The Quixotic Engineer

With final exams beginning to wind down, I’ve had a chance at last to get back to playing Mother 3, the Japan-exclusive sequel to the cult SNES RPG Earthbound. The game was translated to English by the dedicated fans at Starmen.net, and was finally released last Fall to much excitement and acclaim.

→ Read more

Like all stupid ideas, it began on the Internet:

→ Read more

This semester I attended “User Interface Design”, a class that encouraged us to think critically about the ways in which people interact with systems. While the course work naturally focused on software interfaces, the principles of good UI design are universal. Whether you’re creating a website, a toaster, a lamp or a door handle, intuitive design relies on understanding human psychology.

In my ongoing quest to contextualize everything I learn in terms of video games, I’d like to explore how the principles of user interface design might be applied to make games more accessible.

→ Read more

This week I’ve been eating up all the coverage from GDC, scouring blogs and Twitter and attempting to live vicariously through the writers in attendance. The dozens of fantastic presentations have given me reading material for weeks, but I was especially blown away and thoroughly inspired by the Indie Games Summit. Jim Rossignol described 2008 as the year indie development “was confirmed as a vital, valid movement within the world of gaming”, a statement that is strongly supported by this year’s presentations. The excitement, potential and innovation coming from small development studios is simply staggering.

Inspired in part by Petri Purho’s “5-minute game” magic trick, I decided to see if I could put together a small functional game in the scope of an afternoon. I didn’t quite meet my time goal (for reasons I’ll explain below), but finally did put together a small game called Rockwell, Papyrus, Skia.

→ Read more

How do you turn older gamers off a beloved iconic character like Mega Man? Reimagine him as a generic anime reject? Replace Dr. Light with a cast of plucky pre-teens? Add Pokemon-like collection elements? Take all of the above and you basically have the Mega Man Battle Network series.

While you could be forgiven for dismissing the game due to its designed-by-committee visual design, I contend that beneath its surface lies a unique and intriguing battle system that’s easy to learn but difficult to master. It’s a seamless mix of real time combat and strategic deck building that allows a skilled player to defeat a challenging enemy in seconds without taking a hit.

→ Read more