The Impact Factor

News & Views

10/3/15-10/9/15

As October continues the horror hits keep coming! That’s right, if you listened to the latest episode of The Impact Factor podcast you would know I had something new to announce: TIF’s Snuggle and Scream! In this special seasonal podcast, I will sit down with my girlfriend Justine to talk about horror movies! We’ll go through our history with the genre, our favorites, and thoughts about a horror flick we just watched. So please be excited for that. You can find it in our normal RSS feed.

News & Views this week brings you great writing about Nintendo’s clairvoyance, the origins of the almost-physicist composer of Grim Fandango, struggling with designing difficulty in games, and a studio founder’s sad farewell to games.

And of course you can check out the brand new episode of The Impact Factor podcast that was posted today! You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, or if you prefer other methods, check out our SoundCloud. We’re on YouTube too!

Spotlight

Year Walk and the future Nintendo predicted

Rich Stanton, Eurogamer

Worth Reading

Dialogue Trees, Mass Effect, and Romance

Dante Douglas, Medium

Peter McConnell, Grim Fandango and the making of a composer

Dave Tach, Polygon

Letters with John Sharp: Inter-generational conflict in games

Mattie Brice and John Sharp, Mattiebrice.com

Game Studio Co-Founder's Farewell Is A Tough, Sobering Read

Patrick Klepek, Kotaku

Beneath the pixels: The art direction of Super Time Force

Dan Vader, Mike Nguyen & Vic Nguyen, Gamasutra

With Comments

Positional Dungeon Crawling

David Stark, Gamasutra

Stark provides an interesting take on spatial awareness in dungeon crawlers. Stark provides examples of some more recent indie dungeon crawlers like Darkest Dungeon, Crypt of the Necrodancer, and The Binding of Isaac and compares them to the classic dungeon crawler Diablo. He argues that a huge design space exists for developers in which player positioning in the context of dungeon exploration is built into the game’s mechanics. Good read.

Black characters in video games must be more than stereotypes of the inhuman

Sidney Fussell, Offworld

Fussell puts into words something I’ve been thinking about for quite some time. Diversity in games in an imperative, but one that should be done with genuine engagement and accountability. Black characters have a long history of terrible representation in video games. In fighting games especially, characters like Boxer just reinforce this dehumanizing portrayal. We need more characters like Lee Everett from Telltale’s The Walking Dead. And fast.

Struggling with obscurity as an indie

Aaron San Filippo, Gamasutra

San Filippo writes a great piece for Gamasutra in which he details the work that needs to be done by indie developers to combat obscurity. Being an unknown entity is something I can relate to: despite hours of work I do each week to create content for The Impact Factor I can’t claim ownership of any real audience. That aside, the author writes about the feedback loop of marketing, and how getting known is a marathon and not a sprint. San Filippo also provides great advice on securing platform support, offering discounts, and the value of knowing the advantages of free versus cheap.

Losing Control of Difficulty in Game Design

Josh Bycer, Gamasutra

There were really some great pieces on Gamasutra this week. Apologies for the triple threat here. Bycer details how games can struggle with creating the perfectly titrated difficulty level. He writes that systems need to exist that allow the player to weigh risk and reward, but the balance of the two must be exact. Super Meat Boy and Dark Souls are given as examples of games that get difficulty right (they are extremely tough but also totally fair), and Darkest Dungeon as a game that misses the mark. Great insights.