Search

Archive for the 'Game Design' Category

Is Single-Player Gaming Dead?

Posted by GBGames on December 4th, 2009

Back in October, Raph Koster wrote about a PC World interview with the lead designer of Dragon Age, a major single-player game from Bioware. Mike Laidlaw on single-player games talks about the idea of creating such games today, when games such as World of Warcraft and even Facebook games such as FarmVille dominate by leveraging [...]

Marketing Is More Important Than Product Quality

Posted by GBGames on November 19th, 2009

GamesIndustry.biz recently published a post called Marketing influences game revenue three times more than high scores. Research has shown that the belief that game reviews have an impact on the sales of a game is a false one.
Or at least a poor quality game with big marketing dollars behind it will sell much more [...]

EA Acquires Major Facebook Game Developer

Posted by GBGames on November 13th, 2009

Facebook has grown to be a powerful social networking force to be reckoned with, and game developers who have taken advantage of the popularity are pulling in plenty of money through ads, virtual good sales, and exposure. And now, EA purchased PlayFish, the biggest publisher of social games on Facebook, for about $400 million.
So [...]

Generating Buzz for Indie Games

Posted by GBGames on October 21st, 2009

Paul Taylor of Mode 7 Games, creators of Determinance, wrote an article for Gamasutra called Building Buzz for Indie Games which I think ties in and expands upon Christopher M. Park’s advice for aspiring indies that I wrote about last week.
He starts by emphasizing marketing, quoting Tim O’Reilly’s message that obscurity is a bigger problem [...]

Advice for Aspiring Indies

Posted by GBGames on October 16th, 2009

Back in August, Christopher M. Park of Arcen Games gave advice for aspiring indie game developers.
He has a number of observations after releasing his first game, A.I. Wars, and my favorite part is categorizing what class of indie game you might have your hands on. He separates them into three main groups: Indie Darlings, [...]

Randomness in Game Design

Posted by GBGames on September 29th, 2009

Greg Costikyan gave a presentation at GDC Austin ‘09 titled “Randomness: Blight or Bane?”.
It’s a long post to read, but I like how this one is actually readable. Most presentations end up online as slideshows only. Without the speaker there, the context of a slide is also missing, and it is hard to [...]

LD#15: Mineral Miner Post-mortem

Posted by GBGames on September 17th, 2009

Ludum Dare #15 is over, and I already wrote that the results are in. Aside from placing well in Community, which shows how much I love participating in LD48, I also saw my overall ranking come in at around the 40 percentile. I was ranked #63, which sounds good, but there were a number [...]

LD#15 Results Are In!

Posted by GBGames on September 14th, 2009

It’s 2 weeks later, and Ludum Dare #15 is officially over. The results are in, and I placed 5th…in the Community category. Unfortunately there was no food category this time around, or I could have gotten the gold in that one. B-)
Seriously, congratulations to the makers of the top ten overall entries! The #1 overall [...]

LD#15: Mineral Miner for Windows

Posted by GBGames on August 31st, 2009

If you Windows users were waiting patiently for a version of the game you could play, check out my final entry post. I’ve uploaded a Windows version of Mineral Miner. Just unzip and run caverngame.exe. Make sure to read the instructions first, since I didn’t get a chance to add it in-game:
Controls:
Use the arrow keys [...]

LD#15: My Time Lapse

Posted by GBGames on August 30th, 2009