Game Design & Dev

In case you weren't aware, the developers on Microsoft's Indie Games channel are in the middle of an Uprising. Sick and tired of being drowned out by a flood of cash-in crapware, the people who take game-making seriously have banded together to release a slew of high-quality titles. One of the initial games available was the superb Epic Dungeon from Eyehook Games. Mike Muir, the man behind the magic, was gracious enough to take time out of his schedule to answer a few questions about his project.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent is highly likely to be my 2010 game of the year, and is the proud recipient of only the second perfect 10 that I have given out. Jens Nilsson, one of the developers at Frictional Games, was kind enough to answer a few of my questions about Amnesia and the future of Frictional.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Uber Entertainment, the creators of Monday Night Combat, back in August before the game released. Now that some time has passed and the team has just released a major title update and some DLC, it seemed like the time was right to check back in and get the lowdown.

You may have not heard it by now, but I kinda love the PlayStation Move. Sure it's derivative, but that's easy to forgive considering how effectively it fulfills the promise of motion controllers that was only hinted at with the Wii. I enjoyed it so much, in fact, that I went ahead and bought a second Move want in anticipation for The Fight: Lights Out.

I was one of those kids who, when all of the other kids were out playing tag and ring-around-the-rosie, I was on my IBM compatible Windows 3.1 machine programming QBasic games because I enjoyed it. I started learning programming when I was 6 and it didn't take long for 6-year-old me to stump my dad (the computer engineer) so I was self-taught from an early age. My first program was "Hello World" but everything I wrote since then has been a game. I've always been attracted to making video games for some reason. I spent a lot of time when I was younger making MUDs and building mods for Quake, Half-Life and Source. One of the bigger projects I worked on was "The Specialists", a Half-Life mod that was pretty popular back in its day.

As anyone who has the misfortune of following me on Twitter will know, I've been engrossing myself in Phoenix Wright for the past few days, and the game has pretty much been riding solo in my newly acquired DS. I'm just about at the end of episode 5, so not totally done yet. However, unless the game suddenly turns into Mega Man X7 within this last case, I can safely say that Phoenix Wright will rocket straight to the top of my "late to the party" list. And as a bonus, I have the correct spelling of "Phoenix" memorized after years of always relying on spellckeck.

I've been going through some of my gaming backlog recently, partially due the to the magical appearance of a Nintendo DS Lite in my closet. I have no idea where it came from, I don't remember buy and none of my old roommates reported losing it. I've approached it somewhat apprehensively, lest it be the focal point of a plot by some supernatural force. Enough about The Lost DS though. I'm here to talk about something much different.

At first, I held off writing this article because everyone was too busy talking about how Final Fantasy XIII is a terrible game, then it was because the game was "too old" to talk about. Fortunately, the recent release of Metroid: Other M has reignited conversation about the portrayal of women in games, and given me the perfect opportunity to get this article out of my mind and off of my back. This article does contain major spoilers.

Many readers and staff on this site have praised BioWare's high fantasy epic Dragon Age: Origins for its compelling story, loveable characters, and nail-biting decisions. Truly, it is a great game, but no one has had the time or focus to closely examine each of the games major choices in an effort to discover what makes them so great. A closer examination reveals that not all of these choices are nearly as good as the others. This article aims to teach what makes story choices in a game compelling, and what makes them forgettable.

Recently I had the pleasure to review Incognito: Episode One, an intriguing title from developer Magrathean Technologies. The game, as the name so aptly implies, is the first in a series of Their CTO, Ron McDowell, was kind enough to answer a few questions for me.