Nuno Silva

Some facts about Video Games (in numbers)

According to ESA (Entertainment Software Association):

• 65% of the Americans play Video games
• 35 is the the Average age of a gamer
• 26% is the percentage of the gamers that are over 50 years old
• 60% is the percentage of Male gamers (which leaves the women with the other 40%)
• 13 is the average number of years that adult gamers have been playing games
• 59% is the percentage of gamers that plays with other gamers in person
• 38% of the houses in America have, at least, a video game console
• 10 out of the 20 most sold games of 2007 where Nintendo games
• 63% of parents believe games are a positive part of their children’s lives.
• 83% of the time children receive their parents’ permission before purchasing or renting a game.
• 88% of the Parents monotoring their childs games.

Note: All the above facts were taken from the ESA document at http://www.theesa.com/facts/pdfs/ESA_EF_2008.pdf.

The document also have another facts about videos games, like the list of the 20 most sold games for consoles and pc (with World of Warcraft at the 2 top positions of the PC Games).

50 games in one Semester?

Yeah, it’s true. The creators of “Tower of Goo” created more than 50 games in one semester. An there were only 3 rules:

1. Each game must be made in less than seven days
2. Each game must be made by exactly one person
3. Each game must be based around a common theme i.e. “gravity”, “vegetation”, “swarms”, etc.

This is what I call Extreme Game Design (and programming)!

Here is the article that explains this experiment: www.gamasutra.com

You can also see the website of this experiment at www.experimentalgameplay.com

The Beginning of a Game - Game Design

How many of you, developers, once though: I really liked to develop a game.

The answer is simple: Most of you.

But beginning a game requires a lot of work. It requires a good idea that must be worked until exhaustion in order to develop a good starting base. This is the begging of the Game design.

Game design is the most important part of making a game. Is the Design that will define the success of a game. The game can be programmed by the best programmer in the world. That doesn’t mean the game will have success.

So what is game Design? Is a process that defines all the concept, rules, way of work of a game.

So, in the beggining of this phase, a lot of things must be done. The original idea must be polished by all the elements of the team. All the ideas must be putted above the table and discussed. Another thing that also helps a lot is to study similar games. And similar games are not necessarily games of the same type. Means games of the same market:

Example: You want to create a game for the Web, so one of the things you must do is explore all the games you can find (wikipedia is a wonderful starting point) of the same market (Web games in general).

And why? Because the type of game is not what matters. What matters are the concepts.

A good example are the GameForge games. Correct me if i’m wrong but games like Bitefight and DarkPirates aren’t exactly the same? User interface apart , the engine looks exactly the same: a place to shop, things you can buy to upgrade you character(Bitefight)/Ship(DarkPirates), find enemies to attack,etc. These two games are a good examples of similar concepts with different background stories.

If a good study of the market is a essential to start the design of a game, a brainstorm also is.

Only imaging new ideas, discussing them in several different perspectives, sometimes with people outside of the game development area (friends, family) can make your game unique, or at least different enough to attract different kind people to play it.

For example, in the current version of Orion’s Belt, the concept that separates Orion’s Belt for the other web games in the market is the Board game. It’s the “thing” that separates Orion’s Belt from all the other Massive multi Player web games in the web.

Of Course, because all members of team the have grew and news ideas have appeared and, in the last 4 years, we managed to build a good community that is always getting new idea. So, in Orion’s Belt 2 we will have concepts that are new in MMPOG (Browser based) and will make the game even more attractive to new players.

So, the ideas that you need to retain of this post are:

• Choose the subject of the game
• Explore the market for that type of game
• Gather the ideas that you think that are most relevant for your game
• Explore other types of games. All you can think of. There is always a concept, a feature, a new idea that you can use in your game
• Discuss all the ideas that you have with your team, your friends, your family.
• And the gold rule: Sometimes the times what you like is not necessarily what can provide good form of entertainment.

UPDATE: there was a problem with my wordpress and comments were shut down. I already took care of the problem. you can now comment this post

I’m happy

At the end of my second day of full time development of the new version of Orion’s Belt, there is only one thing that i can say: I’m happy

My part is the battle (here is a shot for you that don’t know what the hell i am talking about). In some few words, the battle is no more than a chess like board game, with 8 different units on each side. Each one of them has it’s own attack, defense, range, special abilities and bonus.

In this 3rd version we decided not to change anything in terms of gameplay. The great optimizations will be in the Battle Core and in the Design. Why you ask? Because we consider that we have a pretty mature game, with a very strategic gameplay that our few (but very addicted) players love.

In the engine and in the design are our flaws.

The Engine is not extensible enough and all the Orion’s Belt Core is going to change. So, this is a good chance to upgrade all the code (meaning rewrite 90% of what we made in the past). Rewriting the code means:

• making the battle independent of everything else. If tomorrow we want to build a stand alone application with all this code, it will be possible (at least more possible than with the current version).
• making futures addictions to the core (like new units, new unit powers, new ultimate weapons) very easy to make. In our current version doing all of this is a synonym of making a lot of spaghetti code. In the new version we will simple extend some classes (one for each feature) and the engine will automatically use them.
• full support for 4 players in a single board.
• support for battles against an AI Agent.
• and much, much more

All of this using .NET 2.0 (the use of generics will boost the Battle Core performance).

The new design will also help a lot. We want to make the battle page one of the most cool pages of the new Orion’s Belt version (never forgetting that this page must be cool and usable at the same time). Must be something that the players see and say: WOOOOOOOO.

And who is the guy that going to make this happen? Marco Vale.

Visit his site: it’s worth the time spent

WebGames

Finally the new site of the zi-yu portal has been launched. It’s name is WebGames and it is a portal of web based games.

I think this portal can become a good reference of web based games for all players in the web.

Pre made a very good job. Speaking of Pre: Happy Birthday my friend!

Two classics

Super Mario is a classic game. It has several years and the most of us played it in it’s original versions (Game Boy, NES, etc). For me, one of the most addicted games every made.

In our days, the 2D games are not classics anymore. They had been replaced by 3D action games (like Halo) of the new generation of consoles (XBOX360, PS3 and Wii).

But what if we joined the classics of the past with the classics of the present?