Ultimate Game Design : Building game worlds

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Building Game Worlds 244
U L T I M A T E G A M E D E S I G N
GROWTH AREAS AND NEW OPPORTUNITIES
Keeping your skills diverse should help you grow toward being a game designer who
can create content independent, yet mindful of, any platform specifics. You should
be able to work with paper, cards, small pieces of plastic, toy networks, action figures,
key fobs, wireless devices, and the hottest gaming hardware consoles available.
Ideally, this offers quite a range of applications for your game skills. You won’t need
advanced scripting techniques and a deep understanding of forces on particle dynamics
to develop a card game, but you should always be trying to understand what
makes any game—using any means of delivering a gaming experience possible—a
successful gaming experience. Your specific knowledge in this area is part of your
stock and trade.
With this in mind, let’s take a look at some growth areas and new opportunities.
Microsoft, Mattel, Intel, and LeapFrog
You might not have envisioned working on a Microsoft toy like Barney or
Teletubbies as the apex of you game design career when you began working in gaming,
but as a professional commercial designer, you become interested in every
chance to use your abilities and to grow opportunities. If these projects require game
building elements or direction, you are a game builder: Sony PlayStation 2, Microsoft
Xbox, PC, Nintendo GameCube, portable, theme park kiosk, location-based entertainment
(LBE), Web, cards, toys, smart cards, slinkys—it doesn’t matter. Always remember,
there is a vast difference between being a game aficionado and being a
commercial game developer. Odds are, you may not find yourself, especially in the
early days of your career, working on your favorite kind of game for pay. You have to
love more than a genre or two to last in the games business.
As we’ve seen, the marriage of toys and gaming is providing new opportunities.
Toy makers understand the power of gaming and always have. They are constantly
looking for ways to add game elements to toys. Microsoft’s ActiMates series of toys,
including Barney, Teletubbies, and Arthur (from the PBS program Arthur), are just a
few examples of extremely simple game elements mixing in with toy development.
These toys, developed for younger children, offer the ability to play peek-a-boo and
to play simple games. To be sure, these are extremely simple game offerings, but the
next-generation interactive toys are starting to look much more sophisticated with
complete game offerings of several kinds included for older children.
Mattel has used games to bolster recognition and support entire communities of
fans for brands like Hot Wheels and Barbie. It has licensed these properties for standard
game development, as well, but it also has built large web-based game communities
around these brands. Web games of this kind are typically built as Java applets, or as
Flash/Shockwave applications.