Category Archives: design

What’s in a Game? part II, MineCraft

In part I we introduced 5 general game play categories: Creation, Competition, Collaboration, Collecting, and Exploration (I couldn’t find a suitable synonym beginning with ‘C’). We’ll apply these to MineCraft and see how it fares in each. Note that I’ll … Continue reading

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What’s in a Game? part I

I’ve been thinking about various ways of categorizing types of games or perhaps more specifically, types of game play within games. Exploration — Most RPGs feature exploration as a significant part of the game play although it is more important … Continue reading

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Corel PaintShopPro X4 Rant

Another review/rant of a piece of software I’ve used a lot, or tried to use: Corel PaintShopPro X4 which was previously better known as Jasc PaintShopPro. I’ve used PSP for a long time, since v3 or earlier and have always … Continue reading

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Is Anybody There?

Probably not, at least not yet. So why create a blog with no potential readers? The main reason is that I find writing ideas down in concrete form a necessary first step in the process of taking an idea to … Continue reading

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A Matter of Scale

When dealing with a voxel world the number of blocks visible at one time grows quickly as it depends on volume which grows as n^3. Looking at MineCraft again for some examples: the far distance has a view diameter of … Continue reading

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How Fast is Fast Enough?

Something I was thinking on the way home: in real-time procedural world generation how fast do we have to be able to create the world in real-time? In a procedural and semi-infinite world like MineCraft the game only generates and … Continue reading

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What’s In a Name?

Why “Emergent Game Design”? I’d like to say it was after weeks of careful and meticulous research into the optimal company name but in reality it was after just a half an hour of playing around with various name combinations … Continue reading

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