This is a guest post by David Czarnecki. Uncharted 2: Among Thieves supports Twitter notifications of certain game events directly to your Twitter account. Unfortunately, I think there are areas of improvement for future games wanting to incorporate similar Twitter notifications. Specifically they are: Twitter notifications from Uncharted 2 display as being from “API”. This [...]

Title: Up Down Solitaire Platform: iPhone Website: www.updownsolitaire.com Developer: Evan Gilbert Price: $0.99 There are few things which are better than the original. To this day, nothing beats the original recipe of Coca-Cola made with proper cane sugar rather than corn fructose syrup. Yet sometimes, we are pleasantly surprised and the new ‘flavor’ of the [...]

Opinions, impressions, thoughts, preferences, all of those bits are all fine and dandy but in reality what do you really want to know? Yes or no. Good or bad. Inspired by David Czarnecki a friend and colleague of mine I bring to you This Week In Binary Review. A collection of events, products, and other [...]

There are some games such as Far Cry 2, Bioshock, and Shadow of the Colossus which we can analyze their game design mechanics and discuss topics such as ludonarrative dissonance. They are games that have depth and provide something a bit more than a shallow entertainment experience. WET isn’t one of those games and it [...]

This post is a continuation from Syllogism Is Practical For Narrative which discusses how practical syllogism would go about generating narrative for a semi-autonomous agent based on an the desires of actors. Polemical Model The polemical model is largely based on Vladimir Propp’s 31 functions and what Greimas felt that Propp missed out on regarding [...]

Very few times are we given the opportunity or luxury to brainstorm. It’s one of the few times where a certain buzz consumes everyone involved, spirits are lifted, and it seems like you could conquer the world! Recently I had to complete a design exercise – very much like this very design exercise – that [...]

What do all villains have in common? They are the reason ‘good’ exists. They challenge and question the status quo. They tend to shake things up a bit and after they’re through and done things have changed – usually for the better! Granted, sometimes sacrifices have to be made but as the saying goes, what [...]

Last week, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen for the Nintendo DS made it’s way to video game stores, and with it so did the multiplayer design feature which I was the lead for, Battle For Earth. Following upon the success of Transformers: Battle For The Allspark Agora Games once again collaborated with Vicarious Visions and [...]

This post is a continuation from  Énoncé – The Base Of A Narrative which discusses how said semi-autonomous agent would go about creating narrative based on an énoncé model. This post deals with the similar issues discussed in Énoncé – The Base Of A Narrative but this time, using practical syllogism as a base for narrative. Practical Syllogism [...]

This post is a continuation from Creating Interesting Narrative which tackles the problem of how to create an interesting narrative. This deals with more of the actual structure behind creating the narrative rather than what is needed to create an interesting narrative, more specifically how to do so based on the concept of a Narrative Énoncé. [...]