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Postmortem: Norwegian Wood

Programming, Video Games

The project that became Norwegian Wood began in late April of this year. With school winding down and the weather heating up, I felt the itch to tackle something new. By chance I had met a number of like-minded people over the winter; students with big ideas and aspirations of working in the game industry. Inspired by this collective potential, I decided to reach out to my local friends and colleagues about coming together to make a game over the summer.

The response was overwhelming; of the nine people I had e-mailed, seven of them were interested in participating. The project was suddenly much larger than I had anticipated, but I didn’t have the heart to turn anyone away. The eight of us (Kira Boom, Thomas Hibbert, Phil Jones, Renaud Bédard, Alex Charlton, William Mitchell, Kyle Sama and I1) formed the facetiously titled collective No Fun Games.

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Norwegian Wood

Programming, Video Games

The game project that I’ve been quietly working on this summer is finally ready for release! It’s a rhythm-based shmup inspired by the Beatles song Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown). You can download it for PC, Mac and Linux on the game’s website:

Norwegian Wood – No Fun Games

I have more to say about the game’s development process, but I’ll save that for a postmortem post later this month. For now, enjoy the game, and please leave your feedback and suggestions in the comments below.

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Mechanics, Dynamics & Aesthetics

Video Games

This summer I’ve been casually following Game Design Concepts, Ian Schreiber’s experimental online game design course. The curriculum has covered a number of thought-provoking concepts, but the real light bulb moment for me came in his discussion of the MDA framework1.

Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc and Robert Zubek defined MDA in 2001 [PDF link]. It stands for mechanics, dynamics and aesthetics, the three layers that define a game. These words are often thrown around casually in game design discussions, but in MDA they have very specific meanings:

  • Mechanics are the formal rules of the game. These rules define how the game is prepared, what actions the players can take, the victory conditions, the rule enforcement mechanisms, etc.
  • Dynamics describe how the rules act in motion, responding to player input and working in concert with other rules. In programming terms, the “run-time” behaviour of the game.
  • Aesthetics describe the player’s experience of the game; their enjoyment, frustration, discovery, fellowship, etc. In simple terms, what makes the game fun?

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Gaming Made Me

Video Games

This week I’ve been enjoying the “Gaming Made Me” series over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, where various journalists and designers1 are discussing “gaming education and influences: the games that made us the kind of people that we are today.”

What’s interesting about the series is the contrast between how unremarkable many of these games are in a larger sense and how important they are on a personal level. Did the creators of Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe know that they would inspire Jim Rossignol’s lifetime of gaming? Do these influential games have common characteristics, or are they imbued with greatness by the emotion and (later) nostalgia of the player?

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Twice Around The Sun (For Good Measure)

Miscellaneous

If you’ll excuse a brief lapse into meta-blogging, I’m proud to announce that The Quixotic Engineer is two years old today! As I did last year, I thought I’d take a moment to reflect on another year of writing.

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