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Slothy

Game Design, recent gaming achievements and other miscellaneousness!

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Well, it's been a while since I found the time for one of these. Ironically, I've been out of work since the beginning of the month, have nothing but time, and still I drag my heels.

But anyway, some recent happenings before I dive into the main thrust of this blog post. I finally got around to playing Assassin's Creed 2 after hearing Ubisoft had seen fit to ditch the absurd DRM they used in the PC version with the PC version of Brotherhood. My boycott of their games now ended, I picked up AC2 really cheap, plowed through the mind numbing monotony that was the last half of the original game and then proceeded to finish the second one over about three days. I haven't sat down to collect my thoughts on just why it is the better game, so a few quick things to mention for now: it's better in essentially every way I could possibly imagine a game improving on it's predecessor. Combat felt like less of a pain in the ass, Ezio seemed far more adept at predicting where I was trying to go while climbing or free running than Altair ever was, and the game seemed to pull off the whole hiding in plain sight aspect far better than the original since you could blend in with almost any group of people anywhere. The characters also stood out as being much more likable and entertaining, even if they do have a habit of never being seen again until the final moments of the game. I also have to commend the level design as each city was a joy to explore and seemed to have it's own personality, unlike the cities in the first game which all looked pretty much the same but a different shade of drab.

I've also taken up Starcraft 2 again now that I have some free time. I just happened to watch a few matches on the MLG website and I was basically hooked again. I also stumbled upon a site which looks at replays and the strategies being used currently which you can find here: Day[9]TV

Very cool stuff and very helpful. I've only played a handful of matches already but pretty much everything about my play is far better than when I was playing last summer/fall and the game was still relatively new. Build orders, knowing which units excel in different situations, and even figuring out what the hell an opponent is doing when I scout them early are all things I'm improving at thanks in large part to that series and it's quite enjoyable to learn about how the game has developed competitively over the last year or so and quite satisfying to see some fairly rapid development in my own abilities playing it.

Finally, a small update regarding the strategy game I've been designing which I've blogged about previously. For a long while I was too busy to really keep the interest up, and to some extent, I wasn't totally satisfied with where the design was going and wasn't quite sure where to take it from there. Since then I've decided on a direction I want to explore with the game mechanics. I've already jotted down quite a few thoughts on new gameplay systems and re-worked units and abilities. In some respects it will end up being more complex, but also simplified in others as I've completely tossed the old economic system in the game in favour of an idea that isn't really anything new, but is much simpler, and will simultaneously get around the difficulty that my friend and I had trying to balance an economy system for shorter games. A bit of a side benefit is that stalemates should be impossible as well.

I'm hoping to talk more about it before too long. For now, my friend is actually out west for who knows how long living in the woods of British Columbia, so testing my design will be somewhat difficult by myself. One thing I am looking into is possibly prototyping it in the Starcraft 2 level editor. Many of the things I need to be able to do in the game I know it already can, but there are some big ones I'm not sure of. I also need to take a good look at their EULA to make sure that I don't basically give them the rights to whatever I make with it if I post it on Battlenet, which if I'm not mistaken I think you have to do with custom maps to even play them. Even if it said that was the case there would still be ways for me to make it that get around that since you can't really copyright game mechanics after all. It's a very powerful tool though and one which, if it can do what I need it to, would make prototyping and playtesting much easier in these early stages once I learn to use it.

So that about wraps up this blog post. I've actually got a series of posts I plan on getting to in the next few days. When I was packing up my stuff while cleaning out my desk at work I found some notes I had made probably back in January regarding difficulty in games which I wanted to make a few posts about, specifically regarding a players tolerance for failure in a game and how to make failure less of the pain in the ass it can sometimes be. I'll likely try to get the first one up tomorrow. After that I'll be off to my parents for the weekend while my landlord does some renovations to our bathroom.
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Personal Life , Video Games

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