"Design games" for usability

Using Design Games

At workshops with clients, use games to have a successful session and gather insight for designs.

Zombie Outbreak Survival Test

Take the Zombie Outbreak Survival Test ...will you survive?

Programar videojuegos en un lenguaje funcional

prog21: Purely Functional Retrogames, Part 1

When I started looking into functional languages in 1998, I had just come off a series of projects writing video games for underpowered hardware: Super Nintendo, SEGA Saturn, early PowerPC-based Macintoshes without any graphics acceleration. My benchmark for usefulness was "Can a programming language be used to write complex, performance intensive video games?"

After working through basic tutorials, and coming to grips with the lack of destructive updates, I started thinking about how to write trivial games, like Pac-Man or Defender, in a purely functional manner. Then I realized that it wasn't performance that was the issue, it was much more fundamental.

I had no idea how to structure the most trivial of games without using destructive updates.

El juego de la memoria histórica

Contra el revisionismo.
KAOSENLARED.NET ::: El Juego de la Memoria Histórica.El lanzamiento de este didáctico juego de preguntas y respuestas
se engloba dentro de los actos de homenaje previstos para este
recientemente designado Año de la Memoria. Es
nuestra aportación al merecido reconocimiento de todos los
hombres y mujeres, injustamente relegados al olvido, que a lo largo de
la Historia han luchado por hacer de nuestro país un lugar
libre, justo e igualitario.

En la primera modalidad, "Preguntas de todas las categorías en orden", las preguntas se irán mostrando en el orden establecido en el cuadro que indica la evolución del juego. Aparecerá una pregunta de cada una de las seis categorías y al llegar a la última se volverá a empezar de nuevo por la primera.

En la segunda modalidad, "Preguntas de categoría aleatoria", las preguntas irán apareciendo al azar sin ningún orden establecido.

En la tercera modalidad, "Preguntas de una categoría elegida", todas las preguntas serán de una misma categoría elegida previamente por los jugadores.

Aprovechamos para daros las gracias por la excelente acogida que está teniendo este proyecto de memoria histórica y os animamos a seguir participando enviando sugerencias y proponiendo preguntas

Cubo de Rubik para torpes

Solución sencilla para resolver el cubo de Rubik

Beginner Solution to the Rubik's Cube

Futbol chapa

Juego de fútbol con chapas, para windows y linux, hecho en españa

Como jugar « Pro Evolution Chapping - Blog

El juego consiste en meter más goles que el contrario. Cada equipo tendrá tres movimientos para intentar meter un gol. Puedes usarlo para mover la misma chapa tres veces, o una vez tres chapas distintas, etc. Si en algunos de estos movimientos se toca la pelota el turno se pierde automáticamente, a no ser que el balón quede tan cerca de un compañero que podrá hacer un movimiento extra, vamos lo que se llamaría un pase.

Fold It! Juego científico de doblado de proteínas

Como Fold@Home, pero con procesador basado en células grises!


Solve Puzzles for Science | Fold It!

Thanks to all you wonderful protein folders, we had a successful launch today with tons of great press. We even survived the Slashdot Effect! The team posts automatic updates very often, so keep playing and expect to see some awesome new features over the next couple weeks. Thank you for playing Foldit. Now let's solve some puzzles for science!

Juegos educativos

Comentario Slashdot /. Incluye el juego "Tranquilidad"

Here's the educative games I suggest.

http://www.food-force.com/ Made by the U.N. Free, MacOS X or Windows. (sorry no Linux afaik) Probably the best one in my list for the 6-8 years old.

http://www.tqworld.com/ - Tranquility. After years and years, this game has something no other game offers. Well suited for the youngsters. Free, but not open source.

http://www.stopdisastersgame.org/ U.N. too. Free and web-based. Excellent. Probably best for 8 years old (older ones of your range). Surprisingly informative.

http://www.stepmania.com/ Not sure that ones counts as edutainment, but it sure is good for the children! Open source and available for all platforms.

http://www.openttd.org/ A railroad tycoon open source clone (gosh I'm getting old

;-). Suitable for your oldest ones?

