I was flying from Seattle into Virginia yesterday and while two babies behind me were competing to see who could scream louder and kick the seat in front of them harder, and I was trying to make sense of the on-flight movie, 500 Days of Summer, I came upon an interesting thought. It might sound completely unrelated but they link together somewhat. The parents of each child were giving the kids milk to quiet the kids down and telling them how good they were every chance possible between the screaming if any pause lasted for longer than 5 seconds and their methods for positive feedback to the kids seemed to me to only encourage further screaming to receive what they want. From the vibe of all passengers in the seats in front of them in row 32, I felt I was definitely not the only one. And then this movie...
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Here's an interesting article on Gamasutra about Achievements that I think is a must-read for game designers: Achievement Design 101 Every game on the Xbox 360 (with the exception of Xbox LIVE Indie Games) ships with achievements and games have used this functionality in many ways to both their benefit and their detriment. For example, Avatar The Last Airbender is known for allowing you to add 1000 points to your total gamerscore within a couple of minutes while Guitar Hero has its 'hardest-song-on-expert' achievements like Through the Fire and Flames, in which most people have trouble getting past the first 2 seconds of the song. Achievements have added an interesting dynamic to games and now many other games like World of Warcraft have adopted a quantifiable scoring system along with Sony's Playstation 3 Trophy system and Steam's PC game achievements. For some, it's even been a reason to purchase a game for a specific platform over another....
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I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving! My brother, Daniel, and I've been busy working on the our game and have been going through a couple of gameplay prototypes. We've gone through several iterations of gameplay involving battery powered robots and the storyline, and now we feel comfortable with our latest gameplay idea. Our next milestone is end of December so look for more updates about the game around then. For now, I thought we would share another screenshot, this time our Level Editor:
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