Game Developers Evening #2

Ben Cousins -
Low Level Game Design: the Foundation of Great Gameplay
This was a summarize of four articles he's made in the past, and all of them can be found at his website. There were only two bits from his speech that I found of interest. One of them was how to analyze other games to find the 'sweet spot' for certain things, such as the average jumping time for a third-person platform game.

The other one was about a technique using a stopwatch, for balancing competitive level design, that David 'DaveJ' Johnston used for creating his maps (de_dust, de_dust2 among others). He wanted certain choke points where both teams would inevitably meet up if they ran at the same speed. Using a stopwatch, he made sure it would take the same amount of time for each team to reach certain positions of the map, balancing it so each team wouldn't have a advantage over the other.

Low-Level Game Design, Atoms, Measurement and Hierarchies. (presented at GDCE 2005)
Measurement Techniques for Game Designers (at Gamasutra.com)
Elementary game design (published in the October 2004 issue of Develop magazine)
Page1, Page2, Page3, Page4
Mind your language - Unlocking the secret formula of game design (published in the August 2002 issue of Develop Magazine)
Cover, Page1, Page2, Page3


Alex Peters - Postmortem: Battlefield 2142
This was a really boring postmortem which didn't soo much take up the problems during development, but rather talk about how good DICE's company structure is, and how they're making steps towards improving it even more. What they said were mostly that they decided to play safe, and didn't want to have to patch the game at day one, which they still had to do since "Titan Mode" was broken when the players exceeded 24 or something.

Also, it seems the decision to implement ingame advertisement came very late in the production, and hence they had to put a paper in the box about it, since it was too late to write about it on the box or something. Of course, alot of buyers became suprised by the paper, and alot of rumors started to flood the intratubes about wether it was spyware or not.


Conclusion
That was about it. Alot of people and two speeches. Also, they gave out Cola on a bottle for free, so alot of people placed the bottles on the floor after they've finished them, and you could occasionally hear people knocking them over on the stone floor, interrupting the speakers. All in all, I thought it was worth the trip, but I got disappointed since they didn't mention anything about their next project as SGA had promoted they would.

Game Developers Evening #2