Trends

It was a busy class today.

The class researched trends in gaming platforms. We started with a discussion and came up with a few current and future trends

  • 3D
  • Touch Screen
  • HD Graphics
  • Network Multiplayer
  • Ad Hoc Networks
  • WiFi
  • Interactive (motion) gameplay
  • Downloads
  • Blu Ray

The class went off to research these. At the same time the whole class were sent an invite to the new wiki through Glow mail. After some small teething problems we all managed to get logged in and created some new pages.

Wikispaces is a new direction for us in the class, over the next few weeks we will set out our pages and upload the materials we have already created.

Just a reminder there will be a NAB on LO1 Identify gaming platforms and related technologies at the end of the month.

Code Year

Well Code Year is underway and there is still time to learn. It’s part of the Code Academy program that aims to get more people creating websites and games.

Sign up and each week you will be sent an email,  it takes about an hour to complete the tasks. No previous experience is required and the tutorials are interactive, so no boring sitting about watching videos.

Kodu

This is a fantastic game development environment is free on Windows PCs. We started to create a game and within minutes we had a working version.

Kodu lets kids create games on the PC and XBox via a simple visual programming language. Kodu can be used to teach creativity, problem solving, storytelling, as well as programming. Anyone can use Kodu to make a game, young children as well as adults with no design or programming skills.

There is a lot of information about Kodu online and youtube has lots of Kodu videos and tutorials. One of the best ways to learn it though is to download a project and just jump into the editor and have a play about. There are built in tutorials and I found these to be very helpful in learning Kodu, however, if you want to watch some videos you can do that here.

Here are some helpful links.

Play My Code

I have just been told about Play My Code. What a great little site.

You learn to program in Quby which is a Ruby like language, this is fairly easy to learn, although it is text based rather than Scratch’s more intuitive graphical interface. You can view the code of the games on the site and this allows you to learn from people who have developed games.

The site would benefit from some tutorials but the chances are that these can be found in youtube (I can’t check this from work though)

Vampire Physics

I love “Physics” games, where you have to set up a sequence of events to do a task. I found a little cracker over the holidays, Vampire Physics, you have to convert all the humans to vampires while at the same time making sure that they don’t get killed by all the normal things.

What make the game great is the built in level editor, where you can create your own levels for other users to play. Great fun and it keeps the game fresher for longer.

Story Design

Today the topic was story design. There are lots of great stories in video games, some are hidden, some obvious and some virtually non existent. Good game design has to try and blend the story into the action.

There are a number of links on this topic and even an entire BSc(Hons) around it.

I found this site which tries focus on the story which makes the action take a back seat. What do you think?

Can you think of any games that make you come back time and again, not for the action but for the story?

Open Source Games

I am a big fan of free and open source games. They tend to require a lower spec than today’s block busters. Here is a list of some of the best games out there. You might recognise some of them, we have a lot of them on the machines.

Although looking at the list I may need to update some of the games, it looks like I am a release or two behind on them. I will update speed dreams tomorrow and add in the extra cars, etc.

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