Pascal Luban's Blog
Pascal Luban is a freelance creative director and game designer based in France. He has been working in the game industry as a game and level designer since 1995 and has been commissioned by major studios and publishers including Activision, SCEE, Ubisoft and DICE. In particular, he was lead level designer on the 'versus' multiplayer versions of both Splinter Cell - Pandora Tomorrow and Chaos Theory, he designed CTF-Tornado, a UT3 mod multiplayer map built to showcase the applications of physics to gameplay, he was creative director on Wanted – Weapons of Fate and lead game designer on Fighters Uncaged, the first combat game for Kinect. His first major published title as game designer was Alone In The Dark - The New Nightmare.
Leveraging his design experience on console and PC titles, Pascal is also working on Free-to-Play games for Facebook and mobile platforms. His references include Wars and Battles, Twist and Pop, a match-3 game, and Hockey Legends.
Lately, he has been working on several PC games on Steam (Of Kings and Men, The Black Death).
His first game for mobile platforms, The One Hope, was published in 2007 by the Irish publishers Gmedia and has received the Best In Gaming award at the 2009 Digital Media Awards of Dublin.
Pascal is design consultant for the Kainuu Gaming Cluster in Finland and gives master classes throughout Europe on various game design-related topics such as freemium design or level design.
His website: www.gamedesignstudio.com
LinkedIn profile: www.linkedin.com/in/pluban
Expert Blogs
Two new trends are emerging in playtesting: Their integration very early in the development cycle and the multiplication of their formats, from the most economical to the most expensive and complex. Let's review three formats that illustrate these trends
While the game industry is swamped by the battle royale tsunami and its exacerbated individualism, a game genre is slowly emerging: Cooperative games where players should not compete but must cooperate to win.
The “game” Florence has received the 2019 BAFTA best mobile game award, but this title can barely qualify as a game. Nevertheless, the BAFTA jury has not gone mad; it has rewarded a title that illustrates a significant trend in game design.
Apple has announced its new game distribution service, Apple Arcade. This subscription-based service offers unlimited access to games present in its catalog. Is it a good opportunity for independent studios?
Freemium? Premium? If you have a hard time choosing which one is best for your game, mixed monetization strategy could be the right one for you.
Increasing number of games include progression trees in their core gameplay experience. The question is how to compute the values associated with each threshold. There exist three techniques. Let’s review them and assess their pros and cons.
Pascal Luban's Comments
Comment In:
[Blog - 08/29/2019 - 10:58]
Glad you wrote about it. ...
Glad you wrote about it. I published a blog, over a year ago, on the same issue: Onboarding: Not only for free-to-play games anymore https://www.game-design-workshop.com/onboarding-ce-n-est-pas-que-pour-les-jeux-free-to-play .
Comment In:
[Blog - 02/05/2018 - 10:42]
Hello Daniel and thank you ...
Hello Daniel and thank you for your note.Serialized games can, indeed, create rich and deep universes with recurring characters and plots arching over several games. From this point of view, they are more effective than episodic games. However, their main weakness is the time it takes to develop one game. ...
Comment In:
[Feature - 11/22/2011 - 05:05]
Don't forget that F2P gaming ...
Don't forget that F2P gaming is drawing millions new players to our industry. As a consequence, overall revenue for our industry should grow. Furthermore, a key point I am advocating is my strong belief that F2P mechanisms will merge with other business models.