For the curious ones, here's the other worthy (subjective) open source games I discovered with time. http://del.icio.us/Satri/game+opensource

MAME How to

Por qué nunca me funcionan las ROMs del MAME, y cómo solucionarlo. (Hint - las ROMs sólo valen para una versión del MAME, pero hay una aplicación que te extrae las que siguen funcionando para la siguiente versión.

PC Gaming Suggestions for Console-like Fun?

As MAME evolves, the ROM sets get replaced with new and better extractions, so you'll want a piece of software to manage them.

ClrMAMEPro is a tool that will use the data files from the latest version of MAME, and scan a big huge mess of old ROM files, extracting whatever is useful from them into a nice, neat set that works with the current version:

http://www.clrmame.com/ [clrmame.com]

System Shock 2: videojuego de la era dorada

SShock2.com -- Information Data.Node -- A Digital Nightfall / TTLG Production

Welcome to SShock.com's SS2:\ Info Data.Node Pre-Release Infomation center. This center is designed for people who have not yet played System Shock 2, and wish to get an idea of what the game will be like. If offerse a nearly complete collection of pre-release info, which basiclly means that everything in here has been deemed by the developers as "okay" to know before you start playing. There are no spoilers in here! Read to dive in? Select your choice from the menu below! Note that the information here is presented in no particular order, so you may browse and skim as you see fit. Enjoy your stay!

Interactive fiction - compilador natural

comentarios de slashdot /. Incluye enlaces al IF Archive, y al nuevo lenguaje de programación de Infocom Inform 7, programable en lenguaje natural (casi).

Lost Infocom Games Discovered The IF Archive [ifarchive.org] has an extensive collection of these games, and there are several [tads.org] review [wurb.com] sites [ifreviews.org] that attempt to catalog and organize the archive. The IF community has long had rec.arts.int-fiction [google.com] and rec.games.int-fiction [google.com] at their center, though with the rise of blogs and web forums it has started to fragment some. This is fascinating not just for Infocom fans, but also for programmers. For example:

The
Deathbot Assembly Line is a room. "Here is the heart of the whole
operation, where your opponents are assembled fresh from scrap metal
and bits of old car." The dangerous robot is a thing in the Assembly
Line. "One dangerous robot looks ready to take you on!" A robotic head,
a drill arm, a needle arm, a crushing leg and a kicking leg are parts
of the dangerous robot.

That's source code.
Inform 7 has been out for a couple years, and I've been working
intimately with it for most of that time, but I'm still impressed.


Eventyr: Hackday Dojo

- Uso del entorno Inform 7 para crear un juego "interactivo" que recibe notificación de eventos desde sensores en el mundo real

Using the 5 minutes before we started to get an idea for the resources available we came up with the idea for generating a real-world interactive game using Inform 7 and the many different sensors that had been brought by Thom Hopper.

Juegos para n800

Interactive fiction
Arnim's Ports for Nokia

Game Engines / Remakes

GemRB - Baldurs Gate

Frotz Infocom Interpreter

FreeSCI Sierra Interpreter

Mario Bros en 14kb de Javascript

Mario Bros en 14kb de Javascript

Un impresionante trabajo se ha hecho realizando este Mario en 14 kb de Javascripts… Ver para creer.

Los mejores juegos de Nintendo, Online

nintendo8.com - play Nintendo 8-bit games online (no download required)

The Greatest Nintendo Games of All Times - Playable Directly In Your Browser!

1. Super Mario Brothers

Juegos de Spectrum, online

ZX Spectrum Games - ZXSpectrum.net

Reset

El alma de los Sims

Prototipo del algoritmo para las motivaciones de los personajes, en el juego The Sims.

http://www.donhopkins.com/home/images/Sims/

This is the prototype for the soul of The Sims, which Will Wright wrote on January 23, 1997.

