Adding real-world architecture to your game has a ton of benefits. It can set the mood, add authenticity, and give an emotional punch to your game. Plus, and let’s be honest with ourselves here, it’s a heck of a lot easier to base your game on a real place than to come up with something from scratch. So if I’m a game designer and I don’t want to get sued, pretty soon I’m going to ask myself: Can I include a famous location (like Times Square) or a historical building (like the Taj Mahal) in my game? Do I...
read moreThis is most likely just the first of many posts I’ll write on the MDA, or Mechanics-Dynamics-Aesthetics, framework. MDA isn’t a method or set of rules for designing games. It’s a way of breaking down game design into discrete parts, and looking at how those parts interact. The end goal is to help developers go from mechanics (how the game works) all the way to aesthetics (how the player experiences the game). By doing so, developers can focus on creating a game that is engaging for the player on multiple emotional...
read moreAs I posted previously, this semester I’m teaching a new course in video game design and production at the University of Colorado. We have a great group of students, and they’ve just finished putting together their first game, of two that they’ll make in the course. These games were developed by students of CSCI 4830-008, working in teams of two. This is the first of two games they’ll be making this semester in the Unity game engine. They were asked to create a 3-5 minute adventure / scavenger hunt game, where the...
read moreJust wanted to announce that I’ll be teaching a course on video game design and production over at the University of Colorado, starting tomorrow. We’re going to be using Unity and covering all of the basics: materials, terrain, animations, particle systems, programming, physics, etc. It’ll be a design-based course, with the students creating two games over the course of the semester. You can check out the course outline...
read moreA showcase of screen captures from some of our past and current projects. You’ll find a variety of projects here: games, simulations and data visualizations. Our older projects were all in Second Life – our newer work is mainly with the Unity game engine. A number of these screenshots were taken during the making of the game, so they may lack polish, especially in the on-screen UI elements. Click an image preview to view it full-size. TerraViz An experiment: Can we use a game engine to visualize scientific data? TerraViz is...
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