My biggest secret is that, even though I have a math degree from MIT, it’s not about math at all. If I was going to make a fighting game from scratch, starting with nothing, there’d be a tiny bit of math to make sure that, if you make them block a move, you can’t block it again to prevent infinite loops, so there’s already a little bit of maths done for me in Super Street Fighter, but when it comes to things like, should this guy’s priority be a little bit better or not?
It’s just this holistic approach. We know the results from all these tournaments from all these years, and it’s just having an intuition of what a tweak is going to do.
But NO, YOU NEED ! Even glorified worldbuilders need math degrees.
[…] what if we want to include data visualization as an integral part of the site, not just an isolated figure or an interactive chart? When we’re designing interfaces for browsing data-driven sites, it’s valuable to be able to create navigation elements that are also visualization tools. We can keep the user informed as they explore, so they can make better decisions about what they’re looking at and what they’re clicking on.
]]>Have you seen any other player survey “innovations” recently?
]]>Your bottleneck is playtesting. Not QA — your awesome tools help ensure that stuff is mostly not broken on the first iteration! You need playtesting to make sure that experiencing that content is everything that it can be — your awesome tools cannot help you.
Let’s say you’re, oh, working on a mature game and making end-game content to shut whiny guild leaders up.
Your QA team is a bunch of minimum wage temps who don’t actually play the game. They can’t help you test raid content.
You can round up the whole office and ask them to play through it a few times a week, but that’s time they could have spent coding or modeling or whatever it is they do. And they’re not top-notch players either.
You can recruit some player volunteers and ask them to please, please not tell anybody about your dumb first iterations. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t! At least they play the game. (And woe if anyone outside of the program finds out. It’s so unfair!)
Alternatively, you can throw it on test and move on. Then everybody knows about your dumb first iterations! It’s so embarrassing.
How can you solve this bottleneck?
]]>Do you want the truth? Blizzard is giving nobody that pays for a subscription to WoW what they deserve. With the amount of money they are making, they should be putting out at least 4 5-mans and 1 10-man per month and 1 25-man every-other month. Not to mention they should probably be adding 1 new battleground each month, and 1 special tournament every other month. […] To be honest, I’m more irritated with this badge loot bullshit […] No, I really really don’t want to do more Kara, more of the same heroics, or anything else that gives badges. That is OLD CONTENT, regardless of the rewards.
Do people that enjoy 5-mans and heroics not enjoy seeing different encounters in different instances? […] . As was said earlier, -everyone- should be getting content. […] It is all being put out in this game slower than it is in AC1, and AC1 has been out for what, 9-10 years, and has less than 1% of the player-base of WoW.
Asheron’s Call 1 has nine years of monthly content updates. They had what, a live team of ten? But they had a famously awesome toolset, and people said they had an obscene retention rate.
]]>My guild in World of Warcraft finally entered tier 6 content, as reported by Brandon. Even though we’ve been attuned for weeks, we made our first solid attempt at Black Temple just last night, and it was the most fun raiding I’ve had for quite a while. (Was it a conscious design decision to have all of these BT bosses’ AE attacks not have a visible effect icon? Because I tend to think “hey, am I standing in the fire?” and then I look up at my effects list to confirm it, and if I don’t see something, I assume I’m not. Additionally, when there’s an effect, boss mods can use it as a trigger and play a GET OUT OF THE FIRE, MORON sound for you. I guess that we’re playing with the big kids now, and the big kids don’t need any pesky UI to play the game for them.)
It’s GDC time. I’m not going, but my company has a presence this year. If you’re a publisher and would like to spend some money, please visit our booth this week. Even if you’re not, please watch our first gameplay video.
And finally, I’m proud to announce that I’ll be giving a talk at the ION Game Conference in Seattle later this year. It’s called “Design for Longevity,” and it’s about designing infrastructure systems and tools that will make your live team not want to kill themselves five years from now.
]]>