Here is an intersting article on Gamasutra.
That does inspire me to prototype my significant gameplay mechanisms in flash…
An article that focus in gameplay that’s something to behold.
There’s seams to exist a bridge between gameplay quality and games today. Mobile phone games tend to have much richer gameplay than commercial blockbuster games. People seam to have difficulties in thinking of gameplay in an abstract level and adapt it to a different scenario.
For example does anyone remenbers the chucky egg game from the old sinclair zx spectrum microcomputer? It’s easy to adapt the gameplay of this game to a 3d fps or rpg dungeon where the animals are replaced by unkilable zombies or robots (or almost unkilable) and the objective is to collect treasure from the game. The trick is design the behavior of the zombie to be similar to the semi-mindless animals in chucky-egg (pursuit when close enough and forget when far enough) and design the dungeon so that it’s chalenging to avoid the foes but not too hard.
If we consdier the original examples of game mechanics that were created and discrad those that are just a rehash of the same then examples of original game mechanics are really very few. I sugest you post in the gamedev forum or gamasutra and inquire more about this. Anyone who wants to be a game developer should know the core examples of gameplay.
If you want something (relatively) modern that brings together many of the classic gameplay elements along with brilliant storytelling and absolute charm I heartily recommend Beyond Good And Evil. One of the best games I’ve ever played and very much an overlooked classic…
They did ?
Yes, Actionscript may be a nightmare but it is incredibly easy to whip up basic graphical assets, animate them and play with different ways of using them to make a game fun without having ot worry about the complexities of 3d environments and models.
I know I probably could do all that in java2d, but I haven’t really played with that much and flash intergrates the design, animation and basic programming tools into one convenient package. Once I’ve worked something out I can post it around people and they will be able to play it cos everyone has a flash vm installed…