Designing the AAA Title : Letters from the Trenches,
4661
Game Design, Lecture
E. Daniel Arey
Creative Director, Naughty Dog - SCEA
Making a successful AAA title in today’s market is more challenging than ever. The bar continues to rise tremendously in terms of gameplay experiences, production values, and market noise to the extent that it takes a mammoth effort, coordinated across a broad spectrum of disciplines to reach the pinnacle, and even then still require that “magic something” to rise above the fray. This talk will present a number of conversations with top game designers and developers, looking for recurring patterns and strategies which lead to design success or failure, as we dispel many of the myths, and distill the design process down to a few successful habits used by some of the best AAA game developers in the business.
On camera and recorded interviews include:
Will Wright (Maxis), David Perry (Shiny, Ted Price (Insomniac), Jason Rubin (Morgan-Rose), Mark Cerny (Cerny Games), Evan Wells (Naughty Dog), Amy Hennig (Naughty Dog), Raph Koster (Sony Online Entertainment), Peter Molyneux (Lionhead Games), Neil Young (EA),
Additional question survey participants include:
Sid Meier (Firaxis Games), Gabe Newell (Valve), Scott Greig (BioWare), David Jaffee (SCEA Santa Monica), Scott Miller (3D Realms), Louis Castle (EA), Lorne Lanning (Oddworld), Rob Pardo (Blizzard)
There are distinct habits and strategies employed by the best game designers to maximize their chances of reaching the AAA title level, and this knowledge (based on experience) can be applied by anyone to make better games. |
