Developing a New Major

things I like about the book - lots of videogame examples - games we could never hope to own so we get lots of examples to help us understand, covers a lot of info - gives good intro to many aspects of game design, there are some questions for each chapter to help guide your reading, lots of basic vocab is covered (not pulled out explicitly, no glossary - 2 drawbacks). Things I don’t like - it seems choppy - little bits on lots of topics and it can be overwhelming.  but remember class is an intro, chance for you to see the variety of decisions we have to make as developers, try your hand at it. Going to use the info in the book to analyze games - videogames and analog games

Big topics - platform, player mode (single, two, local/LAN multiplayer, mmo), time interval, genres, market - big basic decisions you have to make for your game - lots of possible games for every combination of these big topics, as ya look over your notes think about all the ways you could combine these things

Platform

• to understand platform - what would have to change if we wanted to put ??? game on the DS, on the 360, on the Wii?
• what’s your preferred gaming platform and why?

player mode

• what’s the main difference between single player and multiplayer (single player - you play against hte computer with NPCs, multiplayer - you compete against other people)
• interesting question on p. 89 - if you’re going to build single player games what platforms wouldn’t be ideal?

time interval

• are there some player modes and time intervals that won’t work together?

genre

genres in games mean the same thing as genres in movies or literature - based on a variety of aspects - like gameplay or turn taking

each group take one of the genres and identify major characteristics to share with class

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