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Continue reading →: Disco Elysium: Scrutable Hypertext
Last year I played the excellent whodunnit RPG Disco Elysium by ZA/UM. It’s already become something of a classic due to its a genius take on an RPG engine, as the four core abilities of the player character (Intellect, Psyche, Physique, and Motorics) manifest through twenty sub-skills, each of which…
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Continue reading →: Games/Hypertext
Over the Summer I took part if the ACM Hypertext 2020 conference, hosted in Florida but run online, and gave a presentation to the Blue Skies track on the relationship between Games and Hypertext. It develops some of the ideas that I presented at the Future of Text symposium at…
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Continue reading →: Game Design 2020
Once more we have just completed our Games Design and Development course at Southampton. This year we slimmed things down a little and asked the students to work in pairs to create two prototype games. They have around 4 weeks to do each game. The first is focused on level…
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Continue reading →: Here are the Hypertexts
This month I gave an invited talk at The Future Of Text event held at Southampton University. FoT has been organised by Frode Hegland (currently a PhD student at the University) for 10 years, and is an interdisciplinary talking shop for anyone who is interested in text in the digital…
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Continue reading →: Life is Strange: One Choice vs. No Choice
DONTИOD’s Life is Strange, released in 2015, was a surprise indie hit, marrying Telltale style episodic interactive narrative, environmental storytelling, and narrative puzzles, with a nostalgic coming of age tale. It also happened to be a fantastic exploration of teenage relationships, told through the lens of Max and Chloe and their…
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Continue reading →: Games Design Course 2019
Another year, another set of fabulous games from our students on the Games Design and Development course at Southampton. The students get together in pairs and have just three weeks to put a game together. We do three of these game sprints, one based around creating a game with a…
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Continue reading →: Games Design Course 2018
Each year students on our Games Design and Development course at Southampton produce three games as part of the course. The first is intended to show awareness of core mechanics and tutorial design, the second explore interactive narrative, and the third incorporates some innovation from games (for example, procedural generation,…