April 2008

Egotistic Level Design

There seems to be some egotistical desire for some level designers to want to kill or punish the Player. Sometimes it just feels like, to them, level design is the thousand and one ways I can kill the Player. I wonder: will the level designer himself gain anything by doing so?

Continue reading…

“Box Boy”

Conceptualized during production of Lone Wolf when I was doing alot of tests scenes for testing of different features and doing experiments on kjAPI. Because many tests are done with boxes, so I thought, why not make a Box Boy? So there he is.

He has other forms and concepts, but this is the latest one. His other form is living in my “Primitive” folder currently.
Continue reading…

Introduction to User Accessibility in Games

A rather simple and old game design article from Gamasutra.com (6th July, 2005),“Improving Game Accessibility”

Though this article is pretty old, it does provide some useful information that should give a basic introduction to the subject. No frills and straight to the point. Takes just 5 minutes to read, but gives enough information to gain some awareness to this subject for game designers or developers.

Also, I’ve include a table below shows the major forms of disability that affects game play (extracted from the article), and I have included some suggested and game industry standard of overcoming these games accessibility issues.
Continue reading…

“Be able to Enjoy the Game without Sounds”

For user accessibility reasons, I always follow the game design rule for myself when doing game design. (A good thing that comes out would be, if a game is enjoyable without sounds, it could potentially be BETTER with sounds. )

I just wanna bring up this issue just to bring some attention to accessibility in games. Especially when it comes to accessibility for the disabled. A number of people still don’t know about this subject, or simply don’t bother

Sound comes in as a second layer to the game design, to enhance the game experience, make everything feel good, creates the atmosphere, provides additional information…

Continue reading…