Leading Lights

When I play a game, what’s important to me does vary depending on what genre the game is.
For example, the story is of the highest priority when playing RPGs and so the characters are as well.
FPSs or any other shooter really, I feel that gameplay and controls are the most important. For me, bad or fiddly controls can really put me off a game. An experience of bad controls happened recently while trying to play the PC version of Assassin’s Creed left me with my head lying defeated in front of the keyboard.
One thing that will always grab my attention is how a game looks though, if it’s visually appealing I will always give it more time.
Gameplay means the players interaction and experiences with the game itself. I think it could mean things like whether the game is repetitive, how the battle system (if any) handles etc.
From what I’ve learned, the game design team can be comprised of ‘Game Mechanics, Visual Arts, Programming, Production Process, Audio and Narrative. Some games however like Tetris and Bejeweled have no Narrative.
However, it is the Game Designer who writes the design document which can be good or bad and comes in many different forms depending on what the designer is like.
Staff from the different branches of the design team tree will refer back to this document but it is ultimately up to the Game Designer to keep the document ‘living’.
As I mentioned before, Tetris does not have a Narrative and so there is no reason to have this in the design document. The same can be said for some racing games as well.
For Games Designers, I think that I consider them successful if they make a popular game which sells well but I also like innovative games too. Some of which I believe are; Hironobu Sakaguchi, Hideo Kojima, Shigeru Miyamoto, Marc Loudlaw, Michel Ancel, Cliff Bleszinski, Paul Cross, Owen O’Brien, David Jaffe, Peter Molyneux, Shinji Mikami, Alex Pajitnov, Ken Rolston, Toshihiro Nishikado…just to name a few.
When I think about buying a game I usually don’t look at who worked on it because I feel that it may alienate new designers and developers. However, after a bad experience with RPGs for the 360, Enchanted Arms made me skeptical of anything. So when I learned of Hironobu Sakaguchi ‘s new company Mistwalker Studios’ new attempt called Lost Odyssey I tried it and loved it. Admittedly I detest Blue Dragon but the point I’m trying to make is that who designed it etc. isn’t vital but it helps.