I had just started working at the Maxis Core Technology Group on "Project X" aka "Dollhouse", and Will Wright brought this code in one morning, to demonstrate his design for the motives, feedback loop and failure conditions of the simulated people. While going through old papers, I ran across this print-out that I had saved, so I scanned it and cleaned the images up, and got permission from Will to publish it.

This code is a interesting example of game design, programming and prototyping techniques. The Sims code has certainly changed a lot since Will wrote this original prototype code. For example, there is no longer any "stress" motive. And the game doesn't store motives in global variables, of course.

My hope is that this code will give you a glimpse of how Will Wright designs games, and what was going on in his head at the time!

Artículo de Will Wright sobre diseño de juegos de simulación

El mayor gurú de los videojuegos de final abierto, explica cómo se hacen!

Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games.

Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games.
A summary of Will Wright's talk, by Don Hopkins.



Will Wright, the designer of
SimCity,
SimEarth, SimAnt, and other popular games
from Maxis, gave a talk at Terry Winnograd's user interface class at
Stanford.

He reflected on the design of simulators and user interfaces in
SimCity, SimEarth, and SimAnt. He demonstrated several of his games,
including his current project, Dollhouse.

The anatomy of a simulation game:

There are several tightly coupled parts of a simulation game that must
be designed closely together: the simulation model, the game play,
the user interface, and the user's model.

Sim City, liberado para la educación

Electronic Arts ha donado el código fuente del SimCity original como código abierto, para ser usado en el proyecto educativo One Laptop Per Child.

Games that can educate: SimCity donated to OLPC project

Games that can educate: SimCity donated to OLPC project


"The goal is to enable the open-source community to renovate SimCity
and take it in new educational directions, by applying Seymour Papert's
ideas about constructionist education, Alan Kay's ideas about
interactive user interfaces and object-oriented programming, Ben
Shneiderman's ideas about direct manipulation and info visualization,
and many exciting ideas about multiplayer games, blogging,
storytelling, game mods, player created content, and lessons learned
from World of WarCraft, The Sims, Spore, etc," Hopkins wrote in a comment at Slashdot earlier this year.

Juegos gratis online

Artículo sobre los mejores juegos Flash, y comentario de la noticia en /.

Slashdot | What Are The Best Free Games Online?

CNET has just put up a story about what it thinks are the best online flash games of all time.
These include titles like Line Rider, Bejeweled, Desktop Tower Defense
and Portal, all of which I enjoy playing a lot. But my thirst for free
games is peaking at the moment, probably due to an incredibly boring
job and lack of imagination. Can you suggest any more good free games
online?"

The purpose of the article is Flash Games in specific. So your examples are neither here nor there. Personally, I'm amazed that no one has mentioned Newgrounds Rumble, one of the best brawlers of all time! It was one of the highest rated games over on Newgrounds, and hung around for AGES. More recently, it was ported to WiiCade so that you could play against your friends on the WiiMote controller. (Which is a lot more fun than trying to share a keyboard, let me tell you.)

Actually, I should probably expand on that a bit more. One of the nice things about the Wii is that you can have multiplayer flash games. Games like Wiimote Wars 2 and Slipstream are simply amazing when you get the chance to play against your friends and family members. Much, much, much better than playing single-player games. Which is good, because there isn't much in the way of online-multiplayer flash games.

Juegos modernos en 2D

Juegos Conversacionales - Interactive Fiction, y juegos modernos en 2d

Slashdot | Who Says 2D Gaming is Dead?

Hmm, let me be the 10%... Shit games? Have you played some of the 'classics' of the new wave of IFs? Things like Photopia, All Things Devours, Slouching Towards Bedlam, Metamorphoses, Shade or Vespers? Or whatever the latest IF competition is going to yield?

Seriously, these things are worth your time. Not as big and time-consuming as the old Infocom classics, I agree. But they do what they have to do (entertain you for a few hours) and the price is right. Damn better than most of the commercial games these days.