malvasia bianca

Pro guitar mode in Rock Band 3 turns out to be totally fascinating: I’m still going through the songs on Easy, and I’m amazed at how much there is to learn and think about even on that setting. In particular, last weekend I decided that I would stop looking at my left hand while playing […]

I recently played through Loom along with the Vintage Game Club, and I wished I had more to say about it. It’s a point-and-click adventure game; instead of accumulating an inventory of items to use, however, you accumulate an inventory of tunes. Which is a pleasant change of pace, and helped make the puzzle solutions […]

Now that my Squier and MIDI adapter have arrived, I’m starting on the Pro Guitar mode for Rock Band 3. I’m mostly going to be blogging about it on my gaming experiences blog, but I figure I should mention it here in case somebody was curious to read about it but was put off from […]

One of the side effects of attending GDC last week was that I spent a lot of time in my car; not my favorite place, but at least I got to catch up with podcasts. In particular, I’m glad that I had time to listen to the three part Critical Distance “2010 in Review” podcast: […]

In a role-playing game, you customize your character’s abilities, refining that customization as the game progresses. Your character will typically have a class (fighter, mage, priest, rogue, etc.), which you pick at the start of the game and generally doesn’t change; this sets broad limits of your character’s abilities. You also typically have cross-class attributes […]

The Game Design of Starcraft II: Designing an E-Sport Hybrid Orchestration – Scoring Need for Speed The Game Design Challenge 2011: Bigger than Jesus An Apology for Roger Ebert Message Queuing on a Large Scale: IMVU’s Stateful Event Architecture 9:30am–10:30am: “The Game Design of Starcraft II: Designing an E-Sport”, by Dustin Browder 2005. Dawn of […]

I broke two talks out to their own posts: “Classic Game Postmortem – Out of This World/Another World“, by Eric Chahi “One Falls for Each of Us: The Prototyping of Tragedy”, by Brenda Brathwaite The rest: “Biofeedback in Gameplay: How Valve Measures Physiology to Enhance Gaming Experience”, by Mike Ambinder “No Freaking Respect! Social Game […]

Thursday 4:30pm–5:30pm: “One Falls for Each of Us: The Prototyping of Tragedy”, by Brenda Brathwaite My favorite talk of the conference, or indeed any GDC that I’ve been to. Brenda said that she now gets introduced as somebody who makes games that make you cry; I can attest that she gives talks that make you […]

Thursday 9:00am–10:00am: “Classic Game Postmortem – Out of This World/Another World“, by Eric Chahi This was a look back at the making of Another World. Overview of the creative process. Freedom under constraint: an improvisation process. Initial context. July 1989, the Amiga era. He’s 22 years old, but had written a lot of games; taken […]

I’ve broken out two of today’s talks into their own posts: Clint Hocking on “Dynamics: The State of the Art” Jason Booth and Sylvain Dubrofsky on “Prototype Through Production: Pro Guitar in Rock Band 3“ The rest: “Video Games Turn 25: A Historical Perspective and Vision for the Future”, by Satoru Iwata “GDC Microtalks 2011” […]

Wednesday, 1:30pm–2:30pm: “Prototype Through Production: Pro Guitar in Rock Band 3“, by Jason Booth and Sylvain Dubrofsky The slides are available online. In 2008: music games were a big thing, needed to innovate. Harmonix has this idea of The One Question that they focus work on a game around. For Guitar Hero: is it rock? […]

The entire day posts are getting too long‐Monday’s was almost 4000 words—so I’m going to break talks I particularly liked out into separate posts. Wednesday 10:30am–11:30am: “Dynamics: The State of the Art”, by Clint Hocking This is my favorite talk of the conference so far; I really hope he posts his slide deck and more […]

City of Wonder: Postmortem Humanities Unlocked: The Value of Liberal Arts for Your Game Design Program We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Badges: How to Re-invent Reality Without Gamification Intuition vs Metrics: How Social Game Design Has Evolved Rapid-Fire Indies 10:00am–11:00am: “City of Wonder: Postmortem”, by Troy Whitlock and Scott Jon Siegel Actually, only Scott spoke, […]

This year, unlike previous years, I’m taking notes in my iPad instead of in my notebook. That means that I can generally read my notes, which is good; but it also increases my tendency to just write down slides with minimal commentary, editing, or even formatting. (And I’m sure that amusing iPad autocorrects will slip […]

For all you stalkers out there, here’s my best guess at my GDC 2011 schedule. And clearly I should bring snacks, it’s not at all clear that I’ll be able to eat lunch on Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday… Please say hi if you’re there and run into me! Monday 10:00am: “Creating Your Building Blocks: Modular […]

Ben’s latest post starts with a lament on the lack of blogging about multiplayer games (which I agree with; I hope Ashelia resurrects Hellmode soon, she had some great posts on multiplayer gaming), and then continues with (competitive) multiplayer gaming has been hard to talk about unless you are something akin to a top-tier player. […]

Last month, it seemed like most of my twitter feed (especially the game developers in it!) was playing Game Dev Story, so I decided to give it a try last week. And it’s certainly addictive; I spent more time playing it than I’d like to admit, and while I was getting a little bored with […]

I wanted to like the iPhone version of Noby Noby Boy. Not out of any particular fondness for the PS3 version, but because I think Katamari Damacy is one of the most wonderful games of all time. Sadly, I do not find either variant of Noby Noby Boy to be one of the most wonderful […]

So. Dragon Age: Origins. I’m a pretty big BioWare fan, though more on their action RPG side: Jade Empire was the game where I fell in love with them, and of their two recent games, it’s not due to chance that I played Mass Effect 2 first. But I enjoy their games in general, and […]

I’ve been trying to figure out my reactions to Minecraft recently, and to that end I thought writing down some of my experiences would be useful. Useful to me, that is; quite possibly boring to y’all! So I decided to create another blog for that purpose, and to expand the purpose slightly to include narration […]