Hey guys! Remember me?

It's been a while since I last posted anything here. That's because I've had another project rolling, which is Community Managing at Epic Games Poland (People Can Fly) and I can FINALLY announce my new blog: PCF's official blog: THE blog:

http://www.peoplecanfly.com/blog/

So please, everyone who used to read this blog and maybe still have me in the RSS-reader; please follow me on the PCF-blog. It's gonna be kick ass!

Thank you.

Things are going well for this blog-site-thingy, so why not stop while I'm ahead?

Due to several circumstances, of which most of them are very positive in fact, I'll be closing the site. All the current posts will remain and I'll leave the commenting system online, but there will be no more Game Design posts in any foreseeable future.

Back in 2008 I started this site as a way to think out loud about my passion for game design and it has helped me in many ways. Because of having a "pressure" of having to write posts, I've been constantly stimulated to have an analytical mindset to everything and to actually organize my thoughts to be able to convey them. This techinique, intentional or not, has worked wonders and I think I've "learned" more during this time than I would have if I hadn't run this site at the same time.

During my first month I had 19 unique visitors... The following month I had 404. By now I have more than 10 times that, and considering it's a one man show about someone who's just writing whatever he feels like, I'm satisfied.

In fact, I've even been surprised when I've been meeting people in the industry and they've actually read my blog and enjoyed it. I'm not saying they've learned from it because I don't know.

I actually have a long list with topics I wanted to write about, and some drafts with almost finished texts, but I guess they'll have to be my little secrets.

But as mentioned, this is the season finale. I can't go into much detail at the moment, but there are good reasons for me to not continue doing this.

What I really want right now is to thank each and every reader during this time. You've been what's been motivating me to write and it's resulted in my Level Up!

Thank you!

I hope to be seeing you again, somewhere, sometime. Dun dun dunnn!

Or is it, "Press Start to Continue"?

First a quick description of the title "level designer". You never know what a level designer does at a company untill you ask. All you know is that it's level creation related.

The thing is, at some companies a level designer does everything in regards to creating a level. They plan the design, create the graphics and implements the layout and gameplay scripting. At another company, there are different people for scripting and creating the actual game worl. It's most common to have dedicated graphics artists to make the art as well.

Anyway, what I wanted to discuss was the role of the designing producer. Some large companies merge the roles of producer and the role of game designer.

Producer:

• Makes sure stuff are made in time.
• Keeps track of the big picture.
• Communicates with all disciplines (design, code, art, etc.)
• Says: No, we can't implement that, it'll take too much time!

Designer:

• Handles the creative imagination part of the game.
• Keeps track of the big picture.
• Communicates with all disciplines (design, code, art, etc.)
• Says: We must do this, it's gonna make for a much better game!

So, by looking at my lists of what I think they do, we can see that they both share two critical tasks. They both keep track of the game as a whole and they both must talk to everyone, to make sure things are running smoothly and act depending on the status.

With this in mind, it would be wise to have the multi-class Designing Producer guy, because you don't have to worry about the communication between producer and designer and you might need less people.

The fact that the producer keeps track of the time and the designer handling the creativity doesn't necessarily work against each other, so no problem there.

But here's the problem, the last point of each role. The producers main job is to say no to doing things because it cost time and money, while the designer must push for the good stuff and really argument for having them made to create the best game possible. This "battle" is the constant struggle of measuring the "bang for the buck". Usually, the producer has the final say.

By now, one would think that then of course, you can't have a designing producer because it defeats the whole purpose of the producer and the game will never be finished in time, or finished at all, because the designer will always want to do more stuff and iterate them to make them better.

Hi, I'm a Producer

And here it is, at last, my opinion. The opinion that shapes worlds, the opinion that cures cancer and make blind people see again. I personally, am not too fond of the designing producer idea overall. However, I do think it works if, and this is a big if, you can find the right people for it. I think it requires very skilled people who are very honest with themself and with the project.

A designing producer can save a massive amount of time, because they can make decisions on the fly. The discussions and bickering between designer and producer can be held inside the head within a few minutes instead of out loud for several hours or days.

The issue at hand is that it's incredibly hard not to be more of one than the other. Me for example have often had the role of designing producer during many projects at the Game Development at the University as well as during the spare time. I'd say I do a decent job, but there are times I'm way too much of a designer and other times when I'm way too much of a producer.

Okay, so I've blah blah blah'ed quite a bit now. Summary; in general I think it's not a wise choice to have the designing producer, but if, IF, the right person assumes the role, it's a very good thing.

It has support for graphics, sound effects, triggers, mouse clicks, timing and text as output well as input. With all those tools, you should really be able to do something!

So I just got up again, it's the middle of the night and I've been googling. There are actually quite a few educational PowerPoint games out there but they all seem to... Suck. Hard. Big time. That's too bad really. But one could ask, why make a "game" in PowerPoint when there's Flash, etc. My answer is; because of the fun of it and because it's possible.

I'm gonna prototype!

