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Sunday 11 April 2010

Gamasutra Article

I've just noticed that I never posted a link to my Gamasutra Article up here on the blog...

So a little late, here's a link...


http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4024/examining_game_pace_how_.php

Can you do Tragedy in Games?

We had a rather protracted debate about whether you could do a proper tragedy in game stories - i.e. Romeo and Juliet.

My opinion is that you can do elements of tragedy, perhaps a bittersweet ending or tragedy that affects NPCs, but you just cannot do a tragic story for the main character successfully. Why?

It is my firm belief that you will set the player up for failure if you do this. They "win" the game, but the outcome is a negative one - effectively they lose. I've seen this in a couple of games - situations where you lose no matter what you do - the result is usually extreme player frustration and an overwhelming sense of having no real impact in the game world (and in turn pulling you out of any sense if immersion).

The response from nearly everyone I spoke to is that games have to overcome the childish notion of winning if narrative is to progress. I don't see any real logic in this. Tragedy does not instantly make narrative better than a story with a positive outcome. You can also still deal with tragic elements, loss of a loved one, pain & suffering, etc - just make sure that the player still feels like they have had an impact on the world and that it hasn't all been for nothing.

I think there is still plenty of scope for game narrative to satisfy more highbrow tastes, but we have to still serve the parts of a game that make it a game - the element of the player character making a difference is key to that.

Sunday 28 March 2010

Long Time no E & Unity vs UDK

So I forgot about my Blog. There's a surprise. Very few people probably read it anyway.

So I kind of stumbled across it again from a link on another site. It reminded me that the blog was a great way to get my thoughts out in a (semi) coherent manner. So I thought I'd start trying to blog again, even if it is only for my own benefit.

So the big development in a personal project regard is that I have ditched XNA as the development method for my own project for a couple of reasons:

1. The Community Games on XBox has been a fail in terms of sales potential.
2. Unity and Unreal decided to go free.

So I had spent a long time creating an engine and an editor for use in XNA and I really learnt a lot from it. But the prospect of a complete engine available to use for free was just too tempting.

So I started with UDK. I use Unreal at work daily and absolutely love it. The editor and Kismet are so well formed that it makes design implementation a joy. However, my experience with the scripting side of things when I downloaded UDK were a nightmare. For a start - no IDE as standard - and the nFringe mod licence means no commercial release - I refuse to pay the prices they expect for a commercial version for something that should be standard. Then there is the sheer overcomplication of getting a project started. I managed to get something running, but it took an age, and a lot of frustration.

So I took a quick look at Unity, and almost immediately I was hooked. The component model is a really powerful way of doing things. It is simple enough to make something really quickly and setting up a new blank project was an absolute breeze. However, I would never want to do anything bigger than a three or four man project in Unity, it would become chaos.

So - for big projects you really cant beat unreal, but if you're doing something small then I really recommend using Unity.