![]() The Wing Commander series has spawned a huge number of looky-likeys over the years and formed its own genre. the October issue's Top 100 Games (as voted on) list includes the WC series at #42. It appears that this article reveals the title of the next Wing Commander game. Strike Team? Raxxman was kind enough to type us up a copy of an article which appears in the November issue of the UK PC Gamer. The most qualified game designers continually ask themselves and ask of their designs: What is the FUN THING that I do all of the time in this game? What is my production team doing to bring this FUN THING to fruition? The qualified designer is capable of eliminating the unnecessary in effort to focus on the elements of production that support the central FUN idea of the game. Although understanding of mass media disciplines are crucial to building a believable script, they come in at a distant second to the understanding of CORE FUN. In this business it is easy to be confused (often intoxicated) by the memes and conventions of television and movies as an alternative to understanding the subtly complicated modes of gameplay/story interaction. In order to become a successful designer, one will need to understand the mechanics of a good game. What kind of qualifications does one need to become a designer? My responsibilities were to create the story, dialogue and mission objectives as "broad brush strokes" for the rest of the design team to flesh out later. ![]() ![]() With this editor and the powerful language associated with it, designers are able to create all of the game conditions that make for an exciting mission. During the greatest portion of development, designers work through an editor called "MED" using a proprietary scripting language (that operates a lot like C++). Once the overall goals for the game are decided, the design team focuses on the creation of the game story, the fictional dialogue and the mission content. The designer works closely with the art and programming staff to generate the 'look' and 'feel' of the gameplay. What does a designer do? What did you do for Secret Operations? Time for interview number three, this time it's Secret Ops lead designer, Cinco Barnes. Combat usually regresses to just 'jousting' with the other players, so we're reassessing the game mechanic and the environments in which you fly in order to make sure that the multiplayer Wing Commander experience is a great one. It's a little tricky building something that will be fun because space is a very empty place. We're spending a great deal of time working out exactly what would make a great multiplayer space combat game. Multiplayer WC is something that we would certainly like to see. The rest of the programming consisted of resolving issues that remained from Prophecy, adding and improving game functionality, and optimization.ĭo you see a multiplayer WC game in the future? We learned a lot doing that, and we are already working on some new ideas to make the episodic system even better for future releases. One of the first things we did was modify the existing Prophecy code base to allow for the episodic mission system. Secret Ops is sort of an evolutionary step from Prophecy. What was involved in programming Secret Ops? How much of a jump from WCP is it? there's a good chance we'll get a few more soon, so check back. That's right, folks, it's the last of our exciting Secret Ops team interviews for a while.
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