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The history of Microsoft BOA (Blog post)
Almost unknown, BOA is a nice little game for MS-DOS created in 1989 by Dean Ballard for Microsoft. It's an arcade game similar to Snake, besides the fact that you are playing a rat trying to avoid being eaten by the snake! The oddest thing about this game lies in its distribution model: it was solely available through the driver disk of a mouse created by Microsoft, the "Contour Mouse", also known as "Dove Bar." Due to the technological limitations of the era, [...]Keywords : microsoft boa, history, mouse, pix'n love
Les Briques Gameplay - la classification des jeux vidéo par leur principe ludique (Broacasting our studies)
A conference dedicated to GamePlay bricks and their use to analyse and classify video games. Speakers:Julian Alvarez (Julian.alvarez@univ-lille1.fr)Docteur en Sciences de l’information et de la communication. Responsable du laboratoire consulaire Play Research Lab (PRL) dédié à l’étude du jeu et de ses usages.Plus de 150 Serious Games à son actif pour TF1, Dupuis, Milan, CNRS …Damien Djaouti (damien@ludoscience.com)Maître [...]Keywords : gameplay, bricks, Game design, Classification
Eric Chahi discusses his first Game Jam (Blog post)
Eric Chahi, a famous video games designer (Out of this World, anyone?), recently took part in the Retro Game Jam, a 32h video game creation competition held during november 2013 in Montpellier (France). In the video below, he discusses his feelings about this experience and presents the various prototypes of his game in order to explain his personal game creation process. A rare and very interesting testimony from a living videogame legend about the recent "Game Jam" phenomena (video i [...]Keywords : eric chahi, game jam
?Serious games?: Play to understand? (Broacasting our studies)
Where do “serious games” come from? What are they used for? How can they be safeguarded? BnF is organizing a series of events around this new form of learning. To round things off, a study afternoon on February 5, focusing on social issues, brought together game designers, teacher-researchers and BnF experts to analyze this fast-growing phenomenon, from school to work, from vocational training to citizenship awareness.Keywords : Serious game, Pedagogy, Market, Origin, Classification
The One Fork Restaurant - postmortem (Blog post)
Happy new year everyone! This new year comes with an improved version of my first ever LudumDare competition entry: The One Fork Restaurant. To celebrate the release of the final version of this game, I've decided to write down a full postmortem about it. As the title implies, it's a funny time-management game taking place in a restaurant, where many people come to eat various meals. But the restaurant has only one fork, so customers have to share it! When the customers are w [...]Keywords : the one fork restaurant, postmortem, ludum dare 28, game design, game development
Les métiers des jeux vidéo et de l'animation (Book reference)
This book is a guide presenting the professional side of the videogames universe in a simple but complete way. It's divided in 4 parts. The first one presents the "day-to-day reality", by answering questions like "how do we create videogames?", "do we spent the day playing games?" or "can we became rich?", etc. The second part dissects the different jobs related to videogames, and explains their role and the kind of skills they require: game designer, scen [...]Keywords : jobs, training courses, video games, industry, company, guide, student
New lessons materials (Blog post)
While this will be of little use if you can't read french, I just uploaded 5 new lessons materials on the website: An overall presentation of the history of videogames (from 1952 to 2013).A presentation of the various jobs related to videogames (from AAA game designers to indies or journalist).An updated version of our presentation of the Game Design theories.An updated version of our presentation about the structure of games (i.e. what is gameplay?).An introduction to Serious Games, to [...]Keywords : lessons materials
New website section: games created by Ludoscience! (Blog post)
As the summer goes, a new section appears on this website: games made at the Ludoscience laboratory! This new section will let you play the various videogames created by the members of the laboratory during their research projects. Hence, this new section is different from our reseach projects section (that gathers research projects that are not games, or games that are not available to the general public) and from our students projects section (that solely gathers games created by the st [...]Keywords : website updates, videogames
Nos Meilleurs Souvenirs de Jeux Vidéo 8/16-bits (Book reference)
This book attempts to give a quite unique approach on the history of videogames: instead of interviewing game designers about how they created famous games, the author have collected the memories of numerous anonymous videogames players in France. The book is focused on the 8 / 16 bits era (i.e. from the middle of the 80's to the beginning of the 90's). The author, Florent Gorges, have written a very touching book here. While you'll read it quickly, it'll touch you with a deep feeling of nostalg [...]Keywords : players, memories, 8 bits, 16 bits, consoles, computers
Game Design Tools for Collaboration (Broacasting our studies)
This article presents a selection of "formal game design tools" that may be able to bring game design and software engineering closer. Nowadays, game designers can rely on a set of theoretical tools to create video games. These tools are first intended to facilitate the design phase. However, some of them have a strong potential to communicate designers' ideas to the rest of the team, especially to developers. We will study four examples of such tools, before discussing how they [...]Keywords : game design tools, communication, industry