Library/Miscellaneous Notes

Elevator Speech
Sixty second synopsis of the vision. It's important to do this early and refine it often.

Be very cautious when something is something aims to redefine, not refine the vision. It's perfectly valid and correct to redefine the synopsis of the vision as the project progresses, but realize this will have an impact on the team and it's momentum. A cohesive project will inevitably need to discard earlier work to match the changes.

Game Design
Game design is the process of finding ways to improve a situation such that it provides more entertainment value.


 * Completing sets - all pieces of armor, all colors, all numbers, all in series.
 * Progress monitor - what percentage of a set of the game is done
 * Skill development and education
 * Competition - high scores, mastery of the game

When designing a game, a level, an item, or any aspect of gameplay, focus on the player and his or her relationship to that thing. How can he or she interact with it? What will they try to do with it? What will the naive approach to its use be? What will the clever approach be? What opportunities and challenges does it pose to the player?


 * Rules & Certainty

Control over the game world: certainty about how much damage it takes to kill an enemy or how fast one can travel on road A vs. B can make the game more entertaining, not less. Removes the uncertainty (stressful) so that the player can focus on the primary goals (feels like an expert challenging the problem).

Balance freedom and there being a right way of doing things so that the user feels a sense of progress. . A good design challenges the player to figure out how to use the rules of the game to accomplish a goal; it does *not* challenge the player to figure out the rules of the game. This distinction is what separates challenge from frustration.

Storytelling

 * Plot twists
 * Comic sections
 * Scary sections

Scenarios
From David Perry on Game Design :


 * Fleeing Something
 * Unexpected Danger
 * Hot Pursuit/The Chase
 * Tit for Tat
 * Preemptive Strikes
 * Struggle for Resources
 * Political Motivations
 * Environmental Goals
 * Cultural Differentiation
 * Cultural Manipulation
 * Mortal Threats
 * Family and Personal Issues
 * The Plot Thickens
 * Collaborating with the Enemy
 * Infiltration
 * Neutralize the Base
 * Making an Area Safe
 * Timed and/or Cyclic Events
 * Ways to Trigger Events and Flags
 * Delayed Gratification
 * Qualification Tests (Tests of Worthiness)
 * Criminal Investigation
 * Reversals of Fortune
 * Party Members
 * Unwanted Sidekicks
 * Is It Safe?
 * The Call for Help
 * Unexpected Location Changes
 * The Obscure Object of Desire
 * Innocent Bystanders
 * Missing Persons
 * Ways to Gain Allies
 * Memory Games
 * Something’s Screwy
 * Time Travel
 * The Observer
 * The Gauntlet
 * Imprisonment Scenarios
 * Godlike Roles
 * Misdirection

Character Concepts
Humans tend to be biased to find a human story most interesting. As a consequence it is often useful to begin with character concepts, even if the end goal is developing a conceptual landscape or architecture. Defining the key persons of a place and defining the associated mythology of that place gives the place itself a human tie; which in turn can lead to more engrossing experience for the user.

Visual Stylization
Realistic, cartoon, etc.

To Add

 * Fences - notion of read, write barriers, batch breakers, require a flush; fencing in a common area of operations for re-ordering, etc.
 * Sync objects and signals; events.
 * Hints
 * Client & Server state; shared connection state


 * AABB
 * Coordinate Systems
 * Points versus vectors
 * Euler Angles - ordered rotation about three orthogonal axes
 * Barycentric Coordinates
 * Lights
 * Physical Basis
 * Ambient
 * Attenuation