Game Dev in Motion #3: Theme, Context and Player Engagement

A pretty general discussion in which we discuss some recent examples in providing theme and context, how the platform (particularly iOS) affects context delivery, and specifically some of the feel and engagement aspects to:

• Left 4 Dead (1 & 2)
• Mass Effect 2
• Dragon Age
• Dawn of War II
• Metal Gear Solid
• Dungeon Hunter 2
• Medal of Honour (specifically multiplayer)
• Assassin's Creed (largely as a counter example)

The links we referenced:

• Procedural zombie generation with Left 4 Dead's AI Direction on AIGameDev
• Art stills from Dead West
• Goose's Flickr account -- specifically this set
• My festive musings on Dungeon Hunter 2 << yea, it turns out I never wrote this post, although I did mention it in passing in our "Level up" post
• It was MAG that we were thinking of (256 multi player)

We didn't actually get to talking too much about how we are looking to provide context and feel in Dead West -although we did end up talking about player engagement a whole lot more than I thought we would.

For those of you who stuck around to the end and are curious -- we we're playing Last Night on Earth.

Feedback and general thoughts encouraged, let us know what you think of the general discussion style -- we've a bunch of technical stuff to sort out (external mics, appropriate encoding, publishing in iTunes etc) but we're just going to let the content take its own course and see what happens.