Dodo Blog

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything other than links… I’m just about done with Guppy, my watercolour fish-simulation game. Still need to work on sound effects and music. Meanwhile, I made a short experimental game about the deciphering of the Egyptian Hieroglyphs and I’ve started working on a new prototype: Hellas It’s a [...]

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A series of posts on the use of interactive animation in games … Next: Red Dead Redemption Last post I talked about proximity as a gameplay device. Red Dead is another game that does some interesting things with this… I was somewhere in Mexico doing odd jobs for The Resistance, when ‘man of the people’ [...]

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A series of posts on the use of interactive animation in games… Last time I wrote one of these I believe I said something about weekly entries… Well, so much for that, but I’ve got a couple of new ones: … starting with Assassin’s Creed 2. I’ve talked about Assassin’s Creed before, but the sequel [...]

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For the next couple of weeks I’ll be doing a series of posts on the use of interactive animation in a number of notable games… This week, Gothic. I suggested recently that games could show skill progression in the movement of the player, making the animation more elegant as you level up, but some games [...]

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It’s been a little while, but there’s much still to be said on the subject of interactive animation. So let’s continue… Once again, I’m going to be talking about old games as well as new, because we already have the technology, we’re just not using it very much. These are some exceptions… Let’s start with [...]

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I just got an article published on Gamasutra!

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From the Experimental Gameplay Sessions: I couldn’t make it out to GDC but I wish I could’ve seen this: Spy Party: This game, developed by Chris Hecker (”Spore“) has a character doing suave and subtle things in a cocktail party, trying not to get spotted. One player is the spy, whose animations are a little [...]

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For the next couple weeks I’ll be doing a series of posts on the use of interactive animation in a number of notable games… Now, The Act…

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For the next couple weeks I’ll be doing a series of posts on the use of interactive animation in a number of notable games… A bit of Half Life 2 and Team Fortress 2 this time… One thing Valve does very well is make it feel like you’re present in the world by having characters [...]

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There was something else I wanted to talk about in Shadow of the Colossus. There are many things that set apart this game, but there is one that’s rarely mentioned: This game has anticipation, one of the key principles of animation so often deliberately ignored in games. It is interesting that Ueda chooses not to [...]

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