I will be hosting a roundtable at Meaningful Play. Information about it can be found here. In short, I think failure is very productive, but how do we leverage that failure for the benefit of players? I’m actually looking at the effect of failure on people’s perceptions of themselves as well. Right now I’m looking at …
Realm of The Mad God
I’m always trying to play new games that are made up of interesting mechanics, or are just plain fun. The following games has both. Realm of the Mad God I’ve been addicted to this game for the past couple of days. Realm of the Mad God is a shoot’em up (like R-type) mixed with a …
Making a blog from scratch for 20$ using dreamhost.
Every so often I get a request to help with some techy stuff. To be completely honest, I love doing this kinda stuff because I like to make things. I also like to see things other people create things. Helping people to get blogs up seems to fill both of these needs. So, without further …
Reflections on the Gee unit meeting.
This weekend I attended the MacArthur emerging scholars meeting in Arizona. The following post contains some reflections from that meeting. Day1 The most interesting thing that came out of our conversation, for me anyway, where the issues surrounding designing for all people. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great to be inclusive, but I …
Bots! What about the learning?
Learning component One of the projects assigned in Moses Wolfenstein’s class on Games and learning was to create an educational game. Because bots! already had a, limited, coding component I decided to use the assignment as an opportunity to work on my game. At the beginning there seemed to be several ways I could expand …
Introduction to Operant Conditioning
(this was originally published in NOTALAND in 2009, because the site is no longer operational I have reposted it here.) Thorndike, Edward, (1911) Animal Intelligence, New York, The MacMillan Company Thorndike presents his findings about intelligence with the results from his studies involving cats, dogs and chicks. Thorndike studies imitation, discovery and association using different …
Bots! Playtest, playtest, playtest!
What’s in a game? I cannot stress how important I consider playtesting. I remember creating games growing up and immediately having my brother try them out. Thanks to his suggestions, I was able to make many otherwise mediocre games into something we had fun playing. Isn’t a memorable experience what we want when we create …
Bots! Good ideas die hard
Killing your babies After a few rounds of successful prototyping I started to think about other things I might be able to incorporate into the game. One such idea was the ability to execute special moves. In order to enhance the strategy component of the game I had always pictured being able to string a …
Bots! The beginning
In the spirit of other indie game devs, I will be writing a couple of posts chronicling the development of Bots. Bots is a synchronous strategy game where two players compete to be the last one standing, or collect the most coins. The Beginning. The idea for bots came to me during GDC where, once …
Bastion
Bastion Joystiq Score: 4/5 Gamespot Score: 8.5/10 Common Sense Media rating 5/5, Ages 11+ By now you’ve probably heard of this award winning title by the Indie company Supergiant games, but if you haven’t this game is definitely worth a look. Bastion is an Action RPG set in a post apocalyptic world. By assuming the role of …