My Personal Blog

Since I had a good time doing a quick analysis on a few aspects in Guild Wars 2, I thought I might as well do one of my other favorite games as well, Civilization VI (which just so happened to announce a new expansion!). This one is a bit  more in depth though... The Good Trade Routes When creating a trade route, you are given a list of cities that your trade caravan can travel to, as well as the route that it will take to its destination . These paths are denoted by dashed line emanating from your city. As the game progresses, the number of cities a trade caravan could trade with becomes quite large and can easily clutter the screen. However, if you click on a city from the menu on the left, all these dashed line paths become grey except the path to the city you selected, which becomes white. This is incredibly handy as trade caravans are often prime targets for barbarians and enemy Civilizations to attack so it is easy to see where the route they take towa...

As a requirement in my latest class, a classmate and I (Daniel Lima) created a document outlining design principles directly related to Narratives in video games so I thought it would be an interesting thing to share with you all. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Introduction One of the biggest challenges of conveying a compelling narrative in games, as opposed to a book, movie, or show, is that the director or writer has control over how the story is going to be experienced by the user. In games however, the user has control over how he or she will experience the story. On top of that, a typical movie will last around two hours, while a game could last anywhere from a couple minutes to hundreds of hours. Games don’t have a fixed length, and a story that is experienced by a user in eight hours could be experienced by an...