Me
I’m Will, a Game Designer and QA professional specialising in user interaction, data analysis and design. I have experience as a Quality Assurance (QA) Analyst, QA Coordinator and Project Manager, working with sports fantasy and fan engagement products for a variety of clients. These roles enabled me to put my game design education to use, as I blended user interaction and game mechanic theory with data and user experience fundamentals. The intersection of theoretical design principles, practical data science while achieving clean interaction and design implementations is where I can bring a unique perspective.Advocating for the user and their experience with our products is a hallmark of my practice, and I believe I have a unique skill set to enable this.
Work
Waking the Ghost
For 30 years, Game Development has contained a conflict between the emergence of
narrative design and the game designers who define much of what a game will be. For
years, game design and technology have ruled game development, and justifiably so. But
many prominent members of the game development community have begun to wonder
aloud if perhaps this status quo should change. That perhaps for gaming to reach its
potential, a renewed focus on narrative design should be made. This paper will examine the
history of game narrative development, and how a few psychological theories may help to
progress narrative design to reach gaming’s potential.
Game Design and Flow: How to
Design Games to Better Maintain a
Flow Experience.
Since 1990, when Mihaly Csikszentmihaly released his book explaining his theory of Flow. Games
designers have been working to understand how it applies to the games they make. Now, in 2015, it
is well understood what conditions must exist for flow to be achievable. However, what isn’t as
easily understood, is how can we better design games to maintain that state of flow once it has been
achieved? This essay will analyse 3 games, Diablo 3, Skyrim, and Ori and the Blind Forest. To try and
get an understanding of how the developers of those games were able to achieve flow, and how
they were able to maintain it for the betterment of the players’ experience.
Tropes in Modern RPG’s and how they
may be doing more harm than good.
Today, almost all RPG’s include some kind of experience mechanic, to increase level
and thus make the character more powerful as they “level-up”. It isn’t uncommon to see skill or talent
trees, that give the player powerful abilities as they level. And many games today attempt to mesh
RPG’s with other genres, whether they be First Person Shooters (FPS) or Third Person Shooters (TPS)
and others. This has led to mechanics from those genres seeping into more traditional RPG’s and
indeed, diluting the experience of those games as a result. This article will bring some of these tropes
into the limelight, and pose the question, are they doing more harm than good?
Playtime
Attack of the Killer Space Crabs