And, finally, fly


Kurt Busiek is (among other things) a comic scriptwriter. Not so many years ago, Image Comics started to publish a work by him: Astro City. If I can remember correctly, since my memory is made of cork, Busiek had been already working for some time in the human perspective of the super-heroic experience. With his work, he tried to answer questions such as, how does a journalist view super heroes?, or, what are the feelings of someone who suddenly acquires great power? Continue reading And, finally, fly

Game design as software engineering

A video game is not that different from any other software development; it perhaps depends more on hardware, but even so it is very similar. When you describe a program you need the client’s opinion and plenty of information to determine how the issue was being taken prior to the new development. In the end it is obvious that albeit there won´t be much relation between the analysis and the final development, that relation will still be more or less recognizeable.

But, what about video games? To start with, Continue reading Game design as software engineering

Adrenalin

Masculinity can be defined by two aspects: the cocktail adrenalin+ testosterone added to the liking for shooters.

Shooters, generally on a coin-op platform, were a dominant genre in the realm of early videogames. It’s easy to recall Galaxian, or Tempest, one of the first games to bring deepness to game mechanics. I would like to highlight one among them: Robotron 2084, the first game I ever knew that needed two joysticks to be used simultaneously, one for movement and the other for shooting.

Of course, the genre never died. People everywhere, especially asians as it seems, keep on devouring one shooter after another: Ikaruga, Bangai-O, Radiant SilvergunContinue reading Adrenalin

We love kung-fu!

I hate fighting games. My first contact with them was the Street Fighter 2 coin-op, and already then I thought it was a ridiculous game. That’s strange, because I could finish the first Double Dragon without blinking, but there was no chemistry. It was a game without power-ups, where in order to get the control dynamics you had to Continue reading We love kung-fu!

Video Games design: First Contact

So far I have dedicated many hours to create a good fistful of tools to develop 3D multimedia applications in real time, that is: video games. After erecting structures for Finite State Machines, scripts, messages and (soon soon) triggers, I decided to merge the whole thing into a single concept, and try to bring out errors, bugs, etc. I thought it would be quick and easy to make “a small game”. I was wrong. Continue reading Video Games design: First Contact

Girls and Video Games

Women, that beautiful 50% of the population which handle more than 50% of the small consumer’s money! Let’s go over a couple quick facts related to girls and interactive computing:

1. No sane woman will ever enter a Micro, Game, Microplay -or whatever they are called. Have you seen those places? They are full of nerds, have enormous cardboard figures of a half naked Lara Croft on display -or worse: featuring a six-feet-high Mario!… If they were searching for ways to repel girls, they really Continue reading Girls and Video Games