ggalaxy

Blade Olson bladeols@usc.edu; Katrina Wolfe kwolfe@usc.edu; Harold Vancol hvancol@usc.edu; Michaela Morris michaemm@usc.edu

Basics!

You are Queasy Steve, a lowly matey on a pirate ship that is notorious throughout the land as a particularly dastardly ship. Your captain is like all pirate captains, loud, mean, and impolite. He yells at you constantly to do all of the menial things on the ship, as well as many of the combat functions around the ship.

In the last two weeks, while listening to a lecture by Jeffrey Kaplan and another by Ethan Levy, I realized the principles of analyzing how players use your game will remain relevant for years to come. Ryan Wiancko reads aloud an article on analyzing gameplay metrics from an online game. This spoken article and other designers' are free to download at Industry Broadcast.

Next Monday, December 1st will be a demonstration of the Gamebryo game engine and the Playstation 3 development kit, showing a method of creating current-generation games. You might remember the Gamebryo engine from such games as Oblivion and Civilization IV, and I imagine folks have heard of the latest incarnation of the Playstation. Both are potentially available for student use – This workshop will show how to create an animated scene (complete with shiny stuff like normal mapping), import and interact with it in a Gamebryo executable with minimal C++ code, and then compile the Gamebryo code and play it on the Playstation 3 console.

The workshop will be on Monday, December 1st from 1-4pm in the ZML and will probably end up at the Game Innovation Lab next door. Students and others interested please email tfurmanski@gmail.com