Despite my feelings about blogging expressed in my very initial post on this very blog, I have come to a new appreciation of it after being put to the task for work (nonsubtle plug: blog.datamensional.com) on regular occasion. Seeing how people came across the blog, which articles are receiving the most traffic, and discussing their thoughts on the techniques and information provided has proven rather enjoyable and satisfying. It has actually driven me to seek out others' blogs on some of my non-work interests, particularly Game Design with particular emphasis Procedural Content Generation. As I turn to finally embark on my own little Game Development Adventure in my spare time, I figured I would throw my own hat into the ring of debate on these subjects and possibly strike up some deep and/or spirited discussion on some of the facets of this whole process that have particularly intrigued me.
So now for a little about me. My personal life is not something I like to share with strangers beyond what is needed, and I already have a blog for my professional life, so beyond this post I probably will not divulge anything beyond what is immediately relevant. I am currently employed as a Business Intelligence Consultant at Datamensional, which is where I have been working since I graduated from college in 2010 with a BS in Computer Science and Music (that's two separate majors, not some strange mutant degree). My specialties were embedded system design (for Computer Science) and Theory/Composition (for Music). I live near a rather large army fort, from which I have many friends, and how I met my wife (we just got married), who is a flautist in the Army Band. She also plays videogames, but is more into card and board games, of which she has taught me a few already. She is very much the energetic, enthusiastic complement to my subdued, analytical nature.
The observant might have noticed so far that I don't have a degree in game design or even a specialty, and I don't actually work in the industry. In fact, other than a couple brief attempts with some friends a couple times, I have never developed a game. At this point, most people would probably be wondering why my musings would be worth their time with the blogs of so many developers, indie and otherwise across the web. I suppose the first one would have to do with how long I have been playing games.
My first system was an old 2600 that my kindergarten teacher gave my family because she felt that I needed more stimulation. The games immediately sparked my imagination like little else. It was later succeeded by a Super Nintendo that my uncle gave us, and so on and so forth to the present day. So the first point is that I have been playing games for quite a while. But I have also been analyzing them for a long time.
The main reason that I majored in Music is because I wanted to unlock the secrets to what made music enjoyable and create those wide ranging emotional responses in people. As such, I absolutely loved Music Theory, even if ultimately it doesn't quite explain music so much as provide a tool to analytically describe and study music, allowing you to better perform it and apply the same concepts to your own creations. I have approached other things like this, which lead to tvtropes.org becoming one of my favorite sites to just explore when I have a little time to kill. As such, tropes will end up being used as terminology from time to time here, just to offer fair warning. As time has gone on, I have read progressively more in depth articles, columns, and blogs about the subject of game design, and have gone from my thinking "What would make this game better?" as a child to more challenging questions like "Why did they choose to do this?", "Why is this fun?", and "How would changing ____ effect the overall experience?"
My other major is much more directly relevant to the discussion at hand, as is my profession. My company has a great deal of transparency when it comes to the entire range of its goings on, thanks primarily to its size. Knowing how much it costs to keep a company of this size running on a daily basis is very enlightening, especially when you are on the front line of the business and know how much work even simple projects can take. With the exception of many of the indie studios, game studios have more personnel and all of them have longer production cycles. This is important to understand when studying games, because many design decisions are made due to this instead of gameplay or aesthetic reasons (however unfortunate that may be at times).
That's enough about me though. I am also starting on a game of my own, all but from scratch. This will probably not amount to a career or even a marketable product, but is just something that I have wanted to do. I plan to have many of my articles surround little coding experiments that I make for it, as well as discuss my own design decisions as I make them. I am looking forward to feedback as I go about this process, so long as it remains well thought out and constructive. I'm not a Graphic artist in the least, so don't expect anything pretty.
If you actually read through this whole thing, Thanks. Either way, I will try to keep it to more manageable chunks in the future.
Monday, April 23, 2012
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