PUBLIC MARKS with tags games & www.gamasutra.com

Oh yeah… competitive analysis. The most boring part of any product discussion. Why talk about somebody else's market share when you could be waxing rhapsodic about your vertex shaders? Trouble is, the publisher wants to know what they'll be going up against before they invest a few million bucks in your game. So one of the first questions they're going to ask when the presentation's over is, "Who do you see as your main competition?" And the next one will be, "What makes you better than them?" And you'd better be ready with the answers, or you're wasting their time.

The creators of the PathEngine SDK,a toolkit for implementing intelligent agent movement, based on a 'points of visibility' pathfinding solution implemented over arbitrary 3D ground meshes, have announced the release of V5.01. Key features are pathfinding through overlapping geometry, dynamic obstacle management, and content processing functionality.

Much of the work in game AI has focused on the ‘big' problems: path planning, squad planning, goal-directed behavior, etc. The result is characters that are capable of increasingly intelligent behavior. However, acting intelligently and acting aware and sentient is not the same thing. But if we are to create the kind of compelling and emotional characters upon which the next generation of computer games will be based, we must solve the latter problem, namely how to build characters that seem aware and sentient.

Cobertura do DICE 2006

Ten years ago, Sony brought three dimensions, as well as the concept of "maturity", to the video gaming masses. And yet, when many people think back to the "PlayStation era", a hyper realistic character in a 3D landscape doesn't necessarily come to mind. Instead, they think of a flat cartoony dog that could rap.

The following is a selected excerpt of Chapter 4 from Patterns in Game Design (ISBN 1-53450-354-8) published by Charles River Media, Inc.

"For the latest Question Of The Week, we asked the simple question: "What videogame or games do you think have been the most underrated in terms of providing innovation or pure enjoyment, and why?" This gave our audience of game professionals a chance to discuss those video games that perhaps didn't get the attention they deserved when they first debuted."

"Brenda Brathwaite, a 23-year veteran of the video games industry, has worked on 21 published titles, including most recently Cyberlore's Playboy: The Mansion. She is also the founder and chair of the International Game Developers Association's Sex Special Interest Group, which has as its goal the welcoming of “all developers actively creating or interested in the development of adult sexual content.” The SIG also aims to promote discussion about the adult content development community, and “the unique issues, challenges, possibilities it faces.”"

"Why is game design often overlooked as an important factor contributing to game sales? Perhaps because when most people in development companies talk about “good game design,” they mean “game design that produced a game I really like.” This sort of subjective validation of game design is of no use in business, which thrives on repeatable methods based around capturing a target audience—the market. Unable to see the profit resulting from “good design”— especially since many allegedly well-designed games fail commercially— most businessmen ignore design entirely."

"[Editor's Note: This article originated when the Gamasutra editors noticed a number of online sources such as Wikipedia stating that it was now completely legal to make NES 'clone' consoles, because all of Nintendo's patents regarding the NES had expired. How true was this statement? We asked game IP lawyer S. Gregory Boyd the question: "Are the NES patents expired? If so, is a company free to build and sell new NES-like systems?" Here's his response.]"

With the second annual Serious Games Summit in Washington D.C. [coordinated by the CMP Game Group, as is Gamasutra.com] nearly here, it seems a good time to take stock of ‘the state of serious games.'

Serious games, like every other tool of education, must be able to show that the necessary learning has occurred.