Hi, welcome to our personal blogs, where we’ll be blogging a bit to share some of our experiences with game making. I’m Henrik, and me and Jo are the programmers at D-Pad. We also do much of the design work on Owlboy, of course, and so I’ll mostly be writing about game design, rather than programming topics.
I think that as indies, we have an opportunity to regard games slightly differently from how others do, and we can set ourselves different kinds of design goals and analyse games differently. So these blog points will hopefully shed some light on how I and others at D-Pad look at various popular games.
I have already planned out analyses of a few games, which I’ll probably get to in not too long:
- Bioshock (the first one)
- I want to examine the storytelling technique that is employed, as the game was widely lauded for its story. I aim to show some of its weaknesses.
- Dragon Age: Origins
- Why the characterization in this game didn’t work for me, despite immense amounts of time and effort put into it.
- Starcraft 1 and 2
- On how better technology can force (at times unwanted) design changes.
- Chrono Trigger
- On why Chrono Trigger and the SNES were a perfect match and made the game timeless.
As a quick disclaimer, I would point out that I’m very much a fan of old NES/SNES-era games, and I hope that with these posts I’ll be able to show some of the reasons why.
See you soon!
