Interview with Tom Sloper, Veteran Game Designer

Giles writes: "Listen to veteran game designer and producer Tom Sloper talk about what it was like to make games for the Vectrex, discuss the addictiveness of current MMORPGS and some game development disaster stories. And why is the voice acting in games so bad, anyway? An interesting inside look at the game industry from an old-timer."

Comments

Re:Not really but... - Digistar II

[Dr_Cheeks]

My brother used to work in a Planetarium, in France, where they had a vector-based hemispheric display device.
While the engineer was still taking some classes to understand the way it basically worked, he just read the doc and started to code some games on it, like an asteroids-clone...

Did he ever come up with hypnotic displays and laser shows to tempt small badly drawn kids into returning to the Plane'arium time and time again?

who cares ?

[Bender_]

I read until i came to this in the first paragraph, then my attention dropped.

"Can you tell me specifically what the dev system was like for Vectrex?"
Well, I'm not a programmer, so I never actually used a Vectrex dev system myself.

wtf ? I thought it was about developing games on a vectrex ? Back in these days there was hardly a lot to do for so called 'game-designers'.

Not really but... - Digistar II

[mirko]

My brother used to work in a Planetarium, in France, where they had a vector-based hemispheric display device.
While the engineer was still taking some classes to understand the way it basically worked, he just read the doc and started to code some games on it, like an asteroids-clone...
On a 20meter-diameter ceiling, this was excellent :-)
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State of MMORPG'S

[ColdrenX]

An avid Ultima Online player, I can tell you that MMORPGs have the potential to be HUGE! But there are a few shortcomings to MMORPGs that are obvious to anyone who has ever played one that pose an equally huge threat to the market:

Connection Speed -- Not everyone has cable or a T1 line to connect with. The simple fact that your ability to enjoy a game can be jeaprodized by a telephone line poses a major problem for most users.

Play Styles -- Not everyone can play nicely together. Player Killers (PK's) and Roleplayers despise one another. Plain and simple. Need proof? Look at UO again. For the longest time you only had one "realm" to play on. Complaints by people to Game Counselors and support staff grew to such magnitude, OSI (aka, minion of the hellspawn known as EA) had to double their servers capacity so that there were now 2 realms for every shard: This worked out to be at least 10 new servers at that time that had to be maintained on the prexisting budget. Imagine the hit R&D took!(That would explain why UO3D sucked my dogs balls) And once the non-pking shard was opened, 2/3 of the client base went to the new "Non-Pking" facet known as Trammel, leaving the former facet nearly desolate.

Content-Control -- Individual users have little to no say about what they want the game to become despite the fact that they pay for it. Only massive quantities of emails and posts agreeing on a new aspect get implemented (and some that are NOT agreed on). Take UO yet again. Once player housing was allowed, everyone wanted a house. This lead to servers being jam-packed with new data from all the subsequent houses. To solve this problem, OSI imposed housing placement limitations (some of which in my mind were LUDICROUS! You can't place a house within a few steps of a certain type of grass for example)that caused a tremndous outcry from players. They had lost control of an aspect of a gaming world they pay for. Piss off too many players, and you loose money.

These are just 3 of the major aspects that stick out in my mind that the article didn't mention when they said online games were "The Next Big Thing". Although I have to agree MMORPG'S are really awsome.. I'm drooling over Shadowbane right now.