Update: 45 minutes later and I got a prototype "up and running". It's just a proof of concept, but it does what it's supposed to. You can click on the door, the lock, the key and the window with the ladder. You can climb out, get the key and unlock the door. Feel free to try it. Nothing fancy. I'm happy, maybe I can finally get some sleep.

Download The Castle Game

http://arcadeberg.com/files/2010/05/The-Castle-Game.pptx (16/5/2010)

Actual in-game screenshot. No post processing!

http://www.gametrailers.com/game/bulletstorm/13025

And:

This is some good shit, lemme tell you!

http://www.wolfire.com/humble (9/5/2010)

It's a bundle of cross-platform indie-games that you get for... Whatever you feel is reasonable. You pay what you want. It's just that easy. I didn't pay $80, but I paid something. You get to chose where the money goes, and I chose that everything should go to the developers.

It's a very interesting "business model".

Sorry, no time to write anything more. Just took a few bookshelfs apart and now it's time to pack a few boxes. I hate this part...

So basically, if you haven't seen Kick-Ass yet:

1. You should.
2. You might not want to read this post if you don't like spoilers.

Something that seems to be more and more common nowadays is to have the traileres for movies to be different from the actual movie in one way or another.

For example; some movie trailers for Inglourious Basters (best movie of 2009 IMHO FYI) had scenes in them that weren't in the movie. But the real kicker is Kick-Ass.

SPOILER ALERT

The trailers keeps presenting the character "Red Mist" as one of the many heroes in the movie while in the actual movie, he's a villain.

This was brilliant!

The trailers were still good enough for making me want to see the movie and once in the theatre I had no idea what was gonna happen because of the skewed perspective I'd previously been fed with.

There were also some other scenes that they'd changed the order of making it seem like other scenarios than they actually were, like when "the girl" said that she would definately sleep with Kick-Ass. The trailer makes it look like she doesn't know who he really is, while in the movie she does and it's a flirt with him. (That scene is not included in the embedded trailer.)

SPOILER END

So here's my question:

Can we do this with video game trailers as well? If so, would it be "okay" or would the consumers get angry? And can we only do it with the story and presentation, or can we skew the gameplay a bit as well, making it look more like an adventure game when it's really all about tearing limbs from enemies while bathing in blood?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1250777/

There was a sort of parade in Gothenburg yesterday where students made their carts and stuff and even though most of it was utter crap, there were some things that really made me smile; like seeing Luigi driving in Mario Kart and giants goombas.

Maybe we can't count students as the general public, but I still enjoy how the media grows and how almost everyone, young as well as old ones enjoyed and understood most of it.

I wanted to jump it!

Even some Farmville-references were there.

CHECK YOUR SPELLING!

Depending on the environment you work in, different amounts of text input is needed to make things work. For the designer it can be none existing because everything is drag 'n drop, or it can be mid-range and requires you to enter some asset names and stuff or it can be "extreme" and require you to do actual text scriping/coding.

Pretty much regardless of the environment, and regardless of your position, you should try and make sure to spell things correctly, and at very least, always spell it the same way.

If members of the development team are required to write the same thing as someone else it's an must that they use the same system, which is preferably correctly spelled English.

If there are problems with having the entire team spell things the same way, you can lose countless time on trouble shooting why things aren't working.

It's spelled platform, not plattform. If you're gonna write plattform, at least do it all the time. And make sure not to be sloppy and write plattfrom. If you're unsure if it's spelled movable or moveable, look it up or chose one and stick by it.

As I said, it may sound obvious but then prove it by never making that misstake and you'll make the world a better place.

Thanks in advance.

Bet I have several spelling errors in this post...

Every day after work I start going trough my stuff (read: shit I've collected over the years), keeping some, throwing some away, trying to sell some of it and packing the rest. I would be enjoying the whole thing a whole lot more if there was a system monitoring my choices and giving me points for every item I donate to the poor, etc.

Heck, if there was such a system, I wouldn't let my place turn into the mess it has in the first place!

It's all about the Theory of Fun which I link a video about in:
http://arcadeberg.com/causerie/highscore-hurts/ (26/4/2010)

And talking about games and the real life working together, I found this today on Gamasutra. There's a company that's launching a thingymajing for the NDS that's suppose to help people work hard on handling their diabetes. Since I'm a diabetic I find this very interesting. It's not something I'll use, but it's interesting nonetheless.

[...]DIDGET converts blood glucose test results into reward points.

Players can redeem these points to unlock new levels, minigames, and items[...]

- http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/28234/Bayer_Launches_Diabetes_Management_Game_for_Nintendo_DS.php

Here's the problem I see with this. The games unlocked in this package are probably gonna... Well... Suck... Hard... So very, very hard. I really hope I'm wrong.

Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that in a product like this you really have to create a strong incentive to actually wanting to unlock more stuff and I'm not sure they can do that. Great idea otherwise though.

But being a diabetic is not the only reason why I found this interesting. Dun dun dunnn! Stay tuned!

Captain Novolin; an old SNES-game about Diabetes.