Advice to game designers: "When in doubt, you always go back to Star Wars."
At the the Future of Games conference at UCSC earlier this month, game designer Graeme Devine, known for his work on The 7th Guest and more recently Halo Wars, had some sound advice for designers looking to pull players into the game. He told those in attendance that Star Wars is the best gut check. Gamasutra reports:
Devine expressed some dissatisfaction with his work on Halo Wars which he called “possibly the most cinematic game I made,” but lacking in story interaction.
“I wanted to pull back to making characters. I wrote 8,000 lines of dialogue for the battle dialogue, but it didn’t really add to any sense of story,” he said. “In the end I felt I might as well have just made a movie.” The characters “aren’t talking to me, they’re talking to each other.”
[…]
In his work, Devine said he wants to answer these questions: “What does it mean to put me into a game? How do I do that? How do I actually insert the player into the game so he or she feels that ‘Oh, my God, it’s just me, I have to do this!’”
