David Barnes @ Packt

Written by the folks behind Experimental Gameplay, this article explains how one person can churn out working game prototypes in just seven days.

Perfect for anybody who wants to build games fast -- or churn out a first draft of anything quickly. (250 pages, 12 chapters in 6 months? Easy!)

Here's a summary:

Setup: Rapid is a State of Mind

• Embrace the Possibility of Failure - it Encourages Creative Risk Taking
• Enforce Short Development Cycles (More Time != More Quality)
• Constrain Creativity to Make You Want it Even More
• Gather a Kickass Team and an Objective Advisor – Mindset is as Important as Talent
• Develop in Parallel for Maximum Splatter

Design: Creativity and the Myth of Brainstorming

• Formal Brainstorming Has a 0% Success Rate
• Gather Concept Art and Music to Create an Emotional Target
• Simulate in Your Head – Pre-Prototype the Prototype

Development: Nobody Knows How You Made it, and Nobody Cares

• Build the Toy First
• If You Can Get Away With it, Fake it
• Cut Your Losses and "Learn When to Shoot Your Baby in the Crib"
• Heavy Theming Will Not Salvage Bad Design (or "You Can't Polish a Turd")
• But Overall Aesthetic Matters! Apply a Healthy Spread of Art, Sound, and Music
• Nobody Cares About Your Great Engineering

General Gameplay: Sensual Lessons in Juicy Fun

• Complexity is Not Necessary for Fun
• Create a Sense of Ownership to Keep 'em Crawling Back for More
• "Experimental" Does Not Mean "Complex"
• Build Toward a Well Defined Goal
• Make it Juicy!

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InfiniteUnity3d links to a collection of articles for casual game developers, and indie's thinking of taking the plunge.

The highlight is an article discussing Casual Games as a business, over at the main Unity3d site.

Y'know, some of the advice applies to writing tutorials too...

Think About Your Target Audience

Think about your game and its intended audience when choosing a distribution path. Free browser-based web games appeal to males in their teens and twenties who tend to prefer action, adventure or driving style games whereas downloaded executables appeal to an older and increasingly female audience that tends to prefer story-based or puzzle type games.

Reward Your Player

Keep players interested and engaged with the game experience. For example, in an action game you might offer a new weapon, power-up or enemy every 30 seconds or so for the first few minutes, then every few minutes for the next five to ten minutes, and so on. Or in a story-based game offer new items or character modifications on similar time scales to keep the player invested in the story and the game.

What books should Packt be publishing for casual game developers? And other game developers?

Here's the article list: http://infiniteunity3d.com/casual-game-developer-advice-from-the-unity3d-website/

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Curiosity drives a whole lotta learning. Most of what we learn and remember comes from us feeling curious about something, wanting to understand it, and eventually finding the answer.

A good teacher will create a sense of curiosity in their students, and then satisfy that curiosity with an answer. A strong written tutorial will take the reader through this simple process over and over again:

1. Make them curious
2. Satisfy their curiosity
3. Make them curious about something else

Doing this will keep your reader's mind engaged and active as they learn.

Good ways to make a reader curious:

• Present them with a problem or tricky situation that they don't have the knowledge to solve ("Imagine that you want to...")
• Show them some "magic" that they can't explain -- for example a piece of code that does something impressive or unexpected ("How did that work?")
• Identify some area of ignorance that they'd never noticed they had before ("Have you ever wondered why...?")

All of these will create a hunger for knowledge, that you can satisfy with information and explanation. And once you've satisfied that piece of curiosity, make them curious about something else...

And so on.

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From the Oxford University Press blog:

Without further ado, the 2009 Word of the Year is:

unfriend

.

unfriend

– verb – To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.

As in, “I decided to 

unfriend 

my roommate on Facebook after we had a fight.”

Many of these words a tech words, of course. Should a technical publisher coin new words in their books, when none of the existing ones will do? At Packt we occasionally have to decide whether a word that an author seems to have invented (but that carries a useful meaning) is something we should print, or edit into more pedestrian language.

http://blog.oup.com/2009/11/unfriend/

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Like many skinny boys my age, the first computer book I ever read looked something like this:

Looking back, it's easy to be cynical about these titles. Each book contained a whole selection of games. You'd get a few pages of code (a lot to type on a ZX Spectrum keyboard at the age of 9), virtually no explanation, and a lavish watercolor picture supposed to illustrate the game play.

When you'd got the whole game typed in, you'd run it and discover that the game consisted of a few lines of plain text. Most of them didn't even use color.

One game I remember was called "Archery". I was excited to type it in -- the watercolor was really stunning for that one. The game play looked like this:

. . . .0. . . . . . .

The "player" had to quickly hit the number corresponding to the position of the 0 (which was supposed to be an archers head poking out between the turrets of castle).

It was thrilling. Being able to write a game myself, I knew I was on the bottom rung of a very long ladder that lead all the way to Jet Set Willy.

I feel rather nostalgic that tools like Unreal Developer Kit and Unity3d are now free, and available to any 9 year old who wants to download them. Exploring and playing around with the tools and techniques that bring you the games you love to play is a great experience... and I'm happy that a new generation of kids (as well as the rest of us) are going to get that chance.

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If you're an Amazon Affiliate that is. You can now "tweet" Amazon books and get an affiliate link posted to Twitter nice and easily.

I guess you could already do this by shortening the affiliate URL yourself -- but Amazon's now made it that little bit easier.

RRW isn't happy, uses words like "spam" here: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/amazon_turns_twitter_into_a_marketplace.php -- seems a bit much when most people just get a bit of pocket money out of Affiliates.

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More from Geoffrey Pullum's Language Log. Well known grammar and writing rules books often written by people with no clue about the rules of grammar.

Looking for a job? How about one where you set your own hours, you don't have a boss, you have nothing to do but write at your own pace, you end up receiving fat royalty checks, and you don't have to know anything at all about the topic that you write about? The job is to write non-fiction (textbooks and handbooks), only it's OK if you don't have a clue about the subject matter.

One word about your new career (and it's not "Plastics"): grammar! The field where nobody much cares about anything that's been discovered since the 18th century, and you don't even need to get the 18th-century stuff right!

The same could never be said of my blog...

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1854#more-1854

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Over at Language Log, Geoffrey Pullum moans about user manual diagrams with meaningless labels.

Watch out for nerdview -- look at everything from your readers' eyes.

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Sarah Maddox writes about her experience on the "Here Be Dragons" project.

Integrating Atlassian's suite of collaboration apps is notoriously difficult. Sarah's used technical writing to turn that into an asset. Instead of dry instructions she's created a quest, and even built in a competitive element -- readers tweet their status as they complete each stage of their quest.

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