previously casual games were board games and that’s one of the reasons that I study them so much (and because I love games that get you face-to-face with your opponent).

Global Game Jam

Posted on by Steven

Two weekends ago I participated in the Global Game Jam along with some fellow students at the MDM program. We all spent 48 hours working with other game design enthusiasts around the world making games.  You can check out the games at globalgamejam.org The team I forged with created a game called “Slast” using the Unity Engine.  For most of us on the team that meant we were learning an engine and creating a game at the same time.  I used the time to do some scripting for the spikes as well as getting a chance to step out of the programmer role and try some 3D Modelling and art.  It was quite fun and I liked designing it alongside the modeller who did the Giant Spider.  Keep in mind the name of our group when you play it as none of us were real artists on the team, but we still came up with something decent.

As far as Unity goes, I would definitely use it again sometime.  It is quite handy and has lots of features.  I’ve used the Blender open source game engine and would say that Unity is better than Blender since the interface is unified (a lot of the shortcut keys are similar to Maya) and it exports so well to many interfaces.

Hello, World!

Posted on by Steven

Hi! My name is Steven and I love games.   This is my first post so I figure I should mention the tagline under this blog’s title.  “Bring Lots of Games” that’s my philosophy to life (and parties).  The more you have the more selection you have to play until the wee hours of the morning.  Different games appeal to different people and I hope my blog will appeal to you.  I will have different posts of varying nature depending on what’s happening in my life and what I’m currently thinking about.

That’s it for a first post.  More coming soon.