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...

Since we are coming up upon the 1 year anniversary of Pokemon Go, I thought it was appropriate to talk about the success and also failure that was Pokemon Go. When Pokemon Go was released, it say it was a success is putting it lightly. I've never seen so many people playing a game before in my life. It was an absolutely amazing experience that I will never forget. The sheer amount of people out and about as a result of the game was nothing but extraordinary. The gym I used to go to was part of a larger park and I swear there were nearly 200 people in it at any given time of day during the first 2 weeks upon release. Kids, teenagers, and adults were all playing and working together to capture Pokemon and take over Gyms. My most memorable moment from the game was seeing a kid run over to a group of people screaming "THERE'S A DRATINI OVER HERE, COME QUICK!", sparking a group of 50 kids, teens and adults (including myself of course) into a mad sprint to where the ...