The title is a little Fast Show reference - however the news I just read is no joke. Rez - arguably the best thing to come out of Sega since Sonic 2 – is getting the Xbox Live Arcade HD treatment with Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s Q Entertainment doing the honors.
Oh Rez, how I have missed thee so … some game design trivia – Dead Eye mode in Red Dead Revolver was based on the Targeting System from Rez, and the “bullet time” of Max Payne.
It’s been a while since I wrote anything, and I’ve been meaning to write something like this since I started the blog.
I’ve been asked a number of times over the last few months about becoming a Game Designer. So here is my little guide to dipping your toe in to the swimming pool of Game Design and seeing if it’s warm enough to dive in to.
I mean games pural – not just one game or one kind of games. Have you played a wide variety of different game types on a variety of different game machines? I ask because you need to expose yourself to as many games as you can. Fortunately we live in a world of Xbox Live and Playstation Network, where it is trivially easy to download demos and try all sorts of games without have to commit $20+ dollars for the benefits of trying skate. or Beautiful Katamari. Websites like Gametrailers.com allow you see actual gameplay footage which is sometimes the next best thing to actually playing the game. Do yourself a favor and play more games – play anything you can get your hands on … and here’s the tricky bit – analyze it. Why is Call of Duty 2 better than Hour of Victory? What is the difference between skate. and Tony Hawk’s Proving Ground? More importantly why do you think the designers/developers made the decisions they did?
Much like with Lesson 1, we live in a time and age where it is very easy to get your hands on the actual software used to make shipped games. Games like Half-Life 2, Warcraft 3 and Unreal Tournament ship with the same tools the company used to make the entire game. With a few simple Google searches it is easy to find some tutorials that will get almost anyone making their own content for those games. Hell, there are a ton of console games that ship with really simple but effective game editors – Tony Hawk, Far Cry Instincts, Stuntman Ignition and Timesplitters - all shipped with tools that allow you to make your own content for the game.
