Thursday, February 22, 2007

Offtopic

This is quite offtopic, but quite good.

The Official God FAQ.

Simplicity is a virtue. There's probably some tie-in to game design I could put here, but I'll leave it at that.

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Singleplayer/Multiplayer

The Super Smash Brothers games are quite good. They've got a highly engaging single player mode and an excellent multiplayer mode, suitable both for random wacky play and highly competitive play. However, the competitive play can be annoying to set up. If you're running a tournament in your dorm, someone has to have a save file with all the competitive levels and all the characters unlocked for multiplayer gaming.
Why should this even be necessary?
A game should be ready to play multiplayer out of the box - all the characters/levels available in a fighting game, all the tracks/cars available in a racing game, etc.
Consider this scenario: a college student has bought SSB:M and wants to host a tournament. He has to sit there for a long time to try to get all the characters and competitive levels unlocked before the tournament. What is the point of this?
Singleplayer mode should unlock singleplayer bonuses, or bonuses that don't affect gameplay (extra color costumes for the characters, for instance), but every single game should have the full multiplayer experience available out of the box.
There's no reason for them not to.

Monday, February 5, 2007

Explanation

Yeah, I warned about this in the first post. I haven't posted anything in a while, and won't until this weekend or early next week due to school- I've got 3 tests later this week and have other obligations as well. There are a couple things I've been wanting to discuss, especially in the game design area.