Michel McBride-Charpentier's Blog
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A short soundwalk through City 17 reveals a complex acoustic ecology. Using established soundscape terminology and an open ear I try to establish some techniques for thematically integrating a soundscape with the level design.
An approach to designing the circumstances and expectations that turn normal play into performance through moments of "dramatic realization" (an idea borrowed from Irving Goffman's "The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life").
The concepts of perceptible, hidden, and false affordances are briefly examined as applied (effectively and not) to various objects in the first level of Half-Life 2.
Opportunistic play can be a lens through which to view and design certain game systems. It is a design lens, or methodology, in the same vein as Clint Hocking's notion of improvisational play.
Unfortunately I am going to have to be a bit poncy here because I want to suggest that Audiosurf -- a game made by an individual and not a university team of researchers -- is about exploring the sensations and experience of synesthaesia.
I'd like to show how the stealth combat areas in Arkham Asylum are all about intentional play and maybe needed more improvisation.
Michel McBride-Charpentier's Comments
Comment In:
[Blog - 05/09/2011 - 06:05]
An entitity called sky camera ...
An entitity called sky camera is used to mark the position of the map's origin inside the 3D Skybox. As your position changes relative to the maps origin it will be scaled and applied relative to the sky camera. It's a real-time projection from a camera inside the 3D skybox ...
Comment In:
[Feature - 01/25/2011 - 04:45]
Insightful I'd love to read ...
Insightful I'd love to read another 3 pages on the role of the level designer. I'm not sure the top down approach from intention to realization is always practical or possible. Form Follows Function is the classic design aphorism, but in AAA games I think Form Follows Fun might be ...
Comment In:
[News - 03/01/2010 - 06:43]
@Andrew That was good advice ...
@Andrew That was good advice 5-10 years ago, and still is to a certain extent now, but these programs are really coming into their own and teaching the kind of skills you can't get sitting in your dorm room or basement working with a mod team scattered across the world. ...
Comment In:
[News - 02/19/2010 - 02:26]
Scribblenauts did not deserve to ...
Scribblenauts did not deserve to sweep the portable categories. Very strange. edit: oh I thought there were three portable categories. In any case, innovation award, sure, but I thought everyone agreed the execution and actual design fell short. Guess the judges saw something nobody else did.
Comment In:
[News - 01/19/2010 - 02:07]
Best Downloadable Game is a ...
Best Downloadable Game is a category in 2010 Really I think it might be time to change that to best PSN/XBLA/WiiWare game, because on a PC every game is downloadable.
Comment In:
[News - 12/18/2009 - 12:59]
