Two Weeks of Game Research; A Recap of What I’ve Being Doing

So the past two weeks have been me spending my whole time researching various things doing with games. Starting with a document that outlines all the basics of Massively Multiplayer Role Playing Games(MMORPGs) Social Games aka Facebook Games and Virtual Worlds, things like Second Life where the “game” is not really a game, but a virtual environment for avatars to interact in. This took a team of 5 people working for about a week and by the end of it we had a very long (over 30 pages) and very informative document about those games and the pros and cons of each. The following week was research on the most popular and successful games in those genres (World of Warcraft, EVE Online, Farmville, Second Life, etc) and analyzing the game strengths and weakness so that their mistakes were not remade. The team spent 3 days on this looking at over 30 games and making a document that went into some detail on each game, and a massive spreadsheet that evaluated the pros and cons of each game’s various systems and how it handled basic game interactions. The team then went and looked all various open source (meaning technologies that were being made for anyone to use, no legal strings attached, and let anyone look at its source) technologies to make games in. Again we compiled a giant list of over 30 technologies, researched each of them, and compiled another document and spreadsheet comparing the technologies and their uses. Today the team made another spreadsheet of game mechanics in MMOs, RPGs, and social games. The team just finished this after working all day, and i have to say made a pretty through document. From here, we hope to get some information from Fedora about what type of gameplay they want to see and what genre they want the game to be. It has been a tough two weeks, looking at things I would normally read out of personal interest for academic purposes. I have enjoyed it though and cannot wait to be actually designing some sort of game.

Check back tomorrow with more info on what type of game and what the team is doing next!