Week 15: Game industry

In recent years the game industry has gone from strength to strength. Especially since it has only really boomed in the last 20 years which is wierd as it was only 9years since Pokemon Red came out. (Fun fact there) Gaming companies have sprung up all over the place in those 20 years with
Nintendo becoming a global franchise, same with Sega, Capcom and Square Enix. It has even grown
so large that there are now second party developers (companies owned by bigger ones) have joined
in the game.

If you ask people inside the industry what they are feeling about the direction games are taking, they'd say that it is pretty exciting. With existing hardware being able to do much more than it did before leads to so many more possibilites. This is even in all fields of development like music and marketting. Games are also reaching a larger audience than it did as those who grew up with games are now at the age they can introduce their kids to them and with more casual friendly games being made, it is certainly a more generalised industry than it was before.

To the game industry, coming from a money and audience point of view, these family games are great business but to the hardcore gamers, who do it because they like games and not bcause they are now like films, these kinds of games are a cancer. You could look forward to a game being released for your console and it would be a good game, with many good games inbetween. Nowadays, the DS is turning into a IMPROVE YOUR HEALTH station with every great game being punctuated by a brain training rip off and the Wii is unfortunately going the same way but having cheaply produced games that the whole family can get involved into. Off the Nintendo front, developers are backing away from the PS3 because its games take too long and to make and far too much effort for lacklustre profits. Which would in fact be decent profits if the PS3 wasnt such high end.

In the future we can look forward to thousands of cheaply made games with crappy touch/motion controls improving our physical and mental health.
/Rant

Week11: Gameplay

Gameplay is a term that gets thrown around alot and doesnt really have any certain meaning to it. In one instance it can literally be how a game plays (fast, smooth etc.) or what kind of things youll be doing in a game (puzzling, racing etc.). So all in all its a hard term define but I prefer to thing of gameplay as what sorts of things you get to do in a game. "What is Smash Brothers Gameplay like?" "Its a large beat em up with loads of nintendo characters around a 2D stage" Or at least thats how I'd define it. The general gist of what the game is.

So when it comes down to 'do you design the gameplay or game first?' it would easily be the gameplay. Boiling it down to Half Life 2, it is much easier to say Gordon Freeman has to run and survive (To be honest I really have no idea whats going on in HL2) from the bad guys. Once youve got that point, you can easily design your bad guys and then the locations he would be running through and then your genre can be chosen from the appropriate ones. It would be much harder to say "Lets make a shooter" and then build a story around that.

Of course you will most always come up with a concept for a game before designing the other things about it and what the game will allow you to do. I read up on the Gamasutra links and a game was produced that was about flying through the clouds and making friends with all of them. Then it was designed to be a slow relaxing game rather than a time or point based game.

Much like the above game titled "Cloud" in the future games will tryand introduce new types of game play. One such title is Endless Ocean which was just released and has the player swimming through the ocean taking photos of all the speices and that is all. In the future, after all the conventional genres are burnt out, we will hopefully see new ones bringing in new and exciting game play.