So I went about to work on my own, and game up with an iconography/pictorgraphic system that covered the topical rows of my player/implementation experience interface table.
A long time fan with tinkering like most of you resulted in a reasonable but not thunderbolt group of symbols representing process. I added color coding to the symbols for prioritizing, and numeric sub and super scripting for elevation or deprioritization of production resource attribution scaling.
While I was at it, I added business systems iconography with three or four variant expressions for process streamlining, and was happy with it. Now all those little symbols I'll test rum through some process production scenarios and see how they stand up to my software factory architecture.
It was the first real game design I'd had time to seek my teeth into, and it was good to refresh at the oasis of the goddess of design.
I just heard about level design in excel for indies mentioned in the channel by Superpig, and thought I'd look into that development efficiency as well. I also took the bait and got imagediff, but as a writer, I have to admit, technology and design, wonderful artistic vistas to explore, never have the savor and sweetness of coming home artistically to one's own project. My adventuregame is really starting to shape up its processes, and my documentation base that drives the project is experiencing becoming more and more connected from a producer's standpoint.
I have to admit in the community with what we have all been seeing lately with the magnificent posts of wavinator. This dude is getting picked up in the limosine sent by the goddess of design. I always enjoy watching and interacting with a cutting artist on the leading edge of his game, and he sure has had me thinking about stories in games, as has the strong questions raised by Ketcheval.
It wasn't until I stumbled across my multi genre formula that didn't stink when it played did I realize there were interactive writing methods that cross disciplinistic lines into screenwriting and general story plot design for that matter. Here I had been chipping away at interactive writing with screenwriter's approaches, and while learning interactive writing, beginning to test in the opposite direction.
I gotta say, I think it is the epic format that really works best in large story driven games, and that's probably no news to a lot of game writers. Screenwriters tend to write in an imagic manner, but really the size of the story depicts the size of the game in some parity respect I suspect.
While all the industry lathers and furies about the growth of hot business, media and market trends in game development, I think my spider sense tells me there's about to be a huge runaway title out there to be released soon. It's the design these business elements have been waiting for, and there's going to be a trend of an order larger in market share initiated soon.
I'm sure everyone noticed Game Developer Magazine has published their First Annual Business Issue, and by golly they were smart to get this tack into the winds of the public interest in our industry now. There's been a lot of storming lately about violence, and the ESRB has been really on the PR ball, and we all should stand and give them a round of applause for their efforts on our industry's behalf during this last round of disastrous media regarding gameplay's repercussions into human life. Indeed it is a powerful medium we hold in our hands. I've never been too big a fan of reminding game designers of moral obligations any designer has to the experiencer of their design. I'm one of those First Amendment people because the founding Fathers put it first for a reason. Even in the moral whirlwind the media is in and its runaway growth resulting is every kind of program you can think of, interactive or not getting its production legs under it.
Yep, I think there is a breakthrough design out there coming, considering how many people are in various stages of production in this art and science and business.
Well, time to get into the testing of the pictographics; I'm sure there are going to be adjustments to be made. Happy Independence Day.
Adventuredesign
