Post by gliptitude on Aug 18, 2012 1:06:43 GMT -5
I was looking through this guy's web site about game design, and he is the guy who designed the games for the GCE game watches, "Game Time" and "Arcade Time". I guess these were the first games he worked on, and he talks about the process a bit on his site...
In the Game Time project he was initially provided with the LCD pallet and asked to devise several games using it. Basically it is an array of circles with (half)rings surrounding them. So you choose which of these shapes to fill in at each moment. He described this challenge as something like a kid's coloring book.
In the subsequent Arcade Time project, he was asked to devise his own LCD pallet, according to a few requirements. The array he came up with has some ambiguous (but articulate) shapes which can be viewed as submarines, space saucers, bullets etc, depending on the context, so that several different games can be played using this same array.
This seems like a really fun and simplified method of game design to me. The Coleco (and other) tabletop games used LED displays in a similar way, with a pallet/array of defined shapes, and added various colors (not sure if these were color variations in the overlay or if the actual LED lights were different colors). I've played some of these games and I think the visual effect is really cool...
You can play versions of these games on your PC (called "simulators" rather than "emulators"):
www.madrigaldesign.it/sim/dnload.php
I'm thinking of playing around with new pallets/arrays for fun. Maybe I post here if people seem interested.
In the Game Time project he was initially provided with the LCD pallet and asked to devise several games using it. Basically it is an array of circles with (half)rings surrounding them. So you choose which of these shapes to fill in at each moment. He described this challenge as something like a kid's coloring book.
In the subsequent Arcade Time project, he was asked to devise his own LCD pallet, according to a few requirements. The array he came up with has some ambiguous (but articulate) shapes which can be viewed as submarines, space saucers, bullets etc, depending on the context, so that several different games can be played using this same array.
This seems like a really fun and simplified method of game design to me. The Coleco (and other) tabletop games used LED displays in a similar way, with a pallet/array of defined shapes, and added various colors (not sure if these were color variations in the overlay or if the actual LED lights were different colors). I've played some of these games and I think the visual effect is really cool...
You can play versions of these games on your PC (called "simulators" rather than "emulators"):
www.madrigaldesign.it/sim/dnload.php
I'm thinking of playing around with new pallets/arrays for fun. Maybe I post here if people seem interested.