Notes on design…
by Patrick Sebring on Feb.09, 2010, under Game Development, Game Industry
It’s always good to take a break when you’re neck deep in development and look at your surroundings. People often fall into the cycle of losing focus by focusing too hard a small spectrum. Needless to say I hadn’t really been playing as many games as usual picking up the hits of 5 months to a year ago (Skate2, Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction …etc) rather than jumping on the new fresh games only to be inundated with the cloud of public opinion.
Well I broke down and picked up Mass Effect 2 and Uncharted 2. I do play snippets of the latest games at work to breakdown UI systems, AI, weapons, script/gameplay logic, movement, controls, camera …etc. Until recently I hadn’t played many at home for the entirety of the experience.
That said I’ve been mainly playing Mass Effect 2. I enjoyed the first one and thought the dialog trees and outcome to be well written and well executed. I always play through twice to test the bounds of the script and “moral” options. The overall mechanics and gameplay are solid but I still find myself constantly loading from one place to the next. The shear number of the dialog trees and individual cut scenes is pretty daunting and my hat’s off to Bioware on it. The nagging feeling I have about the game is that I don’t play or interact enough in it. It’s cut scene, combat, cut scene, explore, cut scene… wax and repeat. I’m glad some of the combat mechanics were fixed from the first one but still feel I’d like to actually play the game more.
On a completely different side note: Here’s a great article on agile development.
