As the summer goes, a new section appears on this website: games made at the Ludoscience laboratory! This new section will let you play the various videogames created by the members of the laboratory during their research projects. Hence, this new section is different from our reseach projects section (that gathers research projects that are not games, or games that are not available to the general public) and from our students projects section (that solely gathers games created by the st
[...]
Keywords : website updates, videogames
This book attempts to give a quite unique approach on the history of videogames: instead of interviewing game designers about how they created famous games, the author have collected the memories of numerous anonymous videogames players in France. The book is focused on the 8 / 16 bits era (i.e. from the middle of the 80's to the beginning of the 90's). The author, Florent Gorges, have written a very touching book here. While you'll read it quickly, it'll touch you with a deep feeling of nostalg
[...]
Keywords : players, memories, 8 bits, 16 bits, consoles, computers
This article presents a selection of "formal game design tools" that may be able to bring game design and software engineering closer. Nowadays, game designers can rely on a set of theoretical tools to create video games. These tools are first intended to facilitate the design phase. However, some of them have a strong potential to communicate designers' ideas to the rest of the team, especially to developers. We will study four examples of such tools, before discussing how they
[...]
Keywords : game design tools, communication, industry
Despite the growing interest in interactive storytelling techniques, their actual applications to traditional gameplay design remain to be investigated. However, many game designers have expressed concerns about the incorporation of such generative techniques in traditional game titles, mainly because of the lack of control they will have over dynamically generated content. This paper proposes an authoring tool allowing game designers to formalize, visualize, modify, and validate game level solu
[...]
Keywords : Cultural Heritage , Serious Game, Game Level Design, Gameplay
This autobiography is composed by the personal journal of Jordan Mechner during the creation of his famous game Karateka (1984). The authors tells us about his thoughts, his doubts, his joy, and more specifically about the different steps towards the creation of this popular game. A very interesting read, despite a rather "rough" writing style : this book allows you to literally enter inside the head of Jordan Mechner, a creative genius with a lot more doubts and fears that we cou
[...]
Keywords : biography, jordan mechner, karateka, artist, creative process
The biography of Yoshihisa Kishimoto, a japanese game creator unknown by the general public, although he created one of the most famous videogame series: "Double Dragon". This well written book is full of pictures and starts by telling you the childhood of this little-known genius, alongside with his thug-like youth where he was always eager to fight inside and outside of school. He hopefully changed his lifestyle before becoming a real criminal. Fond of movies, he then started to crea
[...]
Keywords : yoshihisa kishimoto, double dragon, kunio-kun, renegade, thunder strom, road avenger, vier, biography
This Game Design book is full of "practical advices" coming from an experimented Game Designer. Lewis Pulsipher designed several board games, his most famous title being Britannia (1986-2008). Each chapter of the book emphasizes over the traps to avoid and the good habits to follow in order to become a professional Game Designer: selecting a target audience; critical analysis of existing games; assessment of game ideas; creation of prototypes; the different stages of the Game Design pr
[...]
Keywords : game design, board games, lewis pulsipher, practical advices
This book a call for all amateurs creators around the world to use videogames as means for their personal expression. The authors states that most commercial videogames are guided by market analysis more than creativity, as she concludes that this trend results in locking the expressive potential of videogames. But for Anna Anthropy, an American game designer recognized for its unique creations, there is still some hope left: what the industry can't or don't want to produce, the amateur game des
[...]
Keywords : amateur, indie
ABSRACT While play marks both the cultural and pre-cultural spheres of human existence, the environmental design disciplines have almost exclusively compartmentalized the notions of play and fun into categories of leisure and children’s playgrounds. The rhetorics of environmental design, to date, have ignored, or at best marginalized, the possibility of play outside of recreational and commercial contexts. Still, we have abundant examples of playful architecture and fun places that st
[...]
Keywords : Design, Architecture, Fun architecture, Game
In this paper, we present a new model to analyse therapeutic games. The goal of the model is to describe and analyse the relations between the three aspects of a therapeutic game: the player, the game, and the therapy. The model is intended to game designers. It is a tool to improve the communication between health experts and game designers, and to evaluate the game design coherency of therapeutic games. It also helps to analyse existing games to discover relevant features. The model is built w
[...]
Keywords : Video games, Evaluation, Analysis, Model, Game design, Serious games, Therapeutic