Game design. We love games. Games are everywhere. And you know what? They’re interactive. Like people do things with a controller, and then the game does something different. We love that. We love interactivity. We love the back and forth. And we love thinking about this in terms of brands. Like when someone’s interacting with your brand, that’s interesting, right? And isn’t it interesting how this interaction is so much more than people just watching pictures in order?
Then there’s the amount of time people play games. Man, they spend a lot of time playing games. A lot of time playing a game, interacting with and maybe even thinking about your brand. That’s pretty cool. You don’t really get that as much with a quick hit viral video.
Casual games, puzzle games, silly games, massively multiplayer online games. Any games. Games in flash. Games on your iPod. Games on the XBox Live Arcade. Games here. Games there. Games everywhere. We love them, you love them, we love building them, and they are effective. And fun.
You know that Red Bull makes an energy drink. You may even know that Red Bull puts on those wild events where people drive shit off a dock into water. BUT did you know that Red Bull invented it’s own sport (Red Bull Air Race) or a helicopter that can do a back flip? Has two Formula 1 teams? Hosts a Cliff Diving world series? Could definitely take your dad in a fight? Throws the biggest world wide break dance competition? Made downhill full contact ice hockey racing a real thing? Probably not.
That was the problem for Red Bull online: diffused presence, minimal cross-pollination of their awesome properties, poor search, and no clean way to show off and share their sickness. The truth is, Red Bull is everywhere, and they wanted to show everyone who has ever taken a sip of their magical beverage what they mean by “Red Bull Gives You Wings”.
We spent the last few months working with Red Bull and just launched the new Redbull.com! It’s pretty fabulous really. We took all their different properties across the globe, housed them within one awesome CMS, made the site content driven, and got out of the way of all the sick content that you really want to see. Oh yeah, and it’s built in HTML (unlike their previous sites that had heavy use of Flash) so it’s now search friendly and easily shareable and trackable. Bitchin, right?
Take a look at the homepage. It’s built to be modular and highlight the best of the best. It even has a feed that is sortable by media type.
Scientists once decried my knowledge of mammoths as “very, very poor”. In fact, my entire knowledge of mammoths could be distilled down to a few simple bullet points:
They can be used as vacuum cleaners
They can be used as showers
They are pretty much not around anymore
Fortunately, this all changed when I had the privilege of helping some Barbarians on a project for the wonderful people at the San Diego Zoo. The Zoo has a brand new exhibit called Elephant Odyssey that teaches visitors about Asian elephants and their prehistoric ancestors, Columbian mammoths.
As a Flash developer, games are definitely one of my favorite things to build. Still, as fun as developing a game can be, the dread of getting the nitty gritty of a game set up can sometimes put a damper on that fun. That’s why I’m always on the lookout for great game development platforms that smooth out that process as much as possible.
Rather recently, I discovered Eric Smith’s rather amazing Citrus Engine and I was quite impressed. Built in ActionScript 3.0, it’s a fairly robust Flash sidescrolling platform game engine that allows quick and easy development. It even makes game physics a little less painful to implement, by integrating the Box2D physics engine into the game mechanics.
Here’s a rundown on some key features (from Eric’s website):
Blazing 50 FPS in the browser on current machines, and 250+ FPS on the desktop (or Adobe AIR).
Physics-based engine allows for tumbling crates, pulleys, vehicles, and just about anything else you can imagine, without the limitations of a grid.
The Level Architect visual level editor makes it easier to create level blue prints, then tweak your level to your hearts desire.
Robust documentation includes and ASDoc API and a developer-friendly manual.
Standards-based code API means developers and designers spend more time tweaking the fun stuff, and less time debugging.
Level-based progressive downloading allows gamers to start playing the game quicker by only downloading what the next level needs.
I’m definitely excited to dig deeper into this. Eric says it’s still in beta, but I still encourage everyone interested to check it out. I look forward to seeing him add more awesomeness to this in the coming months.
on February 02, 2009 at 08:28 PM
filed under: Games
First is Bryce Glasses Flow maps & Frag Grenades twoparter on boxes and arrows. Its an interview with Comm Nelson, the interaction designer for Halo 3…
“Online systems that facilitate player experiences around social interaction, custom content sharing and online communities have received a lot of attention by both the gaming press and fans and is definitely a hot trend in gaming. The gaming press has even begun to draw comparisons with these features to You Tube, My Space and Facebook. My observation is that developers that are offering more features in [the] user experience around the game are seeing more of a need to specialize and fill roles specifically around user experience and interface design.”
Second is an interview by Joshua Bokardo with Amy Jo Kim, a veteran thinker in the UX / community space as well as the game industry. She has very interesting background. The interview is about how game mechanics and interaction design work together…
“I think game design principles have become common knowledge for young Web designers. Many of the people who are designing and building these sites grew up playing games, and are familiar with game design principles – even if they’re not ‘officially’ game designers themselves. It’s a testament to how pervasive and mainstream gaming has become.”
Lastly, is a hot tip from my co-worker Chandler on a London Review of Books article about video games success as an industry and its contrasting lack of success as a culturally and artistically valuable medium…
“There is no other medium that produces so pure a cultural segregation as video games, so clean-cut a division between the audience and the non-audience. Books, films, TV, dance, theatre, music, painting, photography, sculpture, all have publics which either are or aren’t interested in them, but at least know that these forms exist, that things happen in them in which people who are interested in them are interested. They are all part of our current cultural discourse. Video games aren’t.”
I feel like I am forgetting one more, oh well, maybe one of you know it?
mentioned earlier that Doom is 15 years old today. Wow. Has it really been that long? I have many fond memories of Doom—of hours spent working my way through the single-player mode on my dad’s 286, of coordinating modem sessions with my friend Carl so we could play dial-up multiplayer games, and even of going to my Dad’s office on the weekends with friends and playing network matches. Good times.
So of course, I couldn’t help clicking through the link in the Offworld post and compiling myself a copy of Chocolate Doom. I’m pretty excited about it, even though I still have to go digging through my old floppy disk collection to find a valid IWAD.
For the less nerdtacular (and those who don’t need a mouse to play Doom), Offworld also linked to a pretty fantastic use of Adobe’s Alchemy tech that enabled someone to port Doom into Flash. Doom in a browser? Now that’s a portal to Hell.
So I guess an owner of Tiger Woods Golf by Electronic Arts wanted to show a bug that was in the released version of the game by uploading to YouTube….EA got wind of this and posted a response to it, getting Mr. Woods himself to participate.
Pretty great that EA took the time to do this kind of thing.
CBS Outernet announced last week the launch of GameStopTV, an in-store digital video network using high-definition screens. I am usually pretty annoyed with in-store TV channels because they are so, well, annoying. In this case the content is absolutely relevant to the retail experience and as such is a natural extension of the shopping experience. Awesome.
I wish my local Shaws would learn something from CBS. God, standing in-line to buy ground beef tonight I had to endure three back-to-back television ads for tampons. Ugh.
This came my way last week, and kinda blew my mind. On his eponymous site, Don Hodges has looked into some of the most famous programming bugs in early gaming history – the Donkey Kong kill screen, Pac Man’s level 256 split screen, Dig Dug’s instant-death screen, and others. Although the solutions are very technical (we’re talking assembly code here), the level of detail and understanding of the algorithms is what really impressed me.
on August 17, 2009 at 12:57 PM
