Author: Karen M

What happened to 2016?! Man… it up and took off and took me with it. A whirlwind to be sure. Looking back at my game development goals… I give me a solid D for Doing Other Things. Important things.

GOAL ONE – Blog Reboot

Partial success. I didn’t hit the one-a-month pace, but it’s steps in the right direction.

GOAL TWO – Play my Game Backlog

Partial success.

• Dark Souls
• Castle Crashers [PLAYED]
• Kingdom Hearts
• Thomas Was Alone [PLAYED, FINISHED]
• Shadow of the Colossus
• Earthbound
• Bonus game: Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes [PLAYED]

Continue reading “2017 Development Goals”

In 2014, friend, board game aficionado, and former colleague from The Los Angeles Film School, Sebastian Sohn put me in touch with folks at USC who were looking for part-time faculty to teach a level design class. I was already teaching level and game design full-time at LAFS, but USC has very well-regarded game development programs and it was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.

I met with the inimitable Tom Sloper and in short order had a new level design class to build. I couldn’t use the materials I’d made for LAFS, naturally, so I had to rebuild things from the ground up. Including a simple game for students to make level packs for.

I rebuilt a basic platforming game following Sebastian Lague’s platformer tutorials.

Continue reading “Games for Class Part II: Photonica”

When I started teaching level design, one of the important things I wanted students to learn was how to design a level progression that felt like it made sense and flowed. I initially had students make Sokoban levels.

Sokoban is a simple top-down puzzle game where you can push and only push a box or boxes on a gridded playing field with the goal of getting all the boxes onto their targets. It can make some delightfully simple and some delightfully mind-twisting puzzles, so there’s a lot of space to create a difficulty ramp over a series of levels. Continue reading “Games for Class Part I: Mustachio and Friends”

A quick check in.

Training is going really well. Mostly because I’m doing something – anything – positive for my health, but results help. 🙂 I’ve lost ~20 pounds and move and feel so, so, so much better. It’s great. I’m still VERY new to this – training, tracking, all of it – so I’ve made a study of Calisthenic Movement’s YouTube channel, scouring the comments and cataloguing the videos. It’s been very educational.

I’ve written pages of feedback to CM about my experiences, good and bad, some of which I’ve seen come out in videos they’ve produced. I like to think I contributed, but I’m sure they get tons of feedback from their viewership and clients. This picture went along with a testimonial wrote for them and I liked it well enough to make it my profile pic pretty much everywhere.

Continue reading “Training Shift”

A friend asked me to give a talk in his class about writing game design documents. This is a challenging task. Not just the writing – even simple games have a lot more moving parts than it might seem on the face of things – but specifically the task of teaching people to write good documents.

STEP 1: MAKE SOME GAMES

Nothing teaches like the crucible of game development itself. So for me, the first step in knowing how and what to write is to make games. Learn firsthand what needs to happen, the multitude of mechanics and assets that need to be created, how communication succeeds and fails in the course of production. Roll up your sleeves and jump right into building the plane in flight.

Continue reading “Writing Design Docs”

I used to play a game with myself while waiting to get picked up from school. I spent a lot of time in the same small spaces. Pre-smartphone (what am I saying? Pre-Internet) this meant reading or doing homework or simply sitting. Staring. I don’t recall exactly when, but at some point I noticed something that I hadn’t noticed before in months and months of sitting in that very space.

More than 20 years away from that moment, I don’t have even a foggy recollection of what that first thing I noticed was. I do recall that it occurred to me… ‘I don’t know this place as well as I thought I did.’ So I started trying to notice new things. This extended reasonably quickly into connected spaces and poking around, opening doors and generally being curious about my environment.

Continue reading “Notice Something New”

After I had decided to start this exercise adventure but before rings came into the picture, there was a brief time where building some sort of structure in the back yard was under consideration. I ended up getting some rings – they’re so versatile, and I’ll have… wow… YEARS of work exploring what can be done with them – but that notion of designing and building still appeals to me.

In class the other day students were working diligently on their prototypes and in that little lull I decided to reach back to my architecture roots and model something for construction in my current game engine of choice, Unity. Past and present collide! The object of my efforts: the exercise structure described here by Calisthenic Movement’s Alex (El Eggs).

Continue reading “Momentum”

I started an exercise program today. There are two guys in Germany, Alex (aka El Eggs) and Sven, who run an outfit called Calisthenic Movement. Here’s the video that blew my mind and made me a fan of bodyweight exercise. There’s flash a plenty in this — all those flips, come on! — but what I like about these guys is they aren’t promoting the flash, but a focus on form and quality of movement over reps and speed and the idea that the world is your gym and playground. As a level designer, I already view the world this way. These guys make that a reality. Really, though, it’s this video (and this) that made me fans of Sven and Alex themselves. They do what they do with a sense of fun. I appreciate that. It resonates.

Continue reading “Beacons on the Critical Path”

I tell my students every term that their blogs are a great place to showcase their passion for games and game development. I tell them that every term and here sits my own blog. Empty. Neglected. FORGOTTEN.

So, befitting the start of a new year, I had my students in Game Design 2 (howdy, y’all!) draft three SMART game development goals for 2016. I joined them in this goal-setting and here are mine:

Continue reading “2016 Game Development Goals”