Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest is now for sale!

Our first review (in Nintendo Power, so not online) caught on to our schemes: Given the popularity of the recent Castlevania handheld titles, it's surprising that more developers don't incorporate the best elements of that series into their own games. Fortunately, the folks behind Pirates ( Read more... )

What does Batman think about SpongeBob? Children’s understanding of the fantasy/fantasy distinctionMost interesting is the conclusion that children distinguish separate fantasy worlds as easily as adults. Pikachu, for example, would not show up to help Harry Potter. It also illustrates the power of a literary (and humor) device: Establishing a ( Read more... )

Pros

• The coolness of making games.
• Getting in at 9:30am is "early".
• There are days when reading a book with whiskey in-hand are considered totally reasonable.
• Telling kids what you do for a living.
• Research consists of playing tons of other peoples' games.

I haven't been doing much reading. Almost finished with Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. Slowly working through Borges' Collected Fictions. Haven't yet wrapped up my William Hope Hodgson anthology. You'll mostly find video games below.
( Reviews ahoy! )

A few more screenshots of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest are up on the gaming sites. You can see some of the amazing backgrounds our artist created, as well as a nice shot of the ship-to-ship combat. I'm cautiously optimistic about the reviews we'll get for this one.

In addition and, again, completely unrelatedly, these screenshots ( Read more... )

Since it's showing at E3, I figure it's safe to talk about here. I've finished up my work for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest GBA. I'm particularly proud of it, all things considered. Now I'm working on another GBA game; one that I'll be geeking out on for a long time, but which I shouldn't discuss until it's closer to completion ( Read more... )

Now that I've managed some semblance of Ron Edward's Story Now from the actions/consequences end, I'm slowly working out a way to address Premise. I'm considering the possibility that by varying your Attitude's behavior modifiers, you should be able to encourage decision-making based on a Premise. In traditional RPG design the rules (especially the ( Read more... )

Probably terrible terminology, but in talking with a friend here at work, he pointed out that Story Now isn't the end-all of game design. So I thought about it, and realized that GNS applies pretty solidly to video game design, too.

• Tetris, puzzle games: Gamism
• Zork, adventure games: Big gamism + little simulationism
• Final Fantasy, Japanese CRPGs: ( Read more... )

A problem with Story Now in video games ( introduced here) is to support shifting attitudes of individuals and groups towards the player(s) and each other. One solution would be implementing Factions and Attitudes. Below the LJ-CUT is the result of a few days of tinkering.
( High level description beyond this LJ-CUT )

As it turns out, I'm away from work for a week and I get the design bug. I guess programming all day is a proper inoculation against this particular fever.

In the works are two things right now:

• Some kind of roleplaying game that evokes both pulp fantasy and the whole Planescape/Bas-Lag vibe. I'm not very far, but I'm coming up with some good ( Read more... )