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
Far Cry 5 is a great game and a world success but for how long can Ubisoft cash in on his open world winning formula?
The subscription business model, and its variants, is growing fast in North America’s main economy but it is seldom used in the game industry. Let’s analyze successful implementations and assess its benefits for both publishers and development teams.
In the previous part of my new feature on episodic design, I demonstrated how episodic storytelling can be adapted to a true action-laden shooter game and improve it. I will now do the same with another popular genre, open world games.
In the first part of this feature on episodic design, I summarized why this narrative format can significantly improve game experience. In this second part, I'll describe a game concept that merges intense action gameplay and strong episodic storytelling.
Episodic games have the reputation of offering great storytelling but weak gameplays. Does it have to be that way?
No.
In this 3 parts feature, I will explain how we could merge mainstream gameplays with the effectiveness of episodic storytelling.
Freemium games are using open loops and progression trees to foster long term retention and monetization. This design strategy is very effective but its excessive use could backfire.
Pascal Luban's Comments
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.
