My Personal Blog

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...

Well, it's been a while since my last post. School, work and other obligations have reaaaaaallly taken up the majority of my time, but I have finally found a few hours to go ahead and do a quick usability analysis of one of my favorite games, Guild Wars 2. Since Guild Wars 2 is an absolutely massive game, and I did not feel like spending hours upon hours analyzing everything, I decided to just pick 4 aspects of the game to take a look at. I hope you enjoy. The Good Combat When afflicted by status effects during gameplay, several triggers are initiated that let the player know that something has happened to their character. For example, if I am in combat and an enemy gave me the “Chilled” debuff, which reduces my character’s move by 66% speed, and increases skill cooldowns by 40%.  When I am afflicted by this debuff my character is given a “frost” effect that creates a ring of frost around my character and applies a light blue and white coloring to my char...