Game design

LucasArts day 112. So, I never followed up on GDC. The weather was beautiful and I had a great time seeing some of my old friends. I only had chance to attend one day of sessions but that meant that I got to see industry-legend Hideo Kojima’s keynote about Metal Gear Solids evolution and Keita Takahashi’s heart-warming talk about Noby Noby Boy. But the session that gave me most was the Experimental Gameplay Sessions. Again, it’s clear that innovation within games is often not coming from the established developers. It almost seems like we are returning to the age of the bedroom coders with very few right and wrongs. Read more »

Posted: May 4th, 2009 under Game design, LucasArts.
Comments: 2

LucasArts day 46. I’m starting to count down for Game Developers Conference. Even though I’ve been working in the game industry for over 10 years, I’ve never been there. I guess that having it across town makes it easier than it being 9 time-zones away. Today I got a mail from Nifflas, the maker of Knytt which is one of my favorite independent games, Read more »

Posted: February 27th, 2009 under Game design, Games, LucasArts.
Comments: 4

LucasArts day 36. Last December, LucasArts did something that to my knowledge other companies only dream of. They dedicated a full week for the whole company to go nuts with creating game prototypes. No matter if you were a hardcore programmer or if you were a part of the marketing department; for one week, you got to get your hands dirty and try out that idea that you previously only had been able to talk about over lunch. Read more »

Posted: February 17th, 2009 under Game design, LucasArts.
Comments: none

LucasArts day 13. Before I started working at LucasArts, almost every game I had been working on has started off with a full team. This is not to say LucasArts is doing things differently, it’s just that I’ve always been in the situation where we as quickly as possible must go from nothing to a full-fledge game-prototype in minimal time. Read more »

Posted: January 26th, 2009 under Game design, Games, LucasArts, Personal.
Comments: 1

Something that is very cumbersome (and boring) to do for every developer out there is the software testing. To combat that, you usually develop a number of methods that helps you track down bugs, for example automatic bug-reports and unit-testing.

One of the more interesting ones is automatic testing. For games, this usually means that you have a system that simulates the player and automatically generates input for it. For my latest project Hyena I’ve had the rare opportunity to play around with an application where the controls are so basic that it was actually possible to write a system that played the whole game for me.

Read more »

Posted: March 7th, 2008 under Game design, Projects.
Comments: none

Yesterday I attended a lecture by Jonas Carlquist called “Datorspel + Människa = Berättelse” (Computergame + Human = Story). The lecture was mostly directed towards people who didn’t know that much about storytelling in games, but it was still very interesting to see everything from an academics point of view (also, he made a good impression on me by namedropping important games for storytelling like Deus Ex and Planescape Torment).

After thinking a bit about this lecture I though of some of the views I and my fellow designers at Starbreeze has had on how to tell stories in games. In the last couple of games we’ve made, storytelling has been extremely important.

Read more »

Posted: January 16th, 2008 under Game design.
Comments: none

One of the hardest things to create in games is the interactive stories. It’s probably because that’s something that is very new for us. Before computers, the only stories you could call interactive or branching were the role-playing game-books such as Lone Wolf (which I remember foundly from my childhood). And even those stories are not much older than half a century. Even so, I wish interactive storytelling had evolved as so many other areas related to computers and computer games like graphics technology and AI has.
 
There are some interesting things going on the subject, though. Read more »

Posted: October 29th, 2007 under Game design, Projects.
Comments: 36

Having a great idea for a game is valuable. That goes without saying, but exactly how valuable is such an idea? I’ve become rather cynical on the subject after working a while in the games-industry. If 50 people work on one game for over two years, how many good ideas are thought up? And how many of those are needed for the next game? Even if you don’t have a team of 50 people or don’t plan to work on one project for that long, there is a good chance that you’ll come up with a bunch of ideas that could become great games; Ideas that never will be realized.

Cosmonaut is such an idea. Read more »

Posted: October 5th, 2007 under Game design, Projects.
Comments: 6

The Swedish game-magazine Level had a nice article about the relationship between art and games in their July 2007 issue. This article contained an interview with me about the game Rorschach, where I collaborated with Ida Rödén to make a small art-game. This game has been shown in a number of more “traditional” art-forums, for example at Umeå Konsthögskola and the M.A.D.E. festival. Art and games has always had a slightly weird relasionship and as usual opinions drift apart. Personally I see interactivity as the key word, and Rorschach tries to explore the interactivity of conversations; something that games in general have been pretty unsuccessful in.

Rorschach is now available for download and can be found at http://www.collectingsmiles.com/rorschach.

Posted: September 26th, 2007 under Art, Game design, Projects.
Comments: 2

Mud and plenty of wind can turn a tent into a flying dragon!

Oh sweet mud. I had the pleasure of attending the Roskilde Festival and watch a few bands like BJÖRK-INFLAMES-ROKYERICKSON-BEASTIEBOYS-DIZZEERASCAL-CSS-QUEENSOFTHESTONEAGE-MUSTASCH-BONDEDEROLE-FLAMINGLIPS-CULTOFLUNA.
But since this is a gaming-blog I will not bore you with that. Instead I’d like smoothly move the topic over to licensed music in games. In The Darkness we did a pretty cool thing. We crammed the disc full with video content that ran on the in-game TVs that were scattered all over the game. Read more »

Posted: July 17th, 2007 under Game design, Travel.
Comments: none