Better Game Characters by Design

Author: Katherine Isbister
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1000688860
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 443

Book Description
Games are poised for a major evolution, driven by growth in technical sophistication and audience reach. Characters that create powerful social and emotional connections with players throughout the game-play itself (not just in cut scenes) will be essential to next-generation games. However, the principles of sophisticated character design and interaction are not widely understood within the game development community. Further complicating the situation are powerful gender and cultural issues that can influence perception of characters. Katherine Isbister has spent the last 10 years examining what makes interactions with computer characters useful and engaging to different audiences. This work has revealed that the key to good design is leveraging player psychology: understanding what's memorable, exciting, and useful to a person about real-life social interactions, and applying those insights to character design. Game designers who create great characters often make use of these psychological principles without realizing it. Better Game Characters by Design gives game design professionals and other interactive media designers a framework for understanding how social roles and perceptions affect players' reactions to characters, helping produce stronger designs and better results.

The Art of Game Design

Author: Jesse Schell
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 0123694965
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 522

Book Description
Anyone can master the fundamentals of game design - no technological expertise is necessary. The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses shows that the same basic principles of psychology that work for board games, card games and athletic games also are the keys to making top-quality videogames. Good game design happens when you view your game from many different perspectives, or lenses. While touring through the unusual territory that is game design, this book gives the reader one hundred of these lenses - one hundred sets of insightful questions to ask yourself that will help make your game better. These lenses are gathered from fields as diverse as psychology, architecture, music, visual design, film, software engineering, theme park design, mathematics, writing, puzzle design, and anthropology. Anyone who reads this book will be inspired to become a better game designer - and will understand how to do it.

The Art of Game Design

Author: Jesse Schell
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1466598646
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 604

Book Description
Good game design happens when you view your game from as many perspectives as possible. Written by one of the world's top game designers, The Art of Game Design presents 100+ sets of questions, or different lenses, for viewing a game’s design, encompassing diverse fields such as psychology, architecture, music, visual design, film, software engineering, theme park design, mathematics, puzzle design, and anthropology. This Second Edition of a Game Developer Front Line Award winner: Describes the deepest and most fundamental principles of game design Demonstrates how tactics used in board, card, and athletic games also work in top-quality video games Contains valuable insight from Jesse Schell, the former chair of the International Game Developers Association and award-winning designer of Disney online games The Art of Game Design, Second Edition gives readers useful perspectives on how to make better game designs faster. It provides practical instruction on creating world-class games that will be played again and again.

How Games Move Us

Author: Katherine Isbister
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262534452
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 187

Book Description
An engaging examination of how video game design can create strong, positive emotional experiences for players—with examples from popular, indie, and art games. This is a renaissance moment for video games—in the variety of genres they represent, and the range of emotional territory they cover. But how do games create emotion? In How Games Move Us, Katherine Isbister takes the reader on a timely and novel exploration of the design techniques that evoke strong emotions for players. She counters arguments that games are creating a generation of isolated, emotionally numb, antisocial loners. Games, Isbister shows us, can actually play a powerful role in creating empathy and other strong, positive emotional experiences; they reveal these qualities over time, through the act of playing. She offers a nuanced, systematic examination of exactly how games can influence emotion and social connection, with examples—drawn from popular, indie, and art games—that unpack the gamer’s experience. Isbister describes choice and flow, two qualities that distinguish games from other media, and explains how game developers build upon these qualities using avatars, non-player characters, and character customization, in both solo and social play. She shows how designers use physical movement to enhance players’ emotional experience, and examines long-distance networked play. She illustrates the use of these design methods with examples that range from Sony’s Little Big Planet to the much-praised indie game Journey to art games like Brenda Romero’s Train. Isbister’s analysis shows us a new way to think about games, helping us appreciate them as an innovative and powerful medium for doing what film, literature, and other creative media do: helping us to understand ourselves and what it means to be human.

ZBrush Studio Projects

Author: Ryan Kingslien
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 111806772X
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 520

Book Description
Tips and techniques for bringing reality and creativity to your game characters and art As video games evolve, the bar moves ever higher for realism, one of the most challenging artistic frontiers is creating realistic human characters. In ZBrush Studio Projects: Realistic Game Characters, ZBrush expert Ryan Kingslien zeroes in on specific areas of concern for game creation: human body style, faces, skin texturing, clothing, shoes, weaponry, and putting your character into a game environment. Throughout the book Ryan offers tips and insights that provide readers with the depth and breadth they need to bring reality and creativity to their game characters and art. Projects start from the beginning, just as they do in the studio, with the author to guide you step by step through attributes and tools. Projects encompass multiple disciplines to obtain finished, professional results.Although some step by step explanations are given, projects serve more as a guide for readers to complete their own version of the project. Each project comes with support files to validate results Covers one of the most unique challenges for game artists -- sculpting realistic and moveable human characters for a game environment Brings you up to speed on ZBrush, the top digital sculpting tool used to create characters and props in such games as Rock Band and World of Warcraft Covers body style, faces, skin texturing, clothing, shoes, weaponry, and how to put your character into a game environment Provides in-depth techniques and tips for everyone from aspiring digital sculptors to high-level professional ZBrush artists Includes a DVD with supporting files from the projects in the book, as well as videos that illustrate concepts Build the next game-winning action character with ZBrush and this professional guide! Note: CD-ROM/DVD and other supplementary materials are not included as part of eBook file.

Virtual Character Design for Games and Interactive Media

Author: Robin James Stuart Sloan
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1466598204
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Book Description
While the earliest character representations in video games were rudimentary in terms of their presentation and performance, the virtual characters that appear in games today can be extremely complex and lifelike. These are characters that have the potential to make a powerful and emotional connection with gamers. As virtual characters become more

How to Make Capcom Fighting Characters

Author: Capcom
Publisher: Udon Entertainment
ISBN: 9781772941364
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Take a deep dive into the design process behind the iconic characters of the Street Fighter franchise. This includes a detailed showcase of the raw concept art behind Street Fighter V, as well as a look back at classic Street Fighter and Final Fight games. The book is packed with in-depth interviews, creator commentary, anatomy tips, sprite illustrations, costume designs, rejected characters, and more! How To Make Capcom Fighting Characters is a must-have reference guide for all artists and fighting game fans.

Game Usability

Author: Katherine Isbister
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 0080922422
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 392

Book Description
Computers used to be for geeks. And geeks were fine with dealing with a difficult and finicky interface--they liked this--it was even a sort of badge of honor (e.g. the Unix geeks). But making the interface really intuitive and useful--think about the first Macintosh computers--took computers far far beyond the geek crowd. The Mac made HCI (human c

Game Feel

Author: Steve Swink
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1482267330
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 377

Book Description
"Game Feel" exposes "feel" as a hidden language in game design that no one has fully articulated yet. The language could be compared to the building blocks of music (time signatures, chord progressions, verse) - no matter the instruments, style or time period - these building blocks come into play. Feel and sensation are similar building blocks whe

Playing to Win

Author: David Sirlin
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 1411666798
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 144

Book Description
Winning at competitive games requires a results-oriented mindset that many players are simply not willing to adopt. This book walks players through the entire process: how to choose a game and learn basic proficiency, how to break through the mental barriers that hold most players back, and how to handle the issues that top players face. It also includes a complete analysis of Sun Tzu's book The Art of War and its applications to games of today. These foundational concepts apply to virtually all competitive games, and even have some application to "real life." Trade paperback. 142 pages.