A Thing to Avoid in Large Game Design Company

One thing to watch out for in a large game design company is: never let people not care about the project and just let them focus on "their" part of the work. This leads to UI artists over-emphasizing their part, the programmers making the game overcomplicated, the modellers over model their art. This may seem good, but when game put together, all the components will try to over-compete with each other. It makes the game seem very noisy. Going back would be hard, since the artists would likely be like: oh but.. that's fine. If I make it more grey, it looks bad.

When the parts of a project are good examined individually and then put together, the project is likely worse. (100% of the time) It is like how when you have 6 delicious plates of food, all very vibrant, all very delicious. We put these plates on a dinner table together, they suddenly don't look very appetizing. It is also like how when you put 5 top opera singer together and sing, the show would be hard to bare. A law can be derived from these examples, which is :there should maximum be 1 leader per group. Even if the the group members are all previously leaders. In order for this to happen, the other leaders need to change their behaviour a bit. So, when we apply this law to running a large game design company, it is importnat to make sure certain artwork actually look mediocre, so the true leader can shine. And shine, and shine!

Stuff I Expect From Diablo 3

Diablo 3 is coming out soon, yes. So far, from examining the game guides, there seems to be lack of attributes. The stats on the weapons appear to be too simple and based off of few categories of stats. Few stats means there would be little manipulation of these stats, thus lesser variety of gameplay. In their previous game, Warcraft III, DotA was able to be born mainly actually due to the stats, the attributes, the variety of reasonable variebles, not the graphics. If a weapon only has +attack power, +attack speed, +critical chance as all of its possible bonuses, then that leaves little room for variation amongst classes. Also, gameplay would be obvious, since it's just simple math. Attack - armor = damage the mobs would take upon hits. Talent tree cannot be in vibrant existance if there are few variety of stats for gears of characters.

What I suggest is they change the attributes of character to strength, agility, wisdom, intelligence, endurance and stamina. On top of that, more specific attributes would be fire resistance, ice resistance, electricity resistance, shadow resistance, critical chance, lethalness, resilience, toughness. Strength would dictate shield block value, maybe how much hp and mainly melee damage and possibly some ranged damage. Agility would contribute to ranged damage, movement speed perhaps, critical chance, reaction time, animation time, accuracy and dodge. Wisdom would be mana capacity and mana rege, some spell damage. Intelligence would be spell critical level, spell damage, puzzle solving ability. Endurance would be energy rege, environmental resistance (oxygen recovery, wound recovery). Last but not least, stamina would be maximum hp, hp rege and running duration maybe. Strength could also be how well a character can lift weight. Where as agility would be how fast one can sprint across a trap or how far the character can jump across a cliff. High wisdom could also increase detection of certain mobs. Also, the strength to endurance ratio would somehow determine physical balance level or something. So, this makes focusing on one stat might not be particularly good sometimes. Having a variety of these attributes allow the developers to really characterize each mobs to their designed traits. The characterizations using these variety of attributes will make the mobs' gameplay behaviour synchronize with their graphics. As for the more specific attributes, lethalness would determine the critical damage bonus where as critical chance is by word the chance to perform a critical strike upon hit. Resilience can be resistance to stun or bash or daze. Toughness can be demoralization toughness or physical toughness, which would be high resistance one is to wounds or burns.

It's up to Blizzard really, if they wish to turn Diablo series into a RockBand kind of game, that's fine.

Simcity Games

Simcity games, not very well known in society, nor in the gaming communities. Simcity is a box of treasure with a not so treasure-y package to the eyes of many people.