Game Development: The B Team
August 27th, 2009 by Ravven

At lunch I read a post which I thought was very interesting, by Elder Game: The Warcraft Live Team’s B Squad. There are a number of game designer blogs that I read, since I’ve always been very interested in the art and craft of making games and virtual worlds, and this is a good one. [...]

Virtual Worlds
July 16th, 2009 by Ravven

Keen and Graev had a couple of posts which really got me thinking: What is your favorite thing about MMORPGs? and What is your ideal MMORPG setting? The things that I really like about MMOs, not necessarily in descending order, are: 1. The feeling that I am a real person, in a real world. Character [...]

Game Design Excercise: Shadowland
January 5th, 2009 by Ravven

This is going to be an ongoing experiment in game design. Don’t ask me why I couldn’t have started this when Top Sekrit Project first went under, and why I didn’t spend all that stressful unemployed time being productive, because I don’t know. I suck. Anyway, this will be an exercise in creating the concepts [...]

The Importance of Usability
September 25th, 2008 by Ravven

I’ve always been passionately interested in user experience and usability design. My formal job title is Web Director, meaning project manager of large-scale websites. In actuality, I do a lot of design and branding, SEO, fairly junior-level coding (I can do some simple functions, or if we’ve done something similar, I can rework that for [...]

A Horse of My Very Own
June 24th, 2008 by Ravven

Today I was doing research into what is possible in horse sims for a potential client. I’d heard of the Pippa Funnell games, and Mary King’s Riding Star, but I was hoping to find examples of online games. Riding Club Championships fits the bill exactly…for anyone who loves horses, or anyone who is still a [...]

Treasury of the Ancients
June 17th, 2008 by Ravven

Last night I took Dravven to an instance called Treasury of the Ancients. You access it through doors set into the desert floor near the Pyramid of the Ancients in Khopshef. This brings you into a very dark and atmospheric hallway lined with black granite columns and rows of statues in oxidised copper or blue [...]