7
Aug

Different types of Tutorials

Hello,
This blog post is the background section from our paper (I, Michael Green, Gabriella Barros, and Julian Togelius). The paper proposes the problem of tutorial generation for games, i.e. to generate tutorials which can teach players to play games, as an AI problem. The background of the paper talks about the history of tutorials and their different types. I hope this post will help developers and designers to design better tutorials for their games.

Tutorials are the first interactions players encounter in a game. They help players understand game rules and, ultimately, learn how to play with them. In the game industry, developers experimented with different tutorial formats [1]. In the arcade era, when most games were meant to be picked up and played quickly, they either had very simple mechanics, or they contained mechanics that players could relate to: β€œPress right to move”, β€œPress up to jump”, and so on. As a result, these games usually lacked a formal tutorial. As their complexity increased and home consoles started to explode in popularity, formal tutorials became more common.

24
Apr

Help is Needed

Hello everyone,

Sokobn

Sorry for being away for long time, but as you all know I am working on my master’s thesis in Procedural Content Generation (PCG) of puzzle games and levels for Puzzle Script engine by Stephan Lavelle. I generated lots of levels using different methods for 5 different games and I need some human feedback on everything.

If you have some free time to help me with it please consider playing a handcrafted game and then one of the techniques (playing handcrafted give you reference to the best designed games) (link). Do the assessment after finishing every level to remember it because after playing 16 levels you may forget some games.

27
Sep

The RoguePuzzleGame prototype is now online

Hello Everyone,
Past GameZanga (Arabian game jam happens twice a year) I created a game called Random RPG for it, it was completely disaster but I felt it had some potential.

So I gave it around 1 more week of work and here what I got The RoguePuzzleGame, it was picked to be viewed at the Saudi Gamer’s Day (a Game Expo happens in Saudi Arabia once a year) but I didn’t feel very confident about the game and I always think its a very bad game and I was going to threw it away and stop developing in it but I decided to release a prototype and get some feedback about it.

14
Feb

The Mother of All Post-Mortems

Hey All,
I know I don’t write lots of post mortem or design posts or talking about what I am doing for long time. I think that led me to be good in lots of stuffs but became some how not good in Game Design.

In my view Game Design is about talking, trying stuff showing it to other good designers and having feedback πŸ™‚ the same with level design πŸ™‚ The problem is that most of my friends in Egypt either don’t have time (if they had experience) or they are still amateur so they are just amazed with what I am doing without making a good discussion :S

31
Dec

2012 Year Recap and 2013 Hopes

Hey All,
I wish everyone is happy today and aiming for better in next year πŸ™‚ than 2012 πŸ™‚
This year was amazing for me although I got depressed and stopped working on games and other bad things happen but an overall look it was an amazing year with lots of games released and some of them were large games that took a lot of time to finish

So Let’s Recap this year fast, First thing is my games let’s talk about this year

The Power: I finished that game last year (2011) as a collaboration project with Alexitron, It took around a year to be finished (not entire year working on it). The game stayed too long in sponsoring I sent emails to lots of people begging them to sponsor it for some good money so I told Alexitron I will release it for free but he was in need for money so he told me lets sell it cheap. So it got sponsor from Game Pirate (it was a bit low deal but I liked working with them).

15
May

Week Post

Hey all,
There is no upgrades happened in PaceMaker Flash version as I didnt work on it this week instead I saw IronMan II movie and KickAss Movie.

KickAss is awesome movie reall amazing πŸ™‚ about IronMan I dlove it, it is funny and awesome πŸ™‚ you should really see both espicially KickAss πŸ™‚

I am working these days on my Graduation Project Game (Hello World!)
Tomy (Game Artist) is now working on the base character πŸ™‚ hoping to finish it soon so I can show you some of his work πŸ™‚
And I and my team are making unit testing on first prototype of the game itself.