header / logo - Tom Level Designs (Collaboration - Tom, Brian, Mariam) Growth Production Docs (Tom) - Download Growth project schedule Download Growth_workflow Other Random SWFs (Tom) - Download LightSourceOn Download LightSourceOff Download Hellz_yeah Download Foobie_run_left Continue reading

To be honest, I have very mixed feelings about our game and development process. Things did not go as planned and because of certain factors, we were unable to make the final product as polished or as deep as I would've liked. However, I did learn a lot about the game design process itself, especially when working with small groups. The hardest thing for me in this environment was to shift from a production mode I was familiar with from my time working at a professional studio to this less formal setup. At the studio, I had been used to... Continue reading

If a gamer familiar with World of Warcraft (WoW) jumped into the world of There.com (There), they would feel instantly lost, much like I was the first time logging in to There. One of the obvious familiar features of WoW missing from There is the large, yellow exclamation point above an npcs head, which instantly grabs a players attention and starts them on their first quest. There has none of this, and while this main seem like a small difference, it reflects a complete difference in the way the two worlds are designed. In Wow the player is primarily motivated... Continue reading

The game Borderlands, released at the end of October, includes some wonderful innovations. The game combines first-person-shooter elements with role-playing elements to create a gaming experience that's fresh and unique. The cell-shaded art style makes the game stand out visually. Every gun in the game is randomly-generated - a first for video game - offering the player thousands of different combinations of weaponry. The game is also one of the only shooters to implement a working four-player cooperative experience, which allows four people to play through entire game at the same time. While this experience is familiar to MMOs, it's... Continue reading

Most people, when asking how a game ended, will often ask “Who won?” In the tradition of sports and many board games, this is the ultimate goal: to determine a winner and loser. But what happens if this is not or cannot be the case? What if players at the end of game leave on equal footing and the question of “Who won?” becomes meaningless? I will attempt to examine this concept through three non-traditional game examples, two drawn from the New Games movement and one drawn from the Fluxist movement. For my first example, I will refer to the... Continue reading

Linley's Dungeon Crawl (known more simply as Crawl) is a roguelike game first released to the public in 1997. While this is a relatively late release date, the game is derived from a long series of similar games (of which the most popular is probably Nethack) that span almost two decades back to the genre's namesake of Rogue, released in 1980. These games are loosely based on Dungeons and Dragons and typically share a number of common features, such as randomly generated dungeons, turn-based combat, and permanent death (there are no checkpoints or reloading - when you die, the game's... Continue reading

Chess first revealed itself as a component of German culture in the late 990s. Around this time, a German-speaking monk at the Einsiedeln Monastery in Switzerland wrote “Verses on Chess.” In addition to detailing the rules of the game, the monk also established that the game was not one of chance, in an attempt to prevent any religious opposition (Yalom 16). This text demonstrates that although chess had become popular, the Church still had serious concerns about the game. The monk had to offer a preemptive defense against religious objections. The monastery of Eisiedeln had strong ties to the Germanic... Continue reading