I was tweeted last week by a student working on a “Best Practices of Pacing in Action/Adventure Games” essay. He wanted my thoughts, and I am happy to oblige with this post in the form of a Q&A.
In exchange for me sharing my ideas, please comment here and share your ideas right back. Tell me your ideal videogame.
Valve produced a handbook for new employees at the start of 2012. It’s surprisingly gripping reading, for an employee handbook, and also features some of Valve’s trademark humor:
If you stop on the way back from your massage to play darts or work out in the Valve gym or whatever, it’s not a sign that this place is going to come crumbling down like some 1999-era dot-com startup. If we ever institute caviar-catered lunches, though, then maybe something’s wrong. Definitely panic if there’s caviar.
I’ve been posting a bunch recently, and I’d kind of like my bold statements about the uniqueness of story design within game development to stay near the top of the blog a little while longer.
But Valve, damn their tardy-but-impeccably-engineered brilliance, have gone and unleashed a closed beta of a brand new Steam Mobile app for iPhone, and probably iPod and iPad. In fact, hell, I just checked the press release and it says ‘iOS and Android devices’, so even Google gets some love. Continue reading
I’m a pretty story-aware gamer, for obvious reasons. I have a pathological need to complete every dialogue tree, a determination to hear every variation on a bark, and I even take a perverse delight in spamming all the voice commands in TF2 and Left 4 Dead to any teammate who will listen – “Who’s gonna help me capture this bloody POINT?” – imagine hearing that again and again in the loud Scottish Demoman voice (and please don’t hate me).
You might note that both TF2 and Left 4 Dead (1 & 2) are multiplayer games. You would be correct. TF2 doesn’t have much story, beyond the Class videos, the emerging Announcer / Saxton Hale comics canon, and the fact that each level is effectively a mini-scenario where two groups are fighting for control – a scenario communicated through the level design and art itself. OK, when you write it all down, that does sound like quite a lot of story.
But what I’m thinking of is the more traditional, plot-based story where things happen to characters, who evolve, resulting in new things happening – all within the game. And for this, I want to look at Brink and Left 4 Dead 2.
Continue reading