The Doglion

So the Kinect is coming soon, and game designers are now tasked with the challenge of finding new innovative game ideas and designs that work with the Kinect. Not just work with it, but that are now possible (meaning that they had been impossible before). Obvious game types that lent themselves for motion controls in the past are dance games, for example. On a standard controller not much more than rhythmic button pressing, but with some way of capturing actual dance motion it allows for a an engaging dance experience (of course still nothing compared to actually going out with friends). Read More

There is a genre that I really can’t stand playing, not because the games are dead boring or of generally bad quality, but because they feel tooreal to me as a player. It’s the horror game genre with games such as the classic Resident Evils and Silent Hills. I mean those games apparently are amazing masterpieces, from what I hear, but I never can get my nerves together for long enough to finish one of them. In fact, I usually quit the game after the second scary moment in a game. In Silent Hill 2 I stopped the game before even getting to the town. That whole eerie fog and the sounds scared the living hell out of me. Funny though that I find most of the supposedly scary horror movies (Grudge, Ring, both jap. versions and etc) really just entertaining, and not that scary at all. I can’t help but laugh out loud sometimes even when a particular cheap trick is used in a particular cheap way. So…what is it with those freaking games? Read More

Hello people! Just got back from the countryside, and wow just one week gone and the online space seems to have moved on so much, I don’t have the time to read all my RSS subscriptions, lol.

As I was away from my computer and enjoying a refreshingly intact ecosystem (my homeland of west Mongolia is beautiful) I was pondering on where to go with my JRPG Engine, or better, how to make use of it. I’m not very thrilled with making a traditional game adhering to genre standards, so I’ll share with you some of my thoughts on RPG design in general.  It’s all loosely related to my previous post on non-linearity. As I see it when playing the common RPGs out there today (Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age, Fallout 3), I find the main philosophies of RPG design are: Bethesdas open-world games, the Bioware RPGs and JRPGs.

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