Theory and Principles of Game Design

The holy grail of narrative game design is a game with a carefully constructed narrative that players can influence to the same degree as their real lives. The goal is to have stories that are every bit as engaging as traditional narratives but created in such a way as to enable a rich variety of player experiences. For games in which content is written primarily by human beings, creating such flexible narratives is almost certainly impossible given the number of potential choices for the player -- far too many for any author to account for. On the other hand, for games in which content might be generated dynamically with the aid of computer algorithms, current Artificial Intelligence approaches aren't advanced enough to produce engaging narratives. A less ambitious goal, therefore, is to make games in which players' decisions are limited but significant: limited because the possible choices and outcomes are only a small subset of those that would otherwise be available, and si

Games made with Unity allow users to pick a screen resolution on startup through Unity's Display Resolution Dialog . While it's possible to disable this feature and force a game to use a particular resolution, it's generally not a good idea to deny users the ability to set the game's resolution to whatever they think is best. Such flexibility comes at a price, however, and one of the costs is the loss of control over the game window's aspect ratio. Differences in aspect ratio aren't necessarily a problem, but I think it's generally a good idea to keep things as consistent as possible regardless of the system on which a game is running. For the camera, such consistency ensures that what you see during development and testing is also what players see once your game is released: Objects visible from a particular vantage point will be visible on all systems, and those that aren't visible will likewise remain out of view. A consistent view across systems mea

A History of the Amiga, from Ars Technica: Part 1: Genesis Part 2: The birth of Amiga Part 3: The first prototype Part 4: Enter Commodore Part 5: Postlaunch blues Part 6: Stopping the bleeding Part 7: Game on!