04.19.07

Life and Death

Posted in Game Design at 9:39 pm by martin

There’s a great old game I remember for my Amiga, called Life And Death. The WHDLoad download has the manual and solution, but not the game itself. I found the PC version at a number of abandonware sites, including:

The beeper codes and solution are available from the XTC Abandonware site, and I’ve mirrored them here.

Actually, that XTC site has a bunch of games, including old Infocom games like “A Mind Forever Voyaging.” Cool.

I’d still love an Amiga version…

12.12.06

Review of “Game Design: Theory & Practice” by Richard Rouse III

Posted in Game Design, Review at 8:43 pm by martin

I’m evaluating books on game design as potential texts for a game design course at Union College and also perhaps RPI. The first book I’m looking at is “Game Design: Theory & Practice” 2nd edition by Richard Rouse III.

Overall, I like it. He mixes high level ideas with both analysis of specific games and interviews with game designers, and talks a lot about nuts and bolts. For example, there’s a chapter on the design document, and another on documentation in general. There are also two appendices of example design docs, one for a hypothetical game, the other for The Suffering. He also takes a historical perspective, analyzing Centipede and Tetris along with The Sims and GTA III.

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06.12.06

Talking at Boston Postmortem

Posted in Game Design at 3:17 pm by martin

I’ll be giving my talk on game design, Just One More Game…, at the Boston Postmortem tomorrow. Here’s hoping it goes over well!