This article aims to demonstrate the importance of video game designers as agent of progress. This work is based on a study whose main purpose is to better define casual games while using the video game designers' professional knowledge. During the course of the study, it became clear that the game design practices have been evolving over time. Due to the scarcity of existing information on the role of designers in the scientific literature, it seemed appropriate to explore this lack. The r
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Keywords : video game design, design practice, designer role, professional knowledge, instrumental player, casual game
Behind the challenge of creating an original game from scratch in 48h, one of the main features of the Ludum Dare competition is the user community: people participating in this competition are able to give a very good feedback on the thousands of games created during the event. But sometimes, the feedback comes from people not participating in the competition, as it happened with Attack of the Screen Scrollers: it was reviewed by a Youtuber called KokoStern in his "Concept Hunt
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Keywords : attack of the screen scrollers, youtube
ABSTRACT Fields within education and training have been exploring the use of educational computer-based games, often referred to as serious games (SG), in multiple disciplines of academic research including the affective, cognitive, and psychomotor domains. Traditionally, game designers tend to represent a different viewpoint about learning than instructional designers, or even teachers. More so, one of the fundamental roles designers play in making decisions is based on multiple factors, w
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Keywords : Serious games, Instructional levels, Epistemology
Innovation and creativity seem to be mere buzzwords, but the quest for innovation and creativity by game companies is very real. This Ph.D. dissertation suggests adopting a new perspective on these concepts by abandoning a managerial attitude and favoring a design approach. The design process of video games is under-studied, and this research aims to create a model of video game design activity, using the already existing literature in the field of design, and the observation of actual game desi
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Keywords : Innovation, Design, Video game industry, Designers
Almost unknown, BOA is a nice little game for MS-DOS created in 1989 by Dean Ballard for Microsoft. It's an arcade game similar to Snake, besides the fact that you are playing a rat trying to avoid being eaten by the snake! The oddest thing about this game lies in its distribution model: it was solely available through the driver disk of a mouse created by Microsoft, the "Contour Mouse", also known as "Dove Bar." Due to the technological limitations of the era,
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Keywords : microsoft boa, history, mouse, pix'n love
A conference dedicated to GamePlay bricks and their use to analyse and classify video games. Speakers:Julian Alvarez (Julian.alvarez@univ-lille1.fr)Docteur en Sciences de l’information et de la communication. Responsable du laboratoire consulaire Play Research Lab (PRL) dédié à l’étude du jeu et de ses usages.Plus de 150 Serious Games à son actif pour TF1, Dupuis, Milan, CNRS …Damien Djaouti (damien@ludoscience.com)Maître
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Keywords : gameplay, bricks, Game design, Classification
Eric Chahi, a famous video games designer (Out of this World, anyone?), recently took part in the Retro Game Jam, a 32h video game creation competition held during november 2013 in Montpellier (France). In the video below, he discusses his feelings about this experience and presents the various prototypes of his game in order to explain his personal game creation process. A rare and very interesting testimony from a living videogame legend about the recent "Game Jam" phenomena (video i
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Keywords : eric chahi, game jam
Happy new year everyone! This new year comes with an improved version of my first ever LudumDare competition entry: The One Fork Restaurant. To celebrate the release of the final version of this game, I've decided to write down a full postmortem about it. As the title implies, it's a funny time-management game taking place in a restaurant, where many people come to eat various meals. But the restaurant has only one fork, so customers have to share it! When the customers are w
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Keywords : the one fork restaurant, postmortem, ludum dare 28, game design, game development
This book is a guide presenting the professional side of the videogames universe in a simple but complete way. It's divided in 4 parts. The first one presents the "day-to-day reality", by answering questions like "how do we create videogames?", "do we spent the day playing games?" or "can we became rich?", etc. The second part dissects the different jobs related to videogames, and explains their role and the kind of skills they require: game designer, scen
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Keywords : jobs, training courses, video games, industry, company, guide, student
While this will be of little use if you can't read french, I just uploaded 5 new lessons materials on the website: An overall presentation of the history of videogames (from 1952 to 2013).A presentation of the various jobs related to videogames (from AAA game designers to indies or journalist).An updated version of our presentation of the Game Design theories.An updated version of our presentation about the structure of games (i.e. what is gameplay?).An introduction to Serious Games, to
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Keywords : lessons materials