What Kind of a Game Designer are You?

Way back in the mists of time there was effectively only one type of designer. And that was someone who knew enough about an obscure programming language to make a few dots move around a screen in an interesting way.  Spin forward a few decades and you have game designers, level designers, narrative designers, weapon designers, social designers and quite possibly owl-based-hat designers.

These can all be considered job roles. And as the Earth shifts beneath the feet of the games industry, some of those categories are ceasing to be important as teams rapidly downsize from several hundred to just several, and game designs shrink back down to something you could write on the back of a napkin, and still leave room for an amusing drawing of an owl in a hat.

Job roles aren’t important to this post. The different types of people are!

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The Hypothetical Design Bastard

“The player is the enemy. An invading force that needs to be controlled, to be trained like a dog. Mete out the chocolate drops and the whip with equal abandon. If they make a mistake, let not pity stay your hand, kill them, punish them, send them back and erase their progress. Without punishment there is no risk; no risk, no reward. No tension, no gameplay. It’s a waste of time.”

Really? REALLY???

Surely not.

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Photography - Monochrome Series

I’m a keen amateur photographer so I thought I would share some of my favourite shots on my blog. I hope you like them.

These particular 3 photos (Scroll down) were taken over the past few years, all will have been taken on a small Sony compact. They are all, in fact, full colour pictures, and have not been desaturated at all in Photoshop.

The top shot was taken in Les Deux Alpes on a snowboarding holiday in March 2008, on a piste called Jandri which was my favourite run in that resort. 

The second shot was taken in Wales in 2007. My then girlfriend (now wife) were visiting my Mum and Dad, and they took us to a cove on the Pembrokeshire coast called St Martin’s Haven, where we could see, and indeed hear, the seal pups. It was a wonderful few hours and whilst walking around that headland I saw this particular view. I loved the wonderful, rigid geometry of the rocks and balance to the whole composition.

The final shot was taken in beautiful Newquay in Cornwall on a windy day in 2007. With the winds so high and the waves so explosive there was a huge amount of water spray in the air, and that is what helped give the shot so much depth as even relatively nearby headlands faded into the haze.