Balthazar Auger

Sorry about the short absence, work got the best of me.

What I intended to talk about earlier this week was about the latest crop of projects to come out of ENJMIN. Every year around the end of June, first year students demo their interactive pieces to the public.

This year, a grand total of seventeen works were presented. Not all of them are downloadable yet, I’ll update the list as they hit the web. Read further for the full list. (more…)

While reading a very interesting post over at Chris Bateman’s blog about player choice in games, I obviously tried to find a constraint in how much power over the game you give your player, ranging from total (sandbox games) to none (his Guitar Hero example is quite fitting).

But then, reading it again, I wasn’t so sure it could be called a constraint. Player agency is a variable you can adjust while designing, but it has no real, tangible value you can set as reference. You can say “This game gives me more choice than this one”, but it’s hard giving both games a value you can compare mathematically.

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What is the minimal time in which you can create a game?

I’ve postulated before that the total time spent on the production of a game can either be divided in having the idea and building the objects to communicate that idea with.

Lets look into those two amounts of time.

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Pippa told me that SAGE were offering all of their papers for free until November 30th.

They cover a lot of subjects, but the journal that interested me the most is Games and Culture, a fairly new but already very complete publication.

To download, you need to have an account (those are free too) and a lot of time… I’m devoting this lovely and cold saturday to it.

I understand that i should introduce myself a little, as I’m starting this from scratch in english ; All previous content was in french before, this blog is a sort of writing exercise… So, “excuse my french”!

I am actually a second-year Game Design student at ENJMIN, located in Angoulême, France. This public institution is rather new, even by the game industry standards, but is already proving to be one of the leading creative forces in Europe, as far as videogames are concerned.